About 600 acres of the land I hunt in Vermont is old grown-over hardscrabble farms, some dating back to the late 1790's and early 1800's. This 600 or so acres are all owned by one person - a very good boyhood friend of mine - and there are fieldstone foundations scattered here and there in the woods, on the edges of meadows and a few along the gravel roads in the area... but he's gotta pay his taxes so some of his land is for sale. But several years before he put it up for sale he sold off a lot of stumpage that was cut and chipped into bio-mass. Year after year I told him he was cutting all the spruce and fir roosting areas that the grouse need just as badly as they need food, water and oxygen to breathe. He simply said "It'll grow back..." I said "Not in our lifetime it won't." Yeah, it will grow back someday but I've already noticed a decline in grouse numbers. But there are many more factors that contribute to the decline in grouse numbers that we are witnessing everywhere in their range - it's not just the loss of roosting trees... and it's not just the predators... and it's not just WNV... and it's not just over-hunting... and it's not just mature dense canopy forests... it's all of these things combined. What can we possibly do to slow this (these) processes?
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"I'm a Setter man.
Not because I think they're better than the other breeds,
but because I'm a romantic - stuck on tradition - and to me, a Setter just "belongs" in the grouse picture."
George King, "That's Ruff", 2010 - a timeless classic.
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