Okay, so grouse isn’t a verb. It’s a bird. And grousing isn’t a word, but so what. This is my blog. Get over it.
If you know what a grouse is, then you might know they eat vegetation. When they’re young, they even eat insects. But they don’t eat salmon. So when I was in a meeting earlier this year and a wildlife biologist said he and his team wanted to study the effects of adding dead salmon to streams on grouse, I was stunned. There were so many things wrong with that statement, but I managed to keep my argument simple.
“We need to study the effects of throwing dead salmon in streams on bears (or some other fish-eating animal), because we already know how bears respond in a natural salmon system,” I said. “If bears don’t respond as we would expect, our management strategy may not be working for wildlife species that are known to use salmon in intact systems. Because no one has ever studied the effects of salmon on grouse, you must first study grouse in an intact salmon system, not in a management area where salmon no longer occur.”
“But everyone knows bears eat salmon,” he said. “We want to study grouse.”
“But grouse don’t eat salmon. And the question isn’t just will the bears eat the dead fish, it’s will the bears consume enough to effect growth rates, reproduction, survival, etc.”
“We want to study grouse.”
And I want to win the lottery, but it ain’t gonna happen...just like the grouse study.
TSWB
