A Grouse Hunter’s Almanac: The Other Kind of Hunting

The Beauty of Clear-Cuts

203 The Beauty of Clear-Cuts That sure looks like a grouse,” I said. “Aren’t those tail feathers hanging down?” Bob’s golden retriever had just picked up an unidentifiable frozen hunk of bone and feathers . It was mid-January, and several of us were out snowshoeing with our dogs. “Nah, that’s an organ. Bjorn’s always finding gut piles,” Bob said, thinking it was from a deer. We were cruising on snowshoes through county land north of our cabins where Bob often hunts. Bob called to Bjorn, and he wheeled around with his prize. Sure enough—a grouse. “Good boy, Bjorn,” Bob said, praising his dog for the retrieve. “You probably missed that one in October or November ,” I kidded, assuming the carcass was a bird. “He always finds the birds,” Bob responded. I didn’t think what he had in his mouth quali fied as a bird. The breast and guts were gone, and it looked like the brains had been sucked out with a straw. Three gray tail feathers dangled from the chunk of frozen bone, skin, and feathers. Our nonhunting friend Scott suggested that a snowmobile had schmucked 204 the bird, while Bjorn continued to parade around with his prize in his mouth. We snowshoed over to the area where Bjorn had picked up the remains, and after a few minutes we found the story in the snow: blood, feathers, and the finely sculpted impressions of primary feathers sweeping the dry snow. It had all the marks of a goshawk or an owl dropping like a hammer from the sky and an unsuspecting grouse straying a bit too far into a clearing forty yards away from the edge cover and then the dense cover of the woods beyond that. It looked like a brutal death, but Bjorn didn’t make any analysis or judgment. Death was something he accepted by simply not thinking about it. Surviving in subzero temperatures wasn’t much of bargain either, at least from our perspective, but the grouse in Bjorn’s mouth was hardwired to survive even the depths of a brutal northern Wisconsin winter. It had survived the winter’s cold and ice but not the goshawk. The goshawk, Accipiter gentilis, feeds heavily on grouse, especially in winter. To a ruffed grouse, Accipiter horribilis would be more accurate . There’s nothing gentle or genteel about the way a goshawk takes a grouse, which sits at the bottom of the winter food chain along with the snowshoe hare and the red squirrel. According to Gordon Gullion, the goshawk is the “most efficient” predator of ruffed grouse. When a goshawk spies a grouse, it is “probably seldom that the grouse survives,” the hawk even pursuing ruffed grouse on foot through heavy cover. They do have difficulty pursuing a grouse flying through saplings, which is why aspen cuttings are so important to the grouse’s survival. Late Season 205 In our day clear-cutting has received a lot of negative press, our image of a clear-cut a bombed-out mountainside once home to virgin Douglas fir. The media compares the cuttings to scars and wounds, even nuclear holocaust. A vast clear-cut can look like arrogance or folly. In fact, to some environmentalists clear-cuts are a metaphor for industrial society’s rape of nature. It’s true that Wisconsin , along with much of the other timbered areas of the country, was once razed with truly insolent effectiveness by timber barons and a culture with an insatiable appetite for wood, this heritage adding to our distaste for the technique of clear-cutting, but clear-cutting on a small scale is a much more benign process with valuable effects. Small, properly managed clear-cuts (five acres or so) benefit ruffed grouse and woodcock, as well as other flora and fauna, which need the thriving and tangled riot of young growth that clear-cuts provide. The smaller cuts also create more edge cover than larger, industrial cuts, generating that in-between land where so many species overlap. Before chainsaws and skidders, fire once burned mature forest , creating natural “clear-cuts,” essentially openings in which trees such as popple and brush such as dogwood and hazelnut can grow, but today for the most part we control forest fires so they won’t threaten people and destroy their fixed property. Small clear-cuts can mimic these charred openings...