Neither strip mining or clear-cutting has completely stopped in Ohio. Coal mining has diminished due to the anti-coal burning policies of anti-gun Democrats, but it has not stopped completely. There are several other minerals still actively mined in Ohio including limestone and dolomite, sand and gravel, sandstone and conglomerate, clay, shale, and salt.
There is no doubt that there has been a shift in Ohio forests over the years. But that has always been true of forests everywhere. There is actually a large increase in forested land as a lot of former farm land is reverting back to wooded land. Overall, the forest has become more mature, but there is still a very active logging industry that includes both selective cutting and clear-cutting. Here's a pretty good breakdown of what is actually happening over the entire state:
https://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/resource_bulletins/pdfs/scanned/OCR/ne_rb75.pdfAnd here is one of the recent complaints about the clear-cutting that often happens on both private and state lands:
https://thenewpolitical.com/2017/02/21/opinion-clear-cutting-problem-trump-unlikely-fix/It is in succession stages of growth that we have the best grouse habitat, and there is still no shortage of early and mid-succession regrowth on logged out areas and abandoned farm land. I've also heard the nonsense about one very hard winter that virtually eliminated quail in southern Ohio in the late 1970's. If that was the only cause, it would seem that it should be fairly easy to re-establish a breeding population when the country is supposedly in a global warming trend.
I have not hunted in Ohio for about 10 years, but I can say there is a lot of very thick cover and good habitat in the eastern part of Ohio. Southeast Ohio has some of the thickest cover imaginable, and the areas I hunted had large areas of immature trees along with memorable amounts of blackberries and multiflora rose thickets. I do not think the tremendous decline of ruffed grouse in Ohio (or Pennsylvania) has anything at all to do with a lack of good habitat, either because there is no logging, or because small farms have largely been replaced with the huge monocrop type of farming seen in the midwestern states.
I won't say that West Nile Virus is not a factor. But I know the big decline started well before we ever heard of WNV. It was easy to place the blame on the 11 year population cycle of ruffed grouse. But when the peak years came back and there were still very few grouse, it became apparent that we had a serious problem.
