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 ______________________________________________________________________ Ohio-birds mailing list, a service of the Ohio Ornithological Society. Please consider joining our Society, at www.ohiobirds.org/site/membership.php. Our thanks to Miami University for hosting this mailing list. You can join or leave the list, or change your options, at: listserv.miamioh.edu/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=OHIO-BIRDS Send questions or comments about the list to: [log in to unmask]