by Wm. Hovey Smith

Created on: August 08, 2009

The Ruffed Grouse has been a notable part of North America's wild bird population. It is an interesting bird with spectacular mating habits and also as an object of food gathering and sport hunting. This grouse is only one of a number of grouse species in North America. The largest representative of the grouse family is the Wild Turkey. There are also Sage, Spruce, Blue, Sharptail and Franklin and other medium-sized grouse that occupy more restricted habitats. The Ruffed Grouse, with is range from New England down to the end of the Southern Appalachians up all the way through Canada to the Alaskan arctic, is the most widespread and what most people think of as "grouse."

In recent years Ruffed Grouse numbers, particularly in New England, have been declining, even through fewer people are living on the land and more former marginal crop and pasture lands are reverting into forests. These are nice looking forests that are wonderful to walk through, but are almost completely barren of grouse.

Why?

Those conservationists who are called in derision "tree huggers," very often protest the harvesting of mature forests, stating that this is "ruining the environment." While it is true that there is no distrubence of the environment that does not have some negative impacts, like siltation if streams (now much more controlled that in formerly), it is equally true that there are also benefits. These benefits arise because it is in the briers, whips, weeds, struggling second growth that many wildlife species prosper. In fact, Ruffed Grouse cannot thrive without access to the buds, insects and berries that grow in these clear-cut properties, however terrible they might look to us. These grouse need periodic disturbances on about a 10-year cycle. As the forest canopy grows to shade out more and more of the plants that these grouse need to survive in and on, their numbers will progressively decrease.

Areas that now provide the largest numbers of Ruffed Grouse are, to the absolute shock of most environmentalist, lands that have been reclaimed from strip-mining coal. I am not saying that some of these mining operations do not have adverse environmental impacts such as pollution of water supplies, unstable spoil piles and so on, but this is a practical demonstration that Ruffed Grouse as well as deer and black bear prosper in environments that many consider damaged beyond all hope of recovery. Nature will heal in time. We humans have too short a life span to appreciate

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