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Column: Where have all the grouse gone?

Wednesday, January 16, 2008 3:57 PM EST

I can remember back 40 years or so ago when grouse hunting was a viable sport here in Southwest Michigan. My buddy, Ralph, had a German short-hair pointer and just about every grouse season weekend we'd go afield with reasonable expectations of potting two or three birds. Far more than that were flushed but when it comes to grouse shooting hitting is an entirely different matter than flushing. I moved to Washington State for a game warden job and by the time I returned to Michigan in the late 1980s the Southern Michigan grouse population had taken a serious nose dive.

There were still some birds around but not many. Grouse populations are notoriously cyclical, typically going from boom to bust back to boom over a period of approximately seven years. For a long while I just figured we were on the down side of a cycle but year after year ticked by with no sign of improvement.

By the mid-90s I finally had to conclude there was no upside coming. My Brittany and I more or less kept track of the local grouse status under the guise of hunting but I couldn't bring myself to shoot at the lonely bird we occasionally flushed. The population just slowly slid down, down, down, bird by bird. By the early 2000s we stopped finding them all together. Dog is gone now and I no longer actively seek grouse down here but I've spent a lot of time outdoors on other endeavors and haven't seen one in Southwest Michigan south of Allegan County in over five years. We have fair grouse habitat on our Marcellus farm and even during the declining years I usually heard two or three drumming on a good spring day. The last drum roll died out at least five years ago. Surely someone has seen or heard a grouse somewhere around here since but it would be a real rarity.

So where have all the grouse gone? Like with the pheasant decline, everyone has a theory. The late hunting season in December has long been blamed but studies have proven beyond any doubt that has no effect. "It's them danged turkeys. They've run 'em all out," is another theory. "Naw, it's the coyotes. They've ate every last one," is a typical counter by turkey supporters. There's no evidence whatsoever of conflict between turkey and grouse. True, coyotes can devastate grouse on a very local basis. Out in Washington we lived in a remote valley that had lots of grouse. One year the coyotes moved in and all but cleaned out the grouse in just a month. Feather piles were everywhere. But that's just a temporary, local thing. Soon the coyotes move on and the grouse repopulate. I can't buy that theory, either.

As always, it comes down to habitat. Grouse are edge birds, preferring the dense, shrubby transitional areas between openings and deep woods. Young poplar trees, a common species in this zone, is a critical grouse food source, as are seeds, berries and insects which all thrive there and only there. We no longer have these edge areas. Fields are tilled right up to mature woodlots. Used to be when woodlots were logged they were pretty much clear cut and within a few years new growth of poplar and all the things grouse need would sprout up. Then select cutting came into vogue, where just certain trees were neatly plucked out of the woods, leaving the nice look of a neat, tidy forest. The timing of this practice coincides precisely with the grouse decline. Farther north where small scale clear cutting is still practiced and new poplar growth is encouraged for both future pulpwood and wildlife habitat grouse remain thriving.

There have been a few minor attempts to create grouse habitat down here, primarily at the Crane Pond and Three Rivers State Game Areas, but it takes more than just a few tiny, isolated oasis to sustain a population of anything. With today's value of farmland I doubt we'll ever tolerate substantial areas of shrub land to sit idle growing grouse instead of beans. I'm afraid our grouse are no more forever. Carpe diem.

Larry Lyons writes a weekly outdoor column for Leader Publications. He can be reached at larrylyons@verizon.net

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