I know the greatest spot in Colorado for finding blue grouse.

It’s not too far from timberline, but still among the trees. Deep, but not too deep, in a fragrant stand of tall timber. Not all that far from a back road, but you still have to make a little trek over a well-beaten but mostly dim path up the hillside and through the woods.

It’s dry country, but there’s a water hole nearby. It’s … But you get the drift.

Descriptions of truly good grouse areas, like overlooked fishing hot spots, bring out the best in the teller’s obfuscation skills. Bill Clinton himself might have been a grouse hunter.

By conventional wisdom, grouse hunters are evasive because they want to protect their little hot spots from deflowering by the shotgun-wielding masses. While that assumption has considerable merit there are only so many grouse in the woods and they couldn’t withstand an assault by a horde of hunters I suspect a couple of other factors may be at play.

First, grouse are highly mobile at least when they’re in season. How many times have you seen grouse fumbling about at your very feet while you’re casually walking through the woods? They’re stupid, or smugly defiant? They won’t fly. You can’t scare them away. You wonder why they’re not extinct.

But wait until the season opens. Try to find them. They’re gone. Vanished.

They’re a moving target, quite literally. The hot-shot hunter may find them once but maybe not again. The story teller, therefore, has to be purposely vague. Today’s hot spot is tomorrow’s bust. Or maybe today’s grouseless woods will be alive with them tomorrow. He just doesn’t know, and in the meantime, he still needs a story to tell.

Then again, one potential hot spot looks pretty much like another. Maybe the description is fuzzy because he simply can’t find the one and only spot among all the others in that deep, dark forest.

No matter. The hunt’s the thing. And what better excuse for a walk through the September woods?

In any event, the prospects are not too bad for the season that will begin on Sept. 1, according to the Colorado Division of Wildlife, which keeps track of such things.

In a good-news, bad-news appraisal, the DOW says the population of blue grouse is down because of the statewide drought. On the other hand, the birds will be condensed into areas of good habitat, making them easier for hunters to find.

“Hunters should focus on wet and green habitat or areas with berry patches,” advised Rick Hoffman, a DOW biologist.

Hunters should look for grouse along the edges of aspen stands, where they are met by sage and other low-lying brush.

“Hunters need to figure out what is the best habitat and be able to identify it,” Hoffman said. “Ninety percent of it is finding the birds. It is not that there is a shortage of them.”

Maybe so, but I know the greatest spot in Colorado. Now, let’s see …

It was up the right fork no, maybe it was the left of the old Jeep road along that nameless creek, and then you went left, no right, into the spruce thicket beyond that old fallen tree. …