Sooty Grouse? Dusky Grouse?

Today, we headed up into the Jemez Mountains to complete the measurements of the last of more than 100 trees making up a large wild turkey roosting area . On the way up my mind was wandering when I nearly walked into a small group of 5 grouse. They let us walk to within 15-20 feet of them before they began to move away. That was fun.

I thought that identifying this bird would be easy. So, I looked in the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, 5th edition. According to this guide and based on the presence of a terminally gray banded tail these are Sooty Grouse. But the Sooty Grouse are only found in the western coastal region of the US and Canada. The Dusky Grouse is found to the east of the Sooty Grouse as far south as Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.

The Nov 2006 issue of the  Grouse News reports that in Colorado and in New Mexico the Dusky Grouse have gray banded tails (instead of solid black tails) usually with 18 feathers exactly like the Sooty Grouse.

The terminal gray band on tail feathers are clearly visible in the photo above.

In a recent research article on the genus Dendragapus there are the two previously identified populations, sooty and dusky grouse, and a new and previously unidentified division between the northern and southern dusky grouse populations. This may help explain the confusion in finding the terminal gray bands on the tail feathers of two geographically separated grouse populations; the west coastal sooty grouse and the southern dusky grouse populations.

Grouse Behavior

After a little background reading I discovered that others had found this grouse particularly unafraid. For example the following quote comes from the April 1936 issue of The Auk.

Dusky Grouse in the Chuskai Mountains of northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico.

"On June 21, 1936, a pair of Dusky Grouse (Dendragapus obscurus obscurus) was seen eight miles southeast of Lukachukai, Apache County, Arizona, approximately four miles from the New Mexico state line, at an elevation of approximately 8,800 feet on a steeply sloping, southeasterly exposed canyon wall. The vegetation was dominantly ponderosa pine and Engelmann spruce with underbrush of oak, aspen, Symphoricarpos, wild rose, cliff rose, ferns, Cercocarpus, and small Douglas fir.

The hen was seen first at a distance of about ten feet. She merely clucked and walked slowly away among some clumps of underbrush and stopped behind a small bush about thirty feet from where she was started. Approximately one hundred feet up the trail the male was encountered. On being disturbed he squawked and flew about thirty feet up to a horizontal limb of an open ponderosa pine where he perched for about fifteen minutes jerking his head this way and that, apprehensive, but not excited. Both individuals were extremely tame and apparently had never been molested by human beings. The Navajo Indians inhabiting this area during the summer do not hunt game birds unless taught to do so by the white man."

Paul Phillips, U.S. Soil Conservation Service, Gallup, New Mexico

Others have reported similar experiences of this unafraid grouse. The following is a particularly sweet description of such an experience in the July-August 1904 issue of The Condor: A Magazine of Western Ornithology by Florence Merriam Bailey.

"One of our pleasantest field experiences last summer was with an old Dendragapus in the Rocky mountains, which, after a short acquaintance flattered us by coming to accept us as neighbors. We had a hint of the pleasure in store for us as we were packing up the mountains, for when my horse, leading the way for the pack horses, flushed an old cock grouse which had been dusting himself at the foot of a tree close to the trail, he lit again on a branch so near that we could see his small pointed head and craned neck as he watched us. “If they’re all as tame as that ‘“--I thought with a thrill of expectancy. When we had climbed to 11,000 feet we made camp in the blue spruces and established ourselves for our Canadian zone work. "

The complete article can be downloaded and read by going to A Dusky Grouse and Her Brood in New Mexico .

According to Wikipedia Florence Merriam Bailey "... became the first woman associate member of the American Ornithologists Union in 1885, its first woman fellow in 1929, and the first woman recipient of its Brewster Medal in 1931, awarded for Birds of New Mexico.