Subject: [Tweeters] A ruffed grouse attacks mushrooms
Date: Sep 25 22:48:14 2006
From: Rob Sandelin - floriferous at msn.com


I was up in the Skykomish river watershed keying out a mushroom when
movement made me look up. At first I did not see anything and was about to
go back to my task when a small movement caused a ruffed grouse to suddenly
appear in my view. It was quite like magic, its brown and white striping and
even the black bar on the tail blended so perfectly with the forest
background that it was quite invisible when still. The grouse eyed me but
figured after awhile that I was harmless and began moving and pecking and
then it ran up a small rise and began very vigorously pecking a Russula
brevipes mushroom. After a couple of minutes the largish mushroom was
rendered into mushroom rubble.

As I hiked the trail, every once and awhile I came across small piles of
mushroom rubble and it seemed as if Ruffed grouse have some kind of attitude
about mushrooms. After picking and discarding a half dozen wormy Boletes my
brain clicked in, aha, and sure enough when I cut open the next couple R.
brevipes I found the stems were chock full of maggots, the obvious reason of
the grouses interest. I began paying attention and as far as I could tell
only this one species of mushroom was pecked apart, although others, like
ALL the Boletes, had grubs in them. I thought about comparing grubs in the
different mushrooms but by the time I had that idea I was out of the
mushroom terrain and not willing to hike back up the hill.

Another oddity is that while I made several forays into the forest in the
area, only that one spot had mushroom rubble, so perhaps only one grouse
knows this trick, or grouse are more scarce than I think.


Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer
The Environmental Science School
http://www.nonprofitpages.com/nica/SVE.htm
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