Ruffed Grouse song and call

A Ruffed Grouse sounds like a distant engine trying to start. The male's spring display is not a song but a drumming: he stands on a fallen log, braces his tail and beats his wings against the air, and the thumps begin slowly, thump, thump, thump, then speed up until they blur into a fast, steady whir. The whole thing lasts a few seconds, is pitched so low you feel it in your chest, and carries a quarter mile or more through dense woods. Hens give soft, hen-like clucks.

The drumming: a sound made with wings

Wikipedia writes the rhythm as thump, thump, thump, thump-thump-thump-thump: single slow beats that accelerate into a roll. The Pennsylvania Game Commission describes the individual thudding beats merging into a fast, steady whir. The pitch is so low that many people feel the first beats before they hear them, and a first-time listener often looks for a tractor or a generator.

The mechanism surprises people. The grouse is not hitting the log. Wikipedia explains that he beats his wings against the air to create a vacuum, and the log, stone or mound he stands on is only a stage. The Pennsylvania Game Commission adds that the same displaying male also hisses and drags his wingtips along the ground when a hen is near.

Audubon describes the visual side: on his perch the male fans his tail, raises his crest and the black neck ruff that gives the bird its name, and struts from side to side.

The other sounds: clucks, hisses and a burst of wings

Away from the log, grouse are mostly quiet. Audubon notes the female's soft, hen-like clucks. The sound most hikers actually know is the flush: an explosion of whirring wings from the leaf litter a few feet away. In winter, Wikipedia notes, a grouse may burst straight out of the snow it has burrowed into.

When and where you hear it

Drumming peaks in spring. The Pennsylvania Game Commission gives March and April as the mating season, and Missouri's guide says males display at dawn and dusk in April, usually on a fallen log. A male returns to the same log, so if you hear drumming one morning you can come back the next.

The habitat is young forest. Audubon lists deciduous and mixed woods with clearings and dense undergrowth; the Pennsylvania Game Commission specifies brushy stands less than 20 years old; Wikipedia adds that the best woods are rich in aspen. Grouse eat buds, catkins, leaves, berries and seeds, with aspen, birch and cherry buds carrying them through northern winters. Chicks eat insects. On cold nights a grouse will fly straight into a soft snowbank and spend the night in a snow roost under the surface.

The range runs from Alaska across Canada and down the Appalachians to Georgia, and Audubon puts the population around 18 million. Numbers rise and fall on a roughly ten-year cycle that Wikipedia says still puzzles scientists. Pennsylvania, which adopted the Ruffed Grouse as its state bird in 1931, reports steady declines since the 1980s and sharp ones since the early 2000s, with West Nile virus now identified as a major cause. In Missouri the bird is rare and local, with restoration under way in the eastern Ozarks. In Pennsylvania, Minnesota and northern New England the drum is a spring Warble card; hold the phone still and let the whole roll play out.

Why the drum is so low

Two things make grouse drumming easy to miss. It is very low in pitch, so the first slow beats register as a vibration and the sound passes through trees that would swallow a whistle. And it starts slowly, about one thump a second, and only becomes recognizable once it accelerates. Give any suspicious engine noise in April woods five seconds before you decide what it is.

What it looks like

A chicken-like bird about the size of a crow, 16 to 19 inches long and about a pound and a half, with a short crest, a black ruff on the neck and a long, fan-shaped tail with a wide dark band near the tip. It comes in two color morphs, gray and reddish brown, most obvious in the tail. The barred, streaked plumage makes a sitting grouse almost invisible on the forest floor. In a hen the dark tail band is usually broken in the center; in a male it runs unbroken. Wikipedia notes that partridge, the northern nickname, properly belongs to unrelated birds.

The nest is a leaf-lined depression at the base of a tree or under a log, with 9 to 12 eggs, incubated 23 to 25 days by the hen alone.

Birds that sound similar

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  Downy Woodpecker

  A woodpecker's drum is a fast, even roll on wood, higher and sharper, and it does not speed up. Grouse drumming is much lower, starts slowly and accelerates into a whir.

• 
  Wild Turkey

  A strutting tom turkey also drums, a low hum from his chest, but you hear it only within a few dozen yards and it comes with a gobble. Grouse drumming carries a quarter mile and is never followed by a voice.

Where the Ruffed Grouse card lives

In Warble the same bird can be an easy card in one state and a prized one in another, because each album ranks its birds by how often people really report them there. The Ruffed Grouse appears in 1 state albums:

Questions people ask

Written by the Warble team from the sources above. Updated September 30, 2026.