Was out guiding this morning along Lake County Rd 2 and saw amazing nine female Spruce Grouse and 2 male Spruce Grouse for a total of 11 grouse on the road! I have not seen this many grouse in Lake County in some time! We spotted the grouse a 1.5 miles north of the Sand River. There are some yellow "No Passing" signs on Lake CR 2 and the grouse were right near the signs. I took some photos of the displaying male Spruce Grouse. One of the male was strutting around and going through the full display of flapping its wings against his sides and fanning out its tail and strutting at all the females.. it was quite a sight!
The coolest part of the morning as we were watching the grouse the logging trucks which normally speed through the grouse instead stopped and slowed down and waited for the grouse to move off the road! WOW! Other commuters even stopped to let the grouse move back to the shoulder of the road. Only one time I saw a car that was not going to stop so I moved towards the grouse and clapped at them so they flew off the road. Later on we spotted another cooperative Spruce Grouse on the Whyte Rd off the Stoney River Road. By the way the S.R. Road is in excellent shape for driving. We saw several small groups of Boreal Chickadees in groups of 5-6 birds in each flock we spotted. I think all together we spotted about 13-15 Boreal Chickadees along the S.R. Road. I posted one of the displaying male Spruce Grouse on the Showcase section of the MOU website. Mike Hendrickson Duluth, Minnesota Website: http://www.mikehendricksonbirding.com Blog: http://colderbythelakebirding.blogspot.com/ ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
