Photo and story by Tom Godin,
January 26, 2001

I followed the zigzag path of a Grouse through the snow a few days ago. It went from rose bush to rose bush then down into a spruce grove where the tracks suddenly vanished. No doubt it had flown back across the creek to thick cover.

The tracks of a grouse look like a series of arrows drawn in the snow. If you follow the pointing arrows you will never come upon the grouse because it is moving in the opposite direction. When the snow is fresh, and a few inches deep, it is very hard to tell which way the grouse is moving. The tracks in this case were very clear and I was sure that this particular grouse was looking for rose hips although I didn't see any sign of it having plucked so much as a single rose hip. Perhaps this crop was not up to its standards.

I was surprised the first time I followed the tracks of a Grouse through a rose bush thicket. I knew they ate the hips of the rose in winter but I had always assumed that they would pluck the whole fruit and swallow it. But they don't. They pluck the rose hip from the branch and them proceed to beat the pulp from the outside, eating only the seeds within. In places where they work the hips hard it is possible to find big reddish stains on the snow from the discarded pulp.

In winter the Ruffed Grouse lives on a restricted diet of deciduous tree buds, fruit, and other vegetable matter that might be exposed in the snow. With a small amount of available food, I thought the pulp of the rose hip would be a great source of vitamins and nutrients - who knows what the Grouse is thinking or avoiding by not consuming the whole hip.

Ruffed Grouse must be hardy to thrive in cold winter weather and they have a few adaptations that make the season a bit more bearable. One feature that develops for the winter season is that of pectinations. These are spiky bristles that grow out along both sides of each toe. This increased surface area creates a snowshoe effect. Having a bigger foot surface keeps the grouse on top of the snow, which saves more energy than if it had to plow through chest deep snow.

Another strategy Grouse employ is sleeping under the snow. Launching themselves from a tree limb they plow into deep snow and burrow downward. Often a group of grouse will sleep in close proximity to one another but I have never seen any place where they actually huddled together. When they want to leave this shelter they come up to the surface and burst into flight. I have always been intrigued by this habit and whenever I come upon the places where Grouse have emerged from their snow blanket I dig down to inspect their temporary quarters.

The amount of droppings that the grouse leave behind in each burrow has intrigued me. There is such a large amount - a clump about the size of an apple - that I wonder if maybe the grouse spent more than one night beneath the snow. It seemed logical because if the weather was minus 30 degrees Celsius above the snow, and a bit below freezing under a blanket of snow, staying hidden for a few days to conserve heat and body energy made sense.

However, one day while on a walk in the bush in early winter, with only three inches of snow on the ground, I came upon a place where a grouse had hunkered down to sleep for the night. I was surprised that the grouse chose to sleep on the ground with so little snow. I had assumed that tree roosting would be the norm until a sufficiently deep amount of snow had fallen to act as a thermal shield. But here was a depression that was like a cast of the lower half of a grouse's body. Judging by the way that it squatted down, the back and head would have been sticking out above snow level. As before I inspected the accumulated droppings out of curiosity. I was surprised to see a similar amount to those of deep snow sleepers.

Let me say, at this point, that inspecting grouse droppings is not as repugnant as it may sound. Grouse droppings are essentially compacted vegetation and in cold weather are simply curved cylindrical segments that look for all the world like cigarette ashes solid and frozen.

Anyway here was a chance to get a relative measure on the pile. I laid the bits end to end and if memory serves me correctly there were 38 inches of droppings. Now that seemed like a large amount. This finding basically destroyed my theory about grouse staying under the snow for days on end in cold weather. I always believed a large amount of droppings meant a long time spent in one place. I doubted that this grouse had slept in this spot for more than one night. There was no protection from the cold provided by such a shallow snow and yet here was a large amount of droppings. Perhaps a large amount of digested food material routinely passes through a grouse in a short period of time.

This past weekend someone mentioned to me that they had been 'flashed' by a male Ruffed Grouse while out cross-country skiing. At this time of year a male grouse may get it into its head that any moving object is either a courtable female grouse or a male challenger. This is when people get flashed. Flashing is not what the display is really called but it involves the male grouse trying to show his best assets to the intended. During the display the Grouse struts with halting steps across an opening while majestically spreading its tail in a full semi-circle to show the tail pattern to its fullest. It looks a lot like someone trying to show a full hand of cards. At the same time it pulls its black neck ruff up high around the base of the head and with each step gives a noticeable jerk of the neck to make the ruff dance. The wings are usually drooped low near the sides. The whole display is quite impressive and sometimes a little disconcerting if the grouse approaches quite close.

No doubt I will be writing more about the Ruffed Grouse as spring approaches and the male grouse begins to drum. Suffice it to say at this time that drumming is an attention getting device wherein the male attracts a female to its territory. Just how the Grouse actually made its drumming sound had people stumped for some time. Thanks to the development of slow motion in movies some of the secrets have been revealed. But more about that later.