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October 2015

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From:
Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Wed, 7 Oct 2015 10:49:58 -0400
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After a discussion on the status of this bird the other day, I heard
from some folks who still want to push the strangely fashionable notion,
all too common among various parks and wildlife employees, that the
species requires recently-cleared or second-growth timber to flourish. I
have maintained that if we want to describe a native species' preferred
habitat we should look at records from long ago, when they actually had
habitats to choose from.
        I submit Thomas Nuttall's "A Manual of the Ornithology of the United
States" (1832, during the USA's early decades). This is a large work,
and its treatment of the "Ruffed Grous Tetrao umbellus" runs into six
pages, without illustrations. You can read it on the Hathi Trust site at
  http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.44828960;view=1up;seq=665  .
This came from an era when these birds actually had easy choices between
dense and second-growth forests.
        Nuttall's account begins with these words, saying that the species "is
found to inhabit the continent from Hudson's Bay to Georgia, but are
most abundant in the Northern and Middle States, where they often prefer
the most elevated and wooded districts; and at the south affect the
mountainous ranges and valleys which border upon, or lie within, the
chains of the Alleghanies. They are also prevalent in the Western States
as west as the line of the territory of Mississippi, but appear to be
unknown to the west of that great river, where the Pinnated Grous is so
abundant." Further he wrote: "Although elevated countries and rocky
situations thickly overgrown with bushes and dense evergreens, by rivers
and brooks, are their chosen situations, yet at times they frequent the
low lands and more open pine forests in the vicinity of our northern
towns and cities, and are even occasionally
content to seek a retreat, far from their favorite hills, in the depth
of a Kentucky canebrake. They are somewhat abundant in the shrubby oak
barrens of Kentucky and Tennessee in which their food abounds." Does
this sound like a species that would prefer a once-forested situation
after being stripped of vegetation? Granted, industrial-scale
silviculture was only beginning in this era, but clearly the birds
required an established forest setting. Nuttall and others state that
the males use a fallen log for drumming; one wonders how many hefty
drumming logs are around now, even long after a clear-cut.
        It is possible that in the old days many observers failed to
distinguish between the ruffed grouse and the "pinnated grouse," known
today as the greater prairie-chicken. The latter species--which at the
time was not uncommon in the Columbus area, he described as
"confined to dry, barren, and bushy tracts, of small extent." They were
once abundant in thinly-forested parts of Ohio; Nuttall mentions that
"they were so common an the ancient bushy site of the city of Boston,
that laboring people or servants stipulated with their employers not to
have the Heath Hen brought to table more than a few times in the week!"
        Anyway, when you hear folks saying that cutting down trees improves
habitat for the grouse, think again.
Bill Whan
Columbus


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