Sharp-tailed Grouse

What is a sharp-tailed grouse?

A sharp-tailed grouse (Tympanuchus phasianellus) is a chicken-sized prairie grouse named for its narrow, pointed tail. It lives in the grassland and brush country of the northern plains, gathers on dancing grounds called leks each spring, and runs in coveys through the fall. Most hunters just call them sharptails or sharpies.

Look for a pale, speckled bird in browns, buffs, and white, with V-shaped dark marks down the breast and a white-edged tail that shows plainly in flight. Males and females look nearly identical in the field. On the spring lek, males give themselves away with purple neck patches and yellow eye combs while they stamp their feet, rattle their tail feathers, and coo in a display hunters drive hours to watch. In the fall you will know them by sound before anything else. A flushing sharptail clucks a fast “chuk-chuk-chuk” as it goes, and a covey rise sounds like a squadron leaving in waves.

Sharptails are covey birds. Family groups of five to fifteen hold together through early fall, then merge into winter packs that can top thirty birds. That grouping habit shapes every stage of the season, from tight September points to wild November flushes. When a covey lifts, the birds go in waves rather than all at once, which is both the thrill and the trap of hunting them. A hunter who fixates on the first bird up usually watches the rest leave unshot.

Males and females run so alike that most hunters age birds by wing feathers at the truck rather than sexing them in the field. What sets the sharptail apart from its prairie chicken neighbor is the tail. It is short, pointed, and edged in white, and it flashes plainly as a bird quarters away.

One more thing worth knowing before the bird hits the grill. Sharptail is dark meat. It cooks like duck, not like the pale breast of a ruffed grouse, and it rewards a hot sear and a pink middle.

What do sharp-tailed grouse eat?

Sharp-tailed grouse eat what the prairie serves in season. Summer and early fall mean grasshoppers, green forbs, and berries. Mid fall means waste grain and seeds. Winter means buds and catkins picked from brush and trees. Track the food and you track the birds, because the flock moves with the menu.

In September, work anything holding fruit. Buffaloberry, snowberry, chokecherry, and wild rose draws pull birds off the open grass, and hoppers keep them in green edges through warm afternoons. As frosts stack up, coveys shift to wheat stubble and other harvested grain, trading between crop edges and native grass through the day.

By late season the soft food is gone and sharptails become budders. They fly into brush patches, shelterbelts, and scattered hardwoods at first light to clip buds and catkins, then loaf in heavy cover. A lone tree line full of birds at dawn is a late-season pattern worth setting an alarm for.

Where do you find sharp-tailed grouse?

North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana are the heart of sharptail country, and all three pair strong bird numbers with generous public access. Nebraska’s Sandhills, southern Idaho, and eastern Wyoming round out the lower-48 options, Minnesota holds birds in its northwest brushlands, and interior Alaska has them in surprising numbers.

Inside that range, hunt the mosaic. Sharptails want grassland broken up by brushy draws, berry thickets, and the edges of cropland, not endless open grass and not solid brush. A rough rule is grass with brush stitched through it, hilly enough to give you terrain to work.

On public ground, start with the national grasslands of the Dakotas, PLOTS tracts in North Dakota, walk-in areas in South Dakota and Montana, and BLM land across the west. Wisconsin manages a small population with tightly limited or closed hunting, and Minnesota restricts sharptails to part of the state, so check current regs closely in both. For state-by-state detail on seasons and access programs, see our state-by-state grouse hunting guide.

If sharptails have your attention, the greater prairie chicken shares much of the same country and shows up in mixed bags in Nebraska and South Dakota, and the greater sage-grouse waits farther west in the big sage. For the gun question, our 12 vs 20 vs 16 gauge comparison for grouse hunters covers the tradeoffs, and prairie distances tilt the math a little differently than the grouse woods do.