Thursday, June 17, 2010
Bill Cochran's Outdoors: Beating the drums for new grouse society members
Bill Cochran is a Roanoke Times outdoors columnist.
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Brandon Harper wants to pump new life into the Virginia Mountain Chapter of the Ruffed Grouse Society.
Like the grouse themselves, the chapter has had its ups and downs through the years. The heart of any chapter is its annual fund-raising banquet, and last year Harper and his wife, Summer, pretty well carried the load of putting the chapter’s event together. It attracted 110 people who were gracious in providing money for the society, but not many wanted to work the event.
Harper needs help. So do the grouse.
A meeting to jump-start the chapter has been scheduled June 22, 7 p.m., at the Corned Beef restaurant in downtown Roanoke. Harper, who operates Cycle Shack in Roanoke, needs people to attend who are interested in helping grouse and seeing the chapter’s influence grow. Free drinks and dessert will be promised. Come 6:30 p.m. if you wish to dine with the group.
As I recall, the chapter was formed in the early 1970s as the Virginia Chapter of the Ruffed Grouse Society. That was about 10 years after the national chapter was organized by three men who lived in Bath County: Bruce Richardson Jr., Seybert Beverage and Dixie Shumate Jr. The national society will celebrate its 40th anniversary next year.
The initial Virginia chapter was put together by Bill Tredwell, an avid grouse hunter who was a teacher at William Fleming High School in Roanoke. Tredwell asked me to help. Hardly a week went by during the grouse season that we didn’t hunt together, often behind Tredwell’s hard-charging Brittany spaniel. The dog was so wide-ranging that it would disappear at times and give us an opportunity to discuss chapter matters.
In the early years, we’d hold two or three chapter meetings annually, but we never got around to sponsoring a banquet. The meetings mostly were times of fellowship when avid grouse hunters shared the challenges of pressing through grouse habitat and the joys of good dog work and birds flushing from beneath hawthorn trees.
We did one thing of lasting importance. We hooked up with Joe Coggin, a wildlife biologist of the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, and established an annual grouse survey that the department continues to use today. Hunters who participate provide data on the number of birds they flush per hour of hunting along with the gender and age of the birds they kill. This provides some of the best trend data available to the department today.
The survey began with the 1973-74 season which registered a flush rate of 1.31 birds per hour of effort. The average through the years is 1.13.
A strange thing happened following that first year. The flush rate began to crash. It went from 1.31 to 1, to 98, to 72 in subsequent years. When a concerned DGIF decided to trim 15 days off the end of the season to protect the brood stock, some survey participants childishly felt the information they provided had been used against them and threatened to withdraw from the survey.
That pretty well was forgotten when the flush rate began to rebuild in the early '80s, hitting a survey high of 1.57 during the 1982-83 season. But there hasn’t been much to rejoice over since.
The 2007-08 season had the lowest rate on record, a measly 0.69. On average, it took 15.3 hours of hunting for each bird killed. That is getting pretty close to the “Why bother” level. No word yet on the results of the snowy 2009-10 season.
What grouse need most of all now is early succession habitat, the kind that follows a timber cut or fire. Trouble is, timber cutting has declined on our natural forests, which once provided some of Virginia’s finest grouse cover. The trend is to protect old growth at the detriment of new growth, even though new stuff is equally important to old stuff. Lacking new growth, grouse suffer, and so do other species, but the tree huggers who press for old growth only don’t see that.
Many of the hunters who were part of the chapter in the past no longer are around. Sportsmen like Harper, who is 30, must recruit a new generation of their peers, or things are going to get worse for wildlife and hunting. That’s not an easy assignment, because there aren’t that many grouse out there to attract hunters with the fortitude to go after them. Grouse hunting isn’t like spending the day in a deer tree stand, Harper said.
Providing funds for the Ruffed Grouse Society is important, because the organization is one of the few voices speaking reason on the subject of forest management. That’s what banquets are all about, and the society needs people willing to sponsor them.
IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS about the upcoming chapter meeting, contact Harper at 540-343-1800 or Dave Hansroth of the Ruffed Grouse Society at Rgshans@comcast.net.
THE RUFFED GROUSE SOCIETY has given its quarterly magazine a fresh, updated look and added quality columns and features. The summer issue contains articles on dogs, shotguns, woodcock, the Farm Bill, hunting gear and, of course, grouse hunting. The magazine is worth the $25 membership fee. See RuffedGrouseSociety.org.
