Something to grouse about

By BILL CHAISSON
I still jump every time a ruffed grouse explodes out of hiding and flies away into the woods. I’m not sure I’ve ever come upon one of these gallinaceous birds without flushing it. They are very well camouflaged by their plumage and their skulking habits and I guess I do tend to be looking up for birds rather than down. (This, I am told by a malacologist friend of mine is what distinguishes birdwatchers from snail watchers. You didn’t know there was such a thing, did you?) The stealthiness and shyness of the ruffed grouse is in pointed contrast to the behavior of its northern cousin, the spruce grouse. For all the caution a spruce grouse displays upon encountered a human being, you might as well have come across a weird-looking chicken in the woods.

When I was a kid and learning my birds, I was always intrigued by the local (well, Merrimack County) tendency to call the ruffed grouse a “partridge.” From the point of view of a nascent ornithologist there were no partridges in North America, except for the introduced gray partridge and the one in the pear tree at Christmas. “Real” partridges are generally smaller than grouse and are all Old World species. They are in the same order, Galliformes, as grouse and in the same family, Phasianidae, but in different genera. Partridges tend to prefer open country, while our eastern grouses have a decided preference for a particular kind of woodland, namely one with a thick understory.

Ruffed grouse are the more generalist of the two species found in the East. They live in deciduous woodlands in the mountainous areas of the eastern and western U.S. and all across Canada up into Alaska.

I lived in central New York state for years without ever seeing or hearing a ruffed grouse. Then I lived in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks for about eight months and saw and heard them several times. According to the “Field Guide to the Birds of New York” by Corey Finger, “Declining in the state, it is nearly gone from Long Island and is not doing much better in the lower Hudson Valley, though it is still common through the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and forested regions in the rest of the state.”

In New Hampshire it is an important enough game bird that the Fish and Game writes up reports on its status. In her 2015 “Ruffed Grouse Assessment,” biologist Karen Bordeau calls the ruffed grouse “the most sought after small game in New Hampshire.” Bordeau continues:

The only index to fall grouse populations in New Hampshire currently available (number of grouse seen per 100 hours of hunting) is provided by the annual Small Game Survey and Figure 2 illustrates small game hunter effort per species and region for 2013-2014. This survey has been conducted since 1999 and allows the Fish and Game Department to quantify hunter activity and observations to generate indices for key small game species. This method is viewed as a reliable index to species abundance and allows N.H. Fish and Game to compare grouse observations within and between years. 

The breeding populations are counted by listening for males drumming. Biologists drive established routes and stop at intervals to listen and count. In New Hampshire ruffed grouse are much more abundant in the northern third of the state. Since 2009 grouse numbers have varied between 100 and 165 grouse seen per 100 hours of hunting. Here in southwestern New Hampshire the numbers are between 20 and 60 birds per 100 hours.

The variation in ruffed grouse numbers from year to year is largely controlled by the amount of forage (they love all manner of fruit) available to them and the severity of the winter. This species favors the early stages of forest succession. Historically, forests went away because of fires, both those set by lightning and the ones the tribal people set to keep the land clear for hunting and farming. Logging after European settlement also created grouse habitat in places where the forests were allowed to recover before being harvested again (rather than being put to the plow or used as pasture). Fire prevention policy and changing logging techniques have made it necessary for wildlife managers to create suitable habitat for this well loved game species.

The spruce grouse is an altogether more rarified bird. It dwells exclusively in spruce-fir forest with specific structural components (e.g. there should be living branches down to the ground). Like the ruffed grouse, it benefited from a certain kind of logging operation — large-scale clear-cutting — that is no longer practiced in the northeastern U.S. Consequently, spruce grouse habitat, which was always patchy here at the southern edge of their range, is now very rare and so is the bird. It is listed as endangered in New York and Vermont, and is a species of “special concern” in New Hampshire.

According to a Fish and Game profile of the spruce grouse, lowland populations (mostly Coös County) are small and unstable because land uses have reduced the amount of habitat available. In contrast, montane spruce-fir forests (mostly in the White Mountains National Forests) are more continuous and extensive and support a larger population. The Fish and Game, however, expresses concern that recent longer, harsher winters are reducing breeding success.

The taiga is the name given to the coniferous forest that stretches across Canada to Alaska and southward into the US. along mountain ranges. The distribution of the spruce grouse is essentially identical to the distribution of this plant community. In the winter the spruce grouse dines exclusively on conifer needles, clipped directly from the tree. During the rest of the year the grouse broaden their diet to include berries and leaves and some insects.

Like the ruffed grouse, male spruce grouse drum during the breeding season. The spruce grouse drumming is described as “soft,” but the ruffed grouse sound is anything but. In fact, the drumming of ruffed grouse ranks up there with the call of a loon when it comes to soul-stirring sounds in the woods. It begins slowly and picks both speed and volume. It travels through the air at such a low frequency that if you are close enough you don’t just hear it, you feel it.