What Pennsylvania is doing to help its state bird recover from devastating virus

To hear a ruffed grouse drumming in a forest or witness their immense takeoff speed as they flush is exhilarating for the small-game hunter and other outdoor enthusiasts alike.

An encounter with Pennsylvania’s state bird has also grown exceedingly rare in recent decades, as habitat loss and the deadly mosquito-borne West Nile virus have exacted a heavy toll.

It’s a trend the Pennsylvania Game Commission is working to reverse.

“The population status of grouse in Pennsylvania is that they’ve been declining for a long time,” said Reina Tyl, Game Commission biologist for the grouse and American woodcock. “But also over the last 20 years they’ve been experiencing quite a steep decline.”

Tyl last week brought an hourlong presentation on the grouse, and the woodcock, to Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center in Bushkill Township.

The commission spends about $6.4 million a year on information and education. It’s a relatively small sliver of its annual $131 million budget dominated by $94.5 million spent annually on wildlife habitat management and the protection and management of wildlife, according to the most recently available fiscal year data available on the commission’s website, from 2019-20.

Adopted as Pennsylvania’s official state bird in 1931, the grouse saw its population peak in the 1960s. That was about 20 years after a trend of farm abandonment generated lots of early successional forest habitat that provides the kind of cover and food vital to the species.

“They like where it’s really, really dense where they have protection overhead from predators because their main predators are other birds, raptors like hawks, and owls,” Tyl said.

Grouse walk more than they fly, have a lifespan of about two or three years, and lay clutches of up to 14 eggs. Their signature ruff, present on males and females, surrounds their neck and can be puffed out.

The drumming is how the males attract females during mating season, but they’ll do it year-round to declare and defend territory. The phenomenon is produced by beating its wings back and forth so fast it creates an air vacuum, making a low-frequency “almost like basketball-bouncing sound,” Tyl said.

“It’s something you feel rather than hear because it is so low frequency it can be really hard to detect from your ear,” she told an audience of about 35 gathered Wednesday night at Jacobsburg.

The Game Commission uses four main surveys to monitor the grouse population, beginning in spring with morning walks through forests to listen for drumming. Then there are summer sightings recorded by commission staff, reports of flushing the birds out of hiding places from hunters enlisted for the effort since the ‘60s, and the annual take that hunters can relay to the commission.

“Unfortunately small game hunting in general but also grouse hunting has been declining in participation for decades now,” Tyl said.

The Game Commission is looking to expand its datasets by tapping eBird trends monitoring and the Audubon Christmas Bird Count, according to the biologist.

In attacking their declining population, the Game Commission is tackling the loss of suitable grouse habitat and West Nile threat simultaneously.

Early returns show promise: As a resident rather than migratory bird, the grouse is managed state by state. That allows Pennsylvania to compare flush rates in its northern counties to those in southern New York — a similar landscape. Recent years’ data shows Pennsylvania’s flush rates stabilizing or even increasing slightly, while New York’s has dropped, according to Tyl.

Most of Pennsylvania was at one point logged, Tyl said, leading to wide swaths of second-growth forest with little of the understory that grouse depend on. Agricultural fields and forest stands filled with invasive species aren’t meeting their needs either.

That has resulted in a long-term population decline exacerbated by a dramatic die-off since the early 2000s linked to West Nile virus — one of the Audubon Society’s “6 Horrifying Bird Plagues.”

A research study by the Pennsylvania Game Commission infected juvenile grouse with the virus and projected that 70% to 90% of them would die from West Nile, Tyl said. Adult grouse may better fend off an infection, she said, but: “Clearly the impacts of this virus to this bird are quite profound.”

The Game Commission has begun tailoring its habitat management for the grouse by planning activities like timbering in areas least likely to have a lot of mosquitoes, Tyl said — land with higher elevations, steep slopes and good soil drainage.

Pennsylvania and neighboring states like New Jersey use technology called the Grouse Priority Area Siting Tool (G-PAST) to map where those suitable areas can be found. From the Lehigh Valley, the closest such territory can be found in the Pocono Mountains.

Habitat management techniques can mean thinning a forest to get oak seedlings to establish themselves as an understory then coming in with a second cut to help the oaks thrive. For a stand of aspens, which grow as clones, the trees can be cut back so they re-sprout thicker.

“Generally speaking for grouse we are talking about removing most of the over-story to try to get an even-aged young forest to regenerate,” she said.

Managing the grouse as a game bird in Pennsylvania also means deciding how much of the year should be open to hunting them.

After consecutive years of widespread West Nile activity in 2017-18, the Game Commission launched what it calls a Responsive Harvest Framework. Using indices for grouse population based on its various surveys, the commission can decide on offering a winter season after Christmas, in addition to fall hunting. The idea is to improve the population’s chances of survival into spring breeding season.

“We felt like the grouse that had already survived all of the fall and part of the winter, those ones were most likely going to make it to that spring season,” Tyl said.

The post-Christmas season has been closed since 2017, but the commission takes a look annually at opening it back up. Tyl is currently compiling data for what they mean for next year.

“There is a chance in the future if grouse numbers rebound and their production rebounds that we could see that season open either partially again or fully,” she said. “It’s hard to have hope for that because the indexes have remained low for so long that I’m not sure if it’ll happen. It’s hard to say.”

More Jacobsburg programs

For more information about programs at Jacobsburg Environmental Education Center, visit its website or Facebook page.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com.