This is the best Grouse area Wisconsin has to offer for owners of Pointing dogs. Since the covers are usually not enormous, grouse are less likely to flush wild. Their territory is limited, and they know it. A good pointing dog can hold 'em, and then it's your job to fold 'em.
On a line roughly north of highway 10 is the vast forested upper third of the state, the third country of Wisconsin grouse. In the middle of this is Park Falls, Wisconsin, the Ruffed Grouse capital of the world. Grouse populations are usually quite good in a triangle between Tomahawk, Minoqua, and Eagle River.
This is big country. If a hunter isn't used to forest, its easy to get "turned around", a euphemism for being lost. If not familiar with the area, carry a compass and know how to use it.
I'm going to give you the simplest way to use your compass if you get turned around. If you park on an east / west road and begin hunting north of the road, you know one universal truth. No matter how turned around you get, if you head straight south, you will eventually intersect your road and be back in the game. Without regard to headings or GPS units that lose power or otherwise go on the fritz, a simple compass and taking a second to note which direction you have moved from the road on which you parked will eventually get you back.
It's easy when attacking the big forested areas of the northern third of Wisconsin to forget one basic grouse truism. Grouse are creatures of edges. They don't take to mature forests where the walking is easy and moss grows on the ground. Hunt among thick tree bases and high canopies and you are hunting the wrong area.
Instead, key in on areas that have seen the logging truck. Woodcock will prefer the wet marsh and beaver dam edges sprouting forest green alder thickets, but grouse will take the adjacent areas, where aspen occurs between ten and twenty feet high; juvenile trees. Little grassy areas and an evergreen strand here and there make ideal grouse habitat.

This is one area where flushing dogs usually shine. I also find it is sometimes necessary to "help the dog" by putting a bit of urgency in your gate. Grouse on huge, thick stands of forest have no reason to hang around when they smell trouble. Grouse in this type of terrain tend to run at the sound of the dog and flush wild. Sure, grouse will not fly for miles, but in flat forested land, one often has only a wild guess as to where the flight of the bird took it.
When one of my dogs gets birdy, I step up the pace and try to keep up as best I can, letting the dog work rather than constantly calling it to slow down as it works a bird that is certainly using it's track shoes.
Ted Jarosh hails from St Francis, WI