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In an abbreviated version of a quote I remember, it’s said that things change and life doesn’t stop for anybody.
Hard to argue with that.
Looking back at 2025, Casey Anderson, Game and Fish Department deputy director, wrote in this issue of NDO that last year was about change inside the agency’s walls and across the landscape.
He wasn’t wrong. We experienced it while wandering around the outdoors and others likely did, too.
It didn’t feel right hunting in fog that mostly secreted the deep draws that ran downhill from the shin-high native grasses to rugged badlands landscape we couldn’t see but knew without visual proof was certainly there.
While chasing sharp-tailed grouse in fog in early September across country that mostly leans hard to the arid side of things was unusual, so too was the flush of just a single bird. Considering the amount of ground we’d covered, and memories of past hunts in the same haunts, we anticipated a covey here, a covey there. Not a loner bent on getting out of shotgun range in a hurry.
We heard going into the season that disease, weather, or a combination of the two, had negatively influenced sharptail numbers in parts of western North Dakota, but we weren’t buying it. Too many seasons of spent shotgun shells and ample opportunities at young birds didn’t prepare us for the reality of a single flush of a grouse we dubbed the loneliest sharptail in McKenzie County.
Back home in Burleigh County, hunting land more familiar and appealing in its own way, we found grouse in abundance. It was as if whatever hardships the birds in western North Dakota endured during nesting and the months that followed had hit an invisible wall somewhere west of the Missouri River. Proof was in the number of birds bagged per miles hiked closer to home, which was certainly the kind of change we had no trouble getting behind.
With the killing winter of 2022-23, which reduced the deer population by 50% in the area we hunt, we were banking on change in 2025. We expected things to be different. Not counting a troubling lack of wildlife habitat on the landscape and the difficulty in accessing places that hold deer, we were hopeful for a bump in deer numbers following back-to-back mild winters.
It turned out we experienced the change we were hoping for. We saw plenty of deer, more than the last two seasons combined. Yet, the way the season unfolded after days in the field, one deer is all our small hunting party earned.
I’ve been writing about the outdoors, with the occasional high school sporting event, school board and city council meeting back in my early newspaper days, for nearly 40 years. The changes in game populations and the landscape that I’ve written about and readers have experienced have been considerable in both good and disturbing ways.
Who knows where we’re headed, what 2026 will bring. Even though things change and life doesn’t stop for anybody, I’m hopeful.
