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A Grouse Hunter Wonders: Is Black Hills Grazing A Sacred Cow?

It’s never a great sign when you get to one of your favorite hunting spots and find cows.

Lots of cows, and everything that cows bring with them. Lots of that everything, including the damage a 1,200-pound cow and her fast-growing calves will do to the environment.

If you let them.

Cows are a reality of our lives. And they’re part of the multi-use principles fixed in law for the management of our national forests, including our own Black Hills National Forest. I understand that. And as a grown-up farm kid, I appreciate it, up to a point.

Cows have their place in the forest. And I’d much rather have cow herds complicating natural-resource management — and my hunting and fishing experiences — in the Black Hills than another strip mine or another cluster of rural homes, which have much greater, more-lasting impacts.

Still, the impacts of grazing on Black Hills aspen groves, meadows, fragile slopes, and, perhaps especially, riparian zones are relentless, undeniable, and profound.

The world is fed, of course. Black Hills ranches are part of that food chain. And that’s good. But with management as is, soils are hurt. Streams are hurt. Fisheries are hurt. Native-plant communities are hurt. Aesthetics are hurt. And that’s not so good. Not so good at all.

Cows have an effect on hunting, too, because they have an effect on wildlife populations, including ruffed grouse.

What am I grousing about? I can’t find the ruffies

I’m no expert on ruffed grouse. I’m a native of central South Dakota, so I grew up with sharp-tailed grouse and prairie chickens. Shot plenty. Ate my share. But I’d never seen a ruffed grouse in the wild of the Black Hills until about 10 or 12 years ago. And I’d been looking.

I hunted around for ruffies for a few days every fall for a few years without a dog.

Things improved a lot with the dog, and with a better understanding of where to look in an era when once-common ruffed grouse can be hard to find in the Black Hills.

I hunt them 10 or 12 times a year, both in South Dakota and, after purchasing a non-resident permit, across the line in Wyoming. About every third hunt I see one. Two, if I’m lucky. About every fourth or fifth hunt, I shoot one. Two, rarely. Almost never.

So much for the notion held by some that hunting is all about killing. It’s not, of course. It’s all about hunting, a process that stands alone as a traditional means of encountering our environment and its wildlife.

Spanish hunter and philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset put it pretty well when he wrote: “One does not hunt in order to kill; on the contrary, one kills in order to have hunted.”

Bagging a bird certainly completes an otherwise inspiring process of outdoor engagement. Plus, ruffed grouse is incomparable among fowl, wild or domestic, at the dinner table. So, I hunt to have hunted, but also hope to kill once in a while, too, as cleanly and ethically as possible.

Once, amazingly enough, I found five ruffed grouse in one day and shot three. That was the only time I filled my daily limit on Black Hills ruffed grouse. I was giddy. And I’ll be surprised if I ever do that again or feel like I need to.

The Black Hills are mostly unfriendly terrain for ruffed grouse these days. That’s largely because of decades of fire suppression and timber management aimed at lumber production rather than forest diversity. Where many aspen groves used to be, the explosively productive ponderosa pine now dominates. That's bad for ruffed grouse and many other wildlife species.

Ruffed grouse need mixed forest, heavily deciduous, especially aspen, and all that goes with it. They need the berries and buds and complex community of plants that provide food and cover and the right conditions for their survival and reproduction. They need the shady cool of the aspen groves in the summer heat and the snug protection of the aspen groves in the brutal chill of a high-country winter.

When forest diversity is gone, so are the ruffed grouse

A lot goes into the failure of the forest to provide for ruffed grouse and other species as it once did, the way some old-timers remember it. And cows are part of the failure. How big of a part, I’m not sure. Not as big, certainly, as narrowly focused, commercial based timber management that encouraged and sustained the weed-like growth of pines and the water-sucking, semi-sterilized ecosystems they create.

Probably not as big as the fire-suppression policies often aimed at protecting the private strips of property and rural homes that are interspersed with public forest throughout the Black Hills.

