In 2016, PGC foresters and the PGC’s grouse biologist Lisa Williams began working with RGS & AWS to develop a grouse habitat plan for the State Game Lands (SGLs) that run along the Kittatinny Ridge from Harrisburg to the Delaware River. From these discussions came a plan to increase young forest cover at a landscape scale over the next 10-15 years.The PGC’s SE Region Kittatinny Ridge grouse plan has 6 goals. The first goal is to regenerate a mosaic of young forest stands that shift across the landscape over time.
3,300 acres of young forest habitat have been established on the Kittatinny Ridge and 3,700 acres have received preparation cuttings. A combination of commercial and non-commercial projects was utilized to improve these acres.
The second goal is to provide grouse with all necessary habitat types within one mile, including good brooding habitat and patches of older forest to serve as nesting and feeding habitat, especially for buds during the winter. No-cut islands and travel corridors within larger tree cutting projects provide this type of habitat for grouse in areas with high amounts of early-successional forest.
The third goal is to establish “permanent young forest areas” in select areas where terrain and habitat type limits the size of commercially-viable forest management projects, either with forestry mowing equipment or prescribed fire, which is more cost-effective.
The fourth goal is to establish and improve conifer cover on the game lands to improve winter thermal cover for grouse. Though the Kittatinny Ridge is dominated by hardwoods, remnant pines are scattered along the ridgetops.
The fifth goal is improving road access to ‘stranded’ PGC parcels so that logging crews and equipment can conduct more cost-effective forest management. The Charles Bechtel Chapter and the National Wild Turkey Federation have helped fund many road-improvement projects. Investing in road improvements is a far cry from traditional habitat projects, but the Charles Bechtel Chapter saw how roads make possible the forest management that creates young forest habitat at greater scale and at cheaper per-acre cost.
The final goal is to encourage neighboring forest landowners to conduct forest habitat projects on their properties that will expand the young forest habitat mosaic. For example, the PGC is working on habitat projects with Weiser State Forest. In addition, RGS & AWS and the PGC will be reaching out to private landowner cooperators in the PGC’s Hunter Access Program whose forestland is near the SGLs and then connecting interested landowners with a consulting forester who can help them manage their forestland. This targeted outreach will expand the habitat mosaic unto private lands.Finally, RGS & AWS will be helping to fund grouse monitoring conducted by Jeff Larkin, a research professor with the Indiana University of PA and American Bird Conservancy’s Eastern Forest Bird Habitat Coordinator. Using autonomous recording units (‘ARUs’), Larkin and a graduate student will be assessing forest type, elevation, and other factors that influence grouse