First, no expert here.  But I felt the need to say that I have never
heard that Grouse preferred to live/breed in open to mixed habitat. Nor
have I ever seen them there when in Michigan.  I think I have been told
that they like populars.  The Michigan DNR recently instituted a Grouse
habitat area intiative called "GEMS".  People could look at the habitat
areas selected for these grouse areas pn the MI DNR website, the maps
are somewhat detailed.  The one I did a little walking in was mostly
dense forest and I did see Grouse in that habitat.  There was some open
mixed area at one end though.

Mary, Fairborn OH
Native Michgander


------------------------------ Date: Wed, 7 Oct 2015 10:49:58 -0400
From: Bill Whan <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: more on the ruffed grouse 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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