And the much-defiled mountain pine beetle? Well, the decade-long beetle outbreak of recent times damaged more than 400,000 acres of the 1.2-million-acre Black Hills National Forest. It left ugly swaths of sometimes-dangerous dead trees and ugly, difficult-to-traverse jumbles of fallen timber.

But it wasn’t all bad. The beetle also did some of what we haven’t done well, and that is to get rid of some pine trees. Lots of them. And if you add the beetle’s work to the cleared areas left from large forest fires in the last 20 years or so, you see formerly pine-choked portions of the forest opening up in favor of botanical diversity and the revival of diminished wildlife species, including ruffed grouse.

I celebrate that positive trend. But a lot of the negative remains for ruffed grouse. That includes grazing, which includes tromping, which damages the environment.

If you get a bunch of heavy, sharp-hoofed quadrupeds tromping around in a relatively fragile ecosystem, you’re likely — no, certain — to see negative impacts on the plants and water resources and soil stability, and also on the wildlife.

I’ve certainly seen it on trout streams, through generally unrestricted cattle access to otherwise clear creeks and streams. And I’ve seen it in sensitive riparian zones along streams, where the tromping degrades water quality, hurts trout populations, and despoils habitat.

Cows and ruffed grouse: an uneven co-existence

I think I see the same type of impacts, perhaps less-easily discerned and confirmed, on ruffed-grouse habitat, and on ruffed grouse.

When I do find ruffed grouse in the Black Hills, I generally find them in relatively undisturbed expanses of aspen, especially young aspen, with high-quality, generally undisturbed water resources nearby. That has to tell us something.

These are not scientifically confirmed conclusions. They are anecdotal observations by a non-professional observer who spends a fair amount of time and energy looking for ruffed grouse and wondering why they are and aren’t in certain places.

Take the two places I hunted Tuesday during the opening of the Wyoming grouse season. I considered them to be reliable places to find a few ruffed grouse, which is a realistic goal in the Black Hills.

One place is high in the hills across the Wyoming line, the other somewhat lower eight or 10 miles away. I start each Wyoming season at the first. And I have seen them there most years and shot them there regularly. I only shoot one a year there, however, just because I worry about their numbers.

The other spot I know as a reliable ruffed grouse area because of survey work done by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department that confirmed grouse reproduction there. And last year I saw two grouse there and my dog trailed a third. But I never got a shot.

I hunted both spots Tuesday during the Wyoming opener and found both to be heavily used by cows and seriously roughed up by hooves. Much degraded from previous years. And I never saw a ruffed grouse. My dog got mildly “birdy” once.

Making observations without knee-jerk conclusions

A few things on that: 1) Just because I didn’t see any grouse doesn’t mean there weren’t any there. It’s hit-and-miss hunting in more ways than shotgun percentages. Even with a good dog like Rosie, grouse can evaporate in dense aspen groves.

2) Just because they weren’t there yesterday, doesn’t mean they aren’t around somewhere. Ruffed grouse are faithful to relatively small territories. But the disturbance of the cows may have caused them to be unfaithful for a while. Maybe they’ll return when the cows are moved.

3) What about drought? Wildlife species move to get what they need. That’s true even of wildlife with strong territorial fidelity. Maybe it wasn’t the cows. Maybe it was the lack of rain, the dry water holes, and shriveled creeks. The climate change. Or maybe it was a combination, causing the birds to relocate, for now.

But there’s also another possibility, and a sad one. Maybe something more enduring is in play. Maybe the effects of grazing and habitat degradation finally eliminated a couple of small, fragile, declining grouse populations in what were once promising places.

I’m not prepared to jump to any conclusions on that. And I’ll be back to those same places again, probably later this season and again next, hoping to find grouse instead of cows. Or at least grouse with cows.

Meanwhile, I’ll be thinking more about a philosophy of the multi-use forest-management process that sometimes seems a little out of balance. I’ll probably even ask a few questions about that to the people who do the managing. Then I’ll write some stories about what they say.

That’s what I do, after all. I ask questions. Then I write about the answers.

When I’m not out looking for ruffed grouse, that is.

Click here to access the archive of Woster's past work for SDPB.