I will partly agree with what the video states new growth can make good habitat great habitat but lets not leave out egg predation which has been in my opinion has been the biggest cause .Since the huge decline in trapping raccoons ,opossum and skunks populations are through the roof and getting worse . Upland game hunting will never come back until a plan to control predation is found .

 

I will partly agree with what the video states new growth can make good habitat great habitat but lets not leave out egg predation which has been in my opinion has been the biggest cause .Since the huge decline in trapping raccoons ,opossum and skunks populations are through the roof and getting worse . Upland game hunting will never come back until a plan to control predation is found .

Nature is cyclical and not often in balance. A long, long time ago nobody trapped possums but there was grouse. Predator populations are soaring, it will cause a drastic drop in game birds, but that will result in a collapse of predators and game birds will explode.

And on and on and on. Long before us, and long after.

 

Six minute video on the decline of grouse. It specifies the southern Appalachian Mountains but the same habitat principles apply here in Michigan. FM

Decline of Ruffed Grouse

There are many reasons for the decline of ruffed grouse. I googled when west Nile virus started in United States and coincidentally it was in 1999. Also if you Google asian bird flu it states it started in United States in 1997. I don't know if these could be the cause but truly believe they have and will contribute to the decline of wild bird populations.

I recently found a dead goose that was about 15 feet from the waters edge just as it came into a food plot. Called the DNR and was informed they stopped picking up and testing because they know asian bird flu is in Michigan. I hope you can remember egg prices skyrocketing because of the asian bird flu in domestic birds. Those trying to get birds for dog training still reap the repercussions not only the price of birds but iff you find any birds for training. In my opinion this along with lack of habitat and uncontrollable predators. The reason I say uncontrollable is all raptors are protected along with certain other predators like wolves in the UP for instance. Now add the predators that can be but no one traps hardly anymore and I can see this also contributes to the mortality rate. Keep in mind the location the video is about is the furthest south of ruffed grouse natural range.

 

These guys have a good channel:

 

The overpopulation of deer has hurt the grouse habitat here. No where to hide under the canopy from over browsing. Along with all the other things mentioned attribute to the decline

 

I have been planting tall Sorghum for the Pheasants winter feed.
One area is near heavy continuous woods.
This has been used by the Pats and is slowly increasing their population.

 

Let an old pat hunter elbow into this conversation. The cruelest thing we can do to wildlife is fail to manage it And that includes predators, 4-footed or winged! We no longer have the small family farms with the post in the chicken yard with a #1 foothold trap on top of it. Hawks & owls were treated exactly like coyotes are today, shot on sight And we could hunt a decent population of pats and pheasants.

When I worked for MSU I volunteered this information in a meeting of how we (MSU) was going to live trap Great Horned Owls. Oh how barbaric! Oh how cruel!. The young people that were educated beyond their intelligence/experience could not wrap their heads around why farmers used the “trap on the pole” to save their chickens. I devised a live trap for Great Blue Herons with foothold traps but the powers to be on the owl project didn’t want to see flapping of wings even though there was no injury. These are the same ilk of people running our DNR today!

Back in the day of this “control” we had very huntable populations of pats in my part of Midland Co., today, you’ll work your butt off to flush one. Fox, opossum, raccoon, all have been there since the start of my time, yet the pat and pheasant populations remained pretty constant. The sharp decline occurred IMHO when the small family farms were sold and subdivided. With the demise of the small farms went the need of the “trap on the pole“ In the chicken yard For the raptors, did the gamebird populations decline to the low lever of today.

 

...and in spite of the shot-on-sight necessity of the day we still had (and have) hawks and owls and raccoons and coyotes and weasels and foxes and.... They certainly were not wiped out but their numbers were held in check.

 

They certainly were not wiped out but their numbers were held in check.

Managed, out of personal necessity of protecting a farmer’s livelihood but nevertheless managed.

 

Quite possibly the single largest forest landowner in southern Appalachia (at the elevations where Grouse can still live in the south) is: the US Federal Government.

 

Before logging what sustained the grouse and habitat. Fire is the answer. Fire exclusion is changing the habitat. The fire resistant plants and trees are now being taken over by trees and vegetation that's less resistant to fire. Here's the link to a study that best explains it.

 

It should also be pointed out that the impact of predators is increased in today's landscape where suitable habitat exists more and more in isolated pockets. Predators that can and do travel over longer distances either by ground or air can easily sit on a small patch of suitable habitat and pick off the prey species (rabbits, grouse, pheasants) until they've essentially killed off that entire isolated pocket of game. This is the same reason as hunters we would avoid over hunting small pockets of habitat. The difference is we are not hunting to feed ourselves like non-human predators.
I always laugh at those folks, oftentimes anti-hunters/anti-trappers, that point out that at some point in history there was no "management" of animals by people, and animals did fine. Well for one, how do they know how the animals were doing back then? And as soon as humans, at whatever stage of our history you want to pick, came on the scene, we were hunting and killing anything we could catch. Management affords a good balance. It is only now where too many people have gotten too far from things like Nature and growing food, that our wild things are in great peril. And in case the anti's haven't noticed, this planet is never going back to a time when there was no humans impacting the landscape. So the best we can do is maximize the positive impacts, i.e. sustainable management of all species which add tangible value to animals, we humans have on our environment. A hands off approach, meaning non-management of animals and forests, damns Nature to oblivion as the growing number of people that are too distant from Nature have no idea what is there, and will never know when it disappears.