All About Our Forest Grouses

Forest grouse season opened the first of September. Several homeys have reported seeimg more birds in more places than usual. This is cause for excitement for several reasons: grouse are yummy galliformes (“chicken-like” partridges); bag limits are generous (four a day and 12 in possession); and the long season runs through the end of the year—across all the other hunts which take us into the woods. I love grouse for all these reasons.

We have three (technically, four) forest grouse in Washington. Their numbers have stayed pretty stable over the last century or so, but population are cyclic. This seems to be an “up” year.

Spruce grouse, Falcipennis Canadensis, (aka “fool hens,” since they often sit tight even in the face of danger) are associated with lodgepole pines, from which they seldom wander. Spruce grouse are found all across northern North America, but Paradise is at the southern edge of their range, and limited habitat makes them our least common grouse. The smallest of our grouse, an average fool hen may weigh a bit over a pound and be 17 inches long from tip to tip.

Ruffed grouse habitat also crosses the continent, but a bit farther south than the lodgepole turf of their northern cousins. Ruff’s preference for riparian areas (willows, cottonwoods, dogwood and so on) with nearby forests means that we have plenty of habitat and generally good numbers. The ruffed grouse, Bonasa umbellus, is just a bit larger than our fool hen, with lengths to 20 inches and weights to a pound and a half or more. This is the grouse which five-year-old Huckling Tena once called “a chicken dressed up like a turkey!”

Our third (and fourth) forest grouse is (are) the “blue” grouse, Dendragapus obscurus. At 20 inches in length and weights up to nearly three pounds, this is our largest grouse. These birds range from the Yukon to New Mexico. They were among the very first western birds recorded, in August of 1776, by the the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition. As its members sought a route from Santa Fe to the California colonies, they developed a taste for the delicious wild chickens.

Blue grouse have been my favorites since I was nine or ten. Uncle Ed took me out on his place up the Little Chumstick, north of Leavenworth, to meet his blues—his “chickens.” I learned why I’d been given my uncle Van’s ancient .22 Winchester Model 67, and how tasty those birds were. Decades later, they were the centerpiece of one of the most enjoyable evenings of my life, but that’s another story.

Males have a bluish-gray plumage, and “combs” above their eyes which often change color from yellow to red when they become excited or disturbed. The females have a mottled-brown plumage, and blend in with their surroundings when hiding or on the nest.

Now, about that “third (and fourth)” business. After studying DNA evidence, The American Ornithologists’ Union separated blue grouse into two separate species in 2006. We now have the sooty grouse, Dendragapus fuliginosus, and the dusky grouse, Dendragapus obscurus. Similar in most ways, the defining characteristics are subtle, but noticeable. In mating display, the fleshy air-sac patches at the neck are reddish-purple in the dusky and yellow in the sooty. In the field, the most useful distinguishing marks are on their tails; the dusky has all dark tail feathers with occasional gray tips, while the sooty has a broad gray terminal band. Everything else you want to know is available online at Cornell University’s bird guide at www.birds.cornell.edu/AllAboutBirds/BirdGuide.

The sooty grouse ranges from Alaska to California, and is fairly common in the western part of our state. The dusky grouse, aka “dusky blue grouse” or “interior blue grouse” occupies the rest of what we have long called the range of the blue grouse. Washington is the only state where the ranges of the two species overlap.

A few wildlife agencies have bought into the species separation. Montana continues to use blue grouse for one of its forest species. Oregon calls them blues, but locates the sooty through most of its forest grouse range, and the dusky in the northeast. Idaho and Colorado regs now refer only to the dusky grouse. In Washington, we still hunt “blue grouse,” without discrimination.

This fall, the dusky/sooty/blue grouse will be in brushy and open transition zones around the firs and pines.

Given that we generally use firearms to hunt grouse, given that grouse hunting is an activity in which we often include youngsters, given my oft-expressed concerns about Initiative 594, and given that ballots arrive in a few days, next week’s column will be about youngsters and that initiative. Given my strong opposition to 594, expect to see this column on next Friday’s Daily Record editorial page.