Grouse Drumming Heard in Fall

by Kevin Strauss

If you are walking in the woods this time of year and you hear a sound like a low motorboat engine, and the sound runs for a few minutes, then stops and runs again, it probably isn’t from a boat. What you are hearing is the “drumming” of male ruffed grouse. These chicken-like northwoods birds sit on downed logs and flap their wings to make a rhythmic drumming sound throughout the woods. Drumming tells other male grouse that “this territory is mine and you should stay out.” It is like an auditory “no trespassing” sign in the forest. If you hear drumming, you are probably within a quarter mile of a grouse, but it may be difficult to pinpoint its exact location. Grouse drum at a very low frequency, just 40 cycles per second. Some naturalists think that great horned owls, a grouse predator, can’t even hear sounds that are that low, much to the benefit of the grouse.

Grouse drumming is most common in the spring when males are defending their territory and hoping to attract a mate. But now, all those grouse chicks that were born in the spring are dispersing and looking for territories of their own. Established male grouse, possibly thinking that these young “upstarts” want to move in on their territory, drum to chase them off.

These dispersing grouse have problems of their own. Not only do they have to worry about predators like hawks, owls, foxes and coyotes, they also have to find a feeding territory and shelter as the weather turns cold. Until the snows fall and provide an insulating haven for grouse, they can have trouble staying warm on those rainy, 35-degree days. All these factors combine to make this a rough season for grouse. That is why these birds, unlike many songbirds who produce 4-5 young in a year, produce 9-12 grouse chicks, to cope with the losses of weather and predation.

As the leaves are dropping and the weather is cooling, grouse are beginning to shift from their summer diet of ferns, mushrooms, seeds, berries and frogs to their winter diet of quaking aspen, paper birch and willow buds. It takes a 1 1/2-pound grouse only about twenty minutes to fill their crops with four ounces of nutritious aspen buds for dinner. While that might not seem like all that much food, it is similar to a 175-pound human eating about 30-pounds of food in one meal. So keep that in mind in anyone ever tells you that “you eat like a bird.”

The Ely Timberjay