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The Outdoors: by Conrad Grove

Researchers try to figure out the habvits of ruffed grouse

STATE COLLEGE Pa.-the gaint outdoor laboratory is just a few miles southwest
of here on land ofthe loneliest kind, and soon the drumrolls of it's most
illusive residents will announce their numbers and the dawn.

The drummers are male ruffed grouse, 1.5 pounds lovesicknessas they perch
atop a log, a rock or a stump and bigen their cadence.

In hopes of attracting a mate, they will fan the air with their wings,
slowly at first and then fast enough to make the woods pulsate with a sound
that has been likened to a balky one-cylinder engine finally firing to life.
If a female approches, the drummers will put on another show, flaring their
broad tales and puffing out the iridescent black fethers-or ruffs-around
their necks.

This will be the 23d year the volunteers who patrol this nearly 3,000 acre
tract will hear the commotion, which usually commences just at sunrise and
end a couple of hours. Few, however, will ever see the ritual, given the
reclusiveness of Pennssylvania's state bird and the habitatit requires.

Still the clatter recorded on this forlorn and firgid plot will give
biologists their best estimate of how many grouse survived the winter, and
how science can buffer the decline of an upland gamebird revered by hunters
both for its tactics and its taste.

With grouse, unfortunately, nothing is ever quick-or easy. All we really
know for sure is that the good old days are gone,"said Bill Palmer, a
Pennsylvania Game Commission biologist who is heading one of two long-term
studies that researchers hope will shed light on this creature's baffling
population swings.

Anyone who has ever sought the willy grouse knows where they are likely to
live. Edwyn Sandys, in his book UPLAND GAME BIRDS, published in 1902, said it

well: "The habits of grouse may vary somewhat in different localities, but as a
general rule it is to be found in what is termed heavy cover, usually another
name for the worst there is in that particular section. A snarl of thickets,
swamps, dense second growth, briar patches...right well do they know how to
make the most of every protective feature of their chosen ground."

And that is ground that is disappearing throughout the range of the grouse,
which in the Esat stretches from Maine to nortern Georgia. Grouse can abide
neither civilaztion nor old-growth forest, both of which are squeezing them
into ever-tighter confines. Grouse need a tight understory of trees and brush
eight to 10 years old, the type of habitat nature once created through fire.

Since 1975, the game commission has sought to create that habitat on 28,000
acres of State Gamelands 176, a desolate parcel known as The Barrens. Nestled
between to ridges, warmth flees faster than a flushed grouse in a broad
basin, which averages 45 frost-free days a year. Pockets of the tract, in
fact, have been known to freeze at some point every month of the year and
are devoid of trees as a result.

Those bushes and trees that do not survive are predictably tough:scrub oak
and mixed oak species, and what scientist have long recognized as a
preffered foodstuff of grouse, the buds of aspen.

The commision which subsequently banned grouse hunting in the area in 1989,
divided the acreage into two roughly equal plots. One has been left alone.
the other one was further divided into 10-acre subplots. Every seven years or
so, workers clearcut 2.5 acers from each of the subplots and waited for the
grose to respond to the thickets and age-class diversity that resulted.

And respond they have. In 1975, volunteers counted 20 drummers on the entire
tract 10 on each half. By 1994, the count was up to 40 on the unmanaged
tract with selective clearcuts.

Palmer found two other surprises as well. The range of grouse dramatically
increased in the managed acre. The grouse also seemed to display no bias
between plots consisting of mixed oak-grouse ther fed on accorns-and those
dominated aspen."what that shows is that the structure of habitat is just
as important as the species of trees on it,"Palmer said.

But in the past two years, grouse numbers have dropped to about 15 on
unmanaged tract and 30 on the other side.

"Why? Of all the questions, thats the toughest to answer,"Palmer said.
We know that the numbers are always goin to go up and down, but what we need
to know is how we can dampen that."

Fifty years of research through-out the northernmost range of the grouse,
especially in the upper tiers of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota , which
house the contry's most robust populations of the birds, have shown that
grouse follow a boom-or-bust cycle every 10 years.

The swings are tried to goshawks-an alteration of grouse hawk-and the
availabilty of snowshoe hares. When goshawks decimate hare populatins,
they feed on grouse until the hare populatin rebounds, said Dessecker, who
lives in Race Lake, Wis., and did graduate work at Penn State at the Barrens
study area.

But grouse in area south of those Great lakes state regions show little
regularity in populatin in population cycles. Game officials in five states-
Maryland, Virginia, West Vriginia, Ohio and Kentucky-are entering the second
year of a six year study to determine of hunting on grouse population.
Each year, worker plan to trap grouse at nine sites and fit them with radio
collars to track their movements-and to determine their causes of death.

Preliminary indications, said Garry Norman of the Virginia Department of
Game and Inland Fisheries and the study coordinator, show mammalian predators
-especially foxes-take 30 to 40 percent of the population and hunters only 5
to 10 percent.

"We didn't expect mammalian predation to be nearly that high,"Norman said.
We thought avian predators would probably take 80 percent of the grouse.

About half of the grouse that will be born later this spring won't live till
the next one. But they do not reveal themselves easily-one researcher parked
his car within three feet of the nest for several days without dislodging
the parent.

In May, the female will lay an average of 11 eggs, which hatch in about 24
days if they are not consumed by predators first. The chicks are able to
walk as soon as they dry-and capable of short flights when they are fiae days
old. They will feed heavily on insects at first and later on green plants and
wild fruits. Those that make it to winter will grow thorny ridges around
their toes to help them navigate through snow.

Even the most dedicated grouse hunter in Pennslyvania consider themselves
fortunate to bag several a year, Palmer noted.

"While we grouse biologists don't like to say anything's certain until all
the facts are in," he said. I can say with assurance that few people object
to the taste of grouse."

This was a bird once so abundant that early settlers claimed to have killed
them with sticks and stones, In 1831, famed naturalist John James Audubon
reported purchasing them in Pittsburgh markets for 12 cents a pair.

No one, of course ever expects to see such a glut of grouse again, except
perhaps in heavily managed areas. For that reason alone, Palmer recommends
that The Barrens be closed to hunting for at least another 15 years to take
the fullest possible measure of how the population has responded.

"I'm sure there are critics who would say you could have done this all in
10 years," he added.But with grouse these days ther is no instant
gratification.

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Site created: 12/15/97 Last Updated:12/28/97