[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

It has been raining up here a fair amount, enough to really saturate things and today it is supposed to begin another 24-hour period of fairly intense rain. Now... how this will affect the grouse populations is the big question. Depending on when the first clutch of eggs was laid (in May?), if those chicks are already past the "fragile" point (susceptible to hypothermia) then....we should be golden. If, however, we're not past that point now then we won't be experiencing the incredible population "high" that we had up here last Fall. There are lots of theories about how ruffed grouse populations rise and fall (and accordingly, lots of ink has been spilled on the subject) so of course I have my own as well (after 23-years of mostly unscientific observation up here). If that first clutch comes off well, we usually have a good mixed (young & older) population of birds here in September. If that 1st clutch of birds doesn't do well (because of wet and cold nesting conditions) then the birds I see in the Fall will mostly be adult birds. You can certainly make that theory much more complicated (I have a book that talks about how the interplay of raptor populations and snowshoe hares affect the cycle too) and there is even the argument about successive nesting attempts but...I remain unconvinced by it all. Are there lots of variables, certainly(!) and the populations are likely to also be variable across a region. But...I'm a big fan of Ockham's Razor Theory (or the principle of parsimony) where the best explanations usually involve the smallest set of variables.

Last edited by Lloyd3; 05/21/24 09:57 AM.