The dusky grouse, a game species native to northern Utah and much of the Intermountain West, is poorly understood by scientists — it was only reclassified as a separate species from another kind of grouse in 2006. A Utah State University researcher is working to fill in that knowledge gap.
If you're listening to the audio, then what you’re hearing right now is the sound from a wireless tracking device on a dusky grouse at Temple Fork in Logan Canyon.
“So the transmitter on mom is a lot stronger, because she can hold more weight. And so, we find her first and her chicks are always going to be with her," said Logan Clark, a graduate student at USU’s Wildlife Biology program, who is studying the life history of these mysterious birds.
“We re-find them every other day to confirm that the chicks are still alive and are still with mom throughout the summer," Clark said.
Clark said that until recently, the dusky grouse, a large, dark brown forest bird native to the inland regions of the western U.S. and Canada, was considered to be the same species as the sooty grouse, which is mostly found in western coastal forests.
“And a lot of the work and research and literature was done on sooty grouse, mostly in like the 60s through the 80s," Clark said. "And there's hardly been anything done on dusky grouse, especially looking into their life history," he said. "And it turns out, they have this pretty complicated life history.”
Clark said the dusky grouse migrate to mountaintops in the wintertime, where they subsist on a diet of only conifer tree needles.
“And then around March, early April, they can travel not only down an elevation, but sometimes up to 20 miles up and over multiple ridges to get to their preferred breeding site, where they then come out into an area like this, like Temple Fork, these kind of rolling hills of sage interspersed with little patches of Aspen and conifer and maple,” Clark said.
In addition to wild grouse equipped with transmitters, he also has microphones dispersed throughout the forest, volunteer observers, hunter harvest reports, and other research tools.
“It is a game species, and so we are looking into ideal ways to monitor them," Clark said.
Monitoring the grouse is crucial given the current limited knowledge of this understudied species. Thankfully, the project does have support. It is housed in USU Extension and is primarily funded by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources and the Utah Chukar and Wildlife Foundation.
Note: The "whoot" at the end of this piece is the display call of the male dusky grouse, the video is provided by Logan Clark, the call by xeno-canto.org.
