This ruffed grouse was having himself a l-o-n-g lunch

Duluth hunter Mark Jeronimus has been hunting ruffed grouse for five decades, but he witnessed something new on a recent hunt.

He shot a grouse that was in the act of eating a 22-inch garter snake.

Here's how the event unfolded, according to an e-mail Jeronimus sent:

"Last weekend (Oct. 2-3), we had our annual fish fry at our shack. ... One of my friends from St. Paul told me something I had never heard before. He was walking down a logging road. A grouse got up. He hit it and during inspection found a garter snake around its wing (about 9 inches long). He asked me if I had ever witnessed that. I said in my 50-plus years of aggressive hunting I had never heard of that."

That was soon about to change.

"When the weather got nice on Monday (Oct. 4)," Jeronimus wrote, "my wife Colleen and I returned to the shack for a couple of sunny days... We took off on foot without our grouse maker Jeep (he had injured a foot), wondering what our odds would be without the dog.

"We were walking in some balsam. One got up, and I shot at it. It dropped and started running. First time ever my Benelli jammed. I asked for Col's gun. The grouse got up again, and I finally dropped it on the second shot. We picked up a couple more and decided to head back to the shack, both commenting on how large one of the males was.

"I unloaded the birds from my vest on the porch and turned to put my gun up, then looked back at the grouse for some reason and there was an 18-inch garter snake hanging out of its beak. The snake is down its throat about 3 inches, dead. Now, how did I not see the snake to begin with?"

Jeronimus thinks the bird was regurgitating the snake. He did a Google search and found a University of Minnesota study from 1953 that mentioned grouse eating snakes.

Bob Kirsch, area wildlife manager for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, photographed the snake that came from the grouse Jeronimus shot.

"It does not surprise me that a grouse would eat a snake, but this one is around 22 inches," Kirsch said. "Hard to imagine that it could pack it all in."

John Gosselin, publisher of The Upland Almanac, wrote to share his account of a grouse and snake:

"I once took a grouse in Vermont that had a small grass snake in its crop. Another crop inspection from a grouse taken a few years later revealed several garden slugs, with their shells on. Then came the day that I took a grouse with a crop full of thornapples. This was not unusual except for the fact that there were 27 of them in there.

"I also know of at least one grouse that was photographed along a stream eating a small frog. No stories along the lines of odd grouse diets surprise me now."

BirdWeb, a website of the Seattle Audubon Society, also discusses ruffed grouse diets, stating in part: "In the summer, they eat insects, spiders, snails, small snakes and frogs."

A 22-inch garter snake must be a "small snake."