OCCURRENCE 557 



species reached such a low level in the vicinity of Quebec that the provincial governor issued 

 a decree prohibiting its being shot"'. Later Nuttall'"', although believing that the birds had 

 migrated, made this interesting observation with reference to November 1831 "in the present 

 season, in travelling nearly to the extremity of New Hampshire, not a single bird of the spe- 

 cies was now to be seen," although he states they had been "so unusually abundant, previously 

 to that period, as to sell in the market of Boston as low as 121/4 cents apiece." Another in- 

 stance is the statement of an old market hunter that a companion, catering to the Saratoga 

 Hotel (Saratoga Springs, J\. Y.), had extreme difficulty in finding birds shortly after the 

 Civil War. 



More data are available for the years after about 1880, mainly in the form of observations 

 published in various sporting periodicals and in the reports of State Game Commissions. In 

 the more settled sections of the East many such accounts actually referred to the elimination 

 of grouse as a result of man's occupation of the land. Most of these records, however, apply 

 to localities where no serious impairment of the range had taken place. Several compilations 

 of this material have been made. 



Based on statements in the literature augmented by j)crs()i)al correspondence and inter- 

 views, Leopold"" plotted a curve of relative abundance from lo80-1929 for Vi'isconsin, al- 

 though prior to 1892 it is rather indefinite. The same author also summarized similar data 

 for the north-central states from ]898-1929~'. Michigan records were summed up briefly by 

 Tubbs"" while Clarke'' gathered information for Ontario covering 1873-19.S5 and for other 

 parts of Canada for various periods between 1893 and 193.5. For iSew York and the north- 

 eastern region in general Bump™ presented a preliminary analysis of the trend of grouse 

 abundance covering 1880-1935, though here again the records for the early years are scanty. 



In considering these compilations one must bear in mind that they represent merely esti- 

 mates of the average grouse abundance over the region involved from year to year on the 

 basis of the material available to the authors. Conflicting reports for different localities in a 

 region in the same year have been frequent. Thus if additional observers had reported the 

 average might have been shifted somewhat. Furthermore the available source material is 

 largely expressed in broad terms so that the comparative degree of change between abun- 

 dance and scarcity cannot be interpreted precisely. As Leopold"' comments regarding his 

 graph. "The vertical ordinate has no numerical validity, the curve simply connecting the 

 most frequent of five grades of abundance reported as obtaining during each year." 



Nevertheless these records have clearly indicated an alternation of abundance and scarcity, 

 for the period covered, with respect to the general status of the grouse populations of the 

 regions involved. Presumably the same holds true throughout the present range of the species 

 except, perhaps, in environment so marginal that the birds never become numerous. Further- 

 more, since this behavior has been observed among populations situated in remote localities 

 where the environment is still in a primitive condition (Gross'' and others), it may be as- 

 sumed that it has been a characteristic of the species from time immemorial. On the other 

 hand Leopold has suggested that the optimimi portion of the original range of the species 

 lay in the agricultural belt and that fluctuations were less prominent there"'. Unfortunately it 

 is impossible now to test this hypothesis. ' 



More recently several studies, each extending over a period of vears on the same area, have 

 been conducted. The first of these was the record kept by Criddle"" from 1895 to 1929 at 

 Aweme, Manitoba. Similarly King'"' reported the trend of fall abundance at Cloquet, Minne- 

 sota, from 1931 to 1933. In Michigan, Fisher^'" conducted annual censuses on five areas, the 



