By Bob ZinkContributing Writer

Hunting ruffed grouse can be exhilarating and frustrating all at

the same time. Scarcely a hunt goes by when the post-hunt reflection doesn’t include something like, “If we’d have shot better,” or “I wish I’d have seen that aspen that I sawed in half with my first shot,” or “We should have at least half the birds we saw.” Still, hunting them is a great thing to do on a fine fall morn-ing. Throw in a few woodcock and it becomes spectacular.

Ruffed grouse are interesting from an evolutionary per-spective in that there’s noth-ing quite like them in North America. For lots of animals, we often have several species of a general kind. For exam-ple, North America is home to many ducks that are relatively closely related. We have the

prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse, which although showing some big differences in outward appearance, are actually very closely related genetically and are known to hybridize.

The ruffed grouse, howev-er, has no close relatives in North America or anywhere else, for that matter. Although you might think it’s at least a distant cousin of spruce or blue grouse, distant is the key word. We used to think the ruffed grouse was closely related to the Hazel grouse from Eurasia, but recent genet-ic studies have shown this is not the case. It is fair, then, to say the ruffed grouse has stood alone for millions of years with no close relatives. Maybe that’s why they’re so shy when hunters or dogs approach. Of course, it is well known that the more northerly ruffed grouse tend to lack the shy-ness, so maybe it’s an evolved response to hunting and not a lack of family gatherings with other grouse.

The ruffed grouse is widespread throughout North America, ranging from Newfoundland to Alaska, south through the Appalachians, and into some Western forest regions. Like most species, it has core areas where it is more abundant. In Minnesota, we think of the ruffed grouse reaching its maximum density in the north, habitat willing, but it is rather less common in the southeast-ern part of the state.

Let’s switch now to deeper time. Everyone older than 50 remembers places he used to hunt or hike that are now strip malls or condos. But that’s the catch. We don’t have people over 500 or 5,000 or 10,000 years old who can recall what our current haunts used to look like back in their day. But we have some pretty good indirect evidence that there have been massive changes to our landscape, mostly brought about by the rise and fall of glaciers.

The earth and its climate are constantly changing, although at a pace that is not often per-ceptible to us. At its zenith about 21,000 years ago, the last of the many great glaciers from the north rested over much of Minnesota and stretched well to the south. Understandably, habitats were fragmented and displaced to the south. It is rea-sonable to assume these hab-itats were compressed in the South and there was a lot less habitable ground for grouse 21,000 years ago than there is today.

What did animals like the ruffed grouse do? First, given the ruffed grouse as a species has existed independently for several million years, it’s an old pro at surviving glacial advances and retreats. It has dealt with the massive, natu-ral global climate change and done it successfully. It obvi-ously has found enough habi-tat at both glacial maxima and minima to stave off extinction. But obviously, grouse moved south along with everything else when the northern glaciers pushed southward.

But, where did ruffed grouse find suitable places to live

PAGE 18 OUTDOOR NEWS SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

Think ruffed grouse are close cousins of spruce or blue grouse? Think again. Ruffed grouse, basically, have stood alone for millions of years with no close relatives. Photo by BillMARCHEL.com

(See Grouse Page 32)

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and breed? A newly invented set of ecological tools allows scientists to estimate where the favorable conditions might have been at various points in the past. The method goes by the name of ecological niche modeling and it’s actually pretty straightforward. First, you take a bunch of locality points where ruffed grouse occur today. I used 1,360 plac-es. I then used a modeling program that takes these 1,360 points and a data set on cli-matic variation across North America, and develops a model that predicts the locality points.

I realize that sounds circular, but if you compare the map produced by the model with the known distribution based on sightings, they’re very close. But how do we know where ruffed grouse were at the height of the last glacial period? Climate scientists have also developed reasonably precise pictures of what the cli-mate was like 21,000 years ago. The modeling program then finds the places 21,000 years ago that mimic the climate the ruffed grouse occurs in today. That doesn’t mean they were there, but it is pretty likely.

A map derived from the program would show areas where the model says the

climate required by today’s ruffed grouse occurred 21,000 years ago, at the Last Glacial Maximum. You would see the map showing grouse living in the Gulf of Mexico. Indeed, that would be a problem, because as adaptable as ruffed grouse might be, living in sea-water is not an option.

When the last glacier was at its maximum extent, it took up much of the earth’s water. As a result, sea levels were lowered, and areas around our coasts that today are under water were exposed and covered by

vegetation. For example, off of the coast of Newfoundland in the area known as the Grand Banks, you can today find tree trunks in 100 feet of water that are ghosts of forests past. Clearly forest creatures lived there at the time, but by about 8,000 years ago rising sea lev-els submerged the land and they were forced inland.

So ruffed grouse likely spent their breeding and nonbreed-ing periods in several disjunct spots south of the ice sheet. Whether this was true of the many other glacial advances is unknown because scientists have not produced climate data banks for those time peri-ods. If the distribution of the ruffed grouse was disjointed at each glacial maximum, it is possible the geographic isola-tion they experienced could have led to genetic differences, such as those that exist today in the blue and dusky grouse.

I hope to be able to report soon on some genetic work that might indicate that in fact there could be more than one species of ruffed grouse in North America. Perhaps they are not as alone as we thought?

AlmanacPAGE 32 OUTDOOR NEWS SEPTEMBER 18, 2015

Remembering

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Ed Holslin shot these northern ducks while hunting near Alberta, Minn., in the late 1920s. Photo courtesy of Elbert Holslin

Sean Callahan, of Alexandria, captured this 8-point buck on a trail camera near Browerville in August.

Grouse(From Page 18)

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WEEKLY WINNER. Paul Hedlund, of Maple Grove, caught and released this 50-inch muskie while fishing Lake Minnetonka on Aug. 20. The fish hit a gold Floating Rapala.

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