doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Declining ruffed grouse population studies?

I'm not sure how you could say this when the real reason we have so few bounty hunters is the simple fact that there are no longer bounty payments for killing predators.

And everyone knows that coyotes don't kill and eat ducks. Here's some nice photos of coyotes saving ducks from other nest predators...

the killing of predators is a long established game bird management technique practiced in europe for hundreds of years...it works there...why not here?

Massachusetts recently published findings by Division of Fisheries and Game biologists in their publication "Massachusetts Wildlife" the results were that WNV has definitely had a negative impact on ruffed grouse populations in MA... however, through the course of their studies, not all infected birds succumbed to the disease... some birds had a natural resistance to it and survived. In blood tests on samples sent in by hunters they found antibody markers for fighting WNV. Lets hope they build up an immunity and begin to show a strong comeback. It will take years or decades for a resistant strain of ruffed grouse to begin to populate our favorite covers but there is hope.

Because of misplaced values by leftist tree hugger types who won't accept that one species may need to be controlled for the benefit of another. Their mantra is ........ leave 'em all alone. Yeah, right. How 'bout rats, mice and roaches? Oh, I see, they're exempt ............?

SRH

Brent, coyotes tend to control fox populations. We had a lot of pheasants in the 90's due to CRP--especially all the "full field" variety, much of which we lost as a result of the 1996 Farm Bill. Overall CRP acreage, Iowa looks good comparatively speaking . . . but much of it is now in buffer strips as opposed to the big fields we had prior to the changes in the 96 Farm Bill. But stop to think how many MORE pheasants we would have had in the late 80's and 90's if trapping pressure had been what it was a couple decades earlier. Studies done by Delta Waterfowl have established that intensive trapping will increase waterfowl production on prairie potholes surrounded with decent habitat. Unfortunately, that doesn't work on the kind of "macro" scale that would be required to have a significant impact on upland bird numbers. But when we had that kind of trapping pressure simply because fur prices were higher and there were a lot more trappers, that helped to offset the fact that we didn't have all the really good habitat that existed in Iowa for about the first decade of CRP. With the push to larger farm fields, we've also lost a lot of the "micro" habitats--fencerows etc--that we used to have. Sort of a "death by a thousand cuts" situation. Farming in Iowa is far less diverse than it used to be--and it's hard to imagine that it's going to change much to benefit wildlife in the future. Barring programs from DC. And it doesn't appear likely that we're going to regain the 10 million acres or so of CRP that have been lost since peak enrollment.

Iowa's grouse decline was mostly a habitat issue. Not much logging going on, and essentially no clear cutting. Same thing happened in SE Minnesota and SW Wisconsin. All those areas offered--at least through the 80's--very good grouse hunting. But the increase in nest predators was almost certainly a secondary factor where grouse were concerned as well.
Back in 1987, when I was assigned to an Army Reserve unit at Ft McCoy, we had a female officer who was married to an active duty officer stationed there. He killed 20-some grouse hunting on post without a dog. That won't happen these days, sad to say.

When the Iowa DNR finally got around to doing an inventory of the forests on public land, they found that the amount of early successional habitat was very small. They've tried to do edge management since then and have worked with private property owners surrounding public land on habitat improvement as well. But it's largely a case of too little and too late.

Larry, was just about to mention those Delta Waterfowl predator studies. I was working quite closely with Delta Waterfowl's HQ at the time (they were two blocks from my office in Winnipeg).

Good memories, I had a chance to hunt on and off at Ft. McCoy for a few years about that time. A buddy had a nice size plot of woods in the tiny town of Mill Pond. Sitting on various deer stands, the Drummer in the Woods show was almost always on display at half a stone's throw. Lots of Woodcock too and Wood ducks on the small water, haven't been in the area for quite a while.

The grouse began to disappear long before WNV came around. In Ct the decline of the grouse coincided with the re-introduction of the wild Turkey. The covers where I hunted are almost exactly the same now as they were 35 years ago. Wild grapes, plenty of berries and birch. The big difference is during the 80's there were no turkeys and plenty of grouse now there are no grouse and plenty of turkeys.

Of course predator control can work, but is very expensive and practical only on very small areas devoted to the production of a few, sometimes a single game species, not the general countryside.
A big part of the problem, at least with trying to increase duck nest success in the Prairie Pothole Region that I am familiar with, is that there are so many kinds of nest predators. Thus the predator control must be intensive, and that is nearly impossible now that the best tools like cyanide guns, poisoned grain, and strychnine drop baits are no longer legal for even professionals to use. Even then, there are obstacles like obtaining landowner permission to kill furbearers such as mink and kill cats that range out from farmsteads. Around here, studies show it takes many years to reduce populations of even the more common predators with normal methods like shooting, den cleanouts, trapping and winter aerial hunting, even on an area as small as 10 mi2. The neighbors just keep moving in to the unoccupied habitat created. Also keep in mind that once those duck eggs hatch and the ducklings complete the perilous trip to a suitable natal wetland, another suite of predators, mostly birds, begin to take their toll.

So in this intensively farmed region, I would rather see tax dollars spent on habitat creation or improvement and let individuals, hunting clubs, or conservation organizations control predators with private dollars on any land they have access to.

In my personnel observation an opinion here in Ohio, the strip mining and clear cutting has completely stopped. This method made great habitat and over the next 25 30 years the habitat changed. I also believe west Nile or some other plight has played a role in the decline of ruff grouse. Lastly Grouse hunters along with turkey hunter here in Ohio, have contacted DNR which falls on death ears due to the sales of hunting licenses. Heaven forbid licensing sales decline. The reality is licenses sales are declining, which has caused price to go out of sight for resident hunters.
Grouse hunting got me obsessed with SxS shotguns! I prey they bounce back but I have not heard a grouse drum in Ohio for more years than I can remember