Man's Relation to the Grouse 257 



vania. The number of Hcenses varied from less than three hundred 

 thousand to nearly seven hundred thousand in each state in different 

 years. Reports in New York are ordinarily received from only about 

 three-fifths of licensees and are taken by local clerks when a new 

 year's license is issued, which is anywhere from one to ten or more 

 months after the game was taken. From 1923 to 1925, specific hunt- 

 ing licenses were issued. From 1926 to 1939 the licenses covered 

 hunting, fishing, and trapping and no separate hunting license was 

 issued. In Pennsylvania, the figures were based on field estimates 

 from 1915 through 1936, and on hunters' game-kill reports from 1937 

 through 1943, received from almost all hunters. Landowners were 

 not required to be licensed to hunt on their own lands, nor were 

 licenses required of women. Thus the actual total take is very much 

 higher than that reported, probably about double. But the trends 

 should be accurately reflected in these statistics. 



It has been thought by some "old timers" that the peaks of grouse 

 abundance have gradually lessened over each previous height. This 

 is not borne out by a comparison of the New York kill between 1923 

 and 1926 with those of 1935 to 1940. The author was about convinced 

 of this contention in 1936 when the tabulation of the 1934 hunter 

 reports was completed. It is indicated in the Pennsylvania records. 



From all evidence the grouse populations had been generally as 

 high in New York from 1932 to 1934 as in 1935 to 1938. This is not 

 reflected in the kill records. Apparently this is a product of social 

 factors: the change in number of hunters; the unwillingness of many 

 hunters to shoot grouse for a few years after the closed seasons of 

 1928-29 and the extermination scare that accompanied the major 

 decline of that period; the shift of bird hunters to the pheasant, par- 

 ticularly of the younger men who never knew grouse hunting, etc. 

 Apparently these factors are gradually overcome as the good grouse 

 years continue, and thus produce a definite lag in the giouse kill 

 trend (as indicated by state records during the years of grouse 

 increase) behind the actual population trend. 



When hunting is normal, and grouse are plentiful, hunting nowa- 

 days in the Northeast (from Virginia northward) results in a legal 

 bag of about eight hundred thousand birds. In the United States, all 

 grouse were estimated to have contributed 3,864,000 pounds of 

 meat in 1942 (S.A.F. Comm. Report, 1944). 



Further efforts at evaluating the importance of hunting in grouse 



