Don't know about grouse but here in PA the pheasant should be on the endangered species, the state cares nothing about fixing it. The used to release 6 week out pheasants on non posted farms and they stopped doing this. Now all if not most are pen raised. In 1971 PA harvested 1.3 million and beat out South Dakota.
Back in about 1978 or 1979, when I was Iowa editor of the old Fins & Feathers magazine, I ran a quiz in one of my monthly columns. One of the questions: Name the only two states to record a harvest of over one million pheasants last season. The correct answer was Iowa and PA. South Dakota didn't top a million in any of the seasons from 1975-79. Iowa was over a million every year from 1963 (when the DNR started reporting numbers) to 1981. Then hit a few down years in the mid-80's until CRP took hold. By that time, PA was into a pretty steep decline. South Dakota didn't get much of a CRP bounce in numbers until the 90's. Iowa's decline didn't really start until the current century. But pheasants aren't anywhere close to being endangered in Iowa now, even though numbers aren't anywhere close to what we experienced from 1987-2000.
Grouse numbers in Iowa were excellent when I first started hunting them back in 1973 (within a fairly small geographic area). They could likely pass for endangered in Iowa now, sad to say.
