Early this morning I looked out the window from my desk and noticed a fairly
large bird perched about thirty feet up in an alder in the nearby canyon. It
looked dark, but was not shaped right to be a crow. I thought perhaps it was a
hawk of some sort, and was surprised, upon training the binoculars on it, to
find it was a Ruffed Grouse. Most of the time it sat motionless, but
occasionally would take a small nip from an alder catkin hanging nearby. After
a minute or so I noticed there was a second grouse sitting about three feet
above the first one, partly obscured by a large limb. The two of them sat there
for about fifteen minutes before flying away.
Seeing two grouse together here is noteworthy. When I was a kid there used to
be lots of grouse here. In a five mile walk one would see a dozen or more. That
was before coyotes arrived in 1966. In more recent decades they have become
decidedly rare. In 2013 I failed to detect one during the course of the entire
year. Within the last year, however, they seem to be making a rebound. I have
been seeing individuals with much more regularity. A couple of weeks back I saw
five in one half-hour outing just before dusk, three of them roosting in the
same tree.
It seems to me not a coincidence that their apparent rebound is connected with
a simultaneous decrease in coyotes. For some reason in the past couple of years
the coyote population seems to have crashed. Only infrequently now do I hear
them or see tracks and/or scat. Some people have suggested that an increase in
cougars (which has been well documented) since the ban on hunting them with
dogs has contributed to a decline in coyotes. I have no idea whether or not
this hypothesis has any real basis. But I do know that in the past twelve
months I have started seeing more grouse, and with increasing frequency, for
which I am glad.
Darrel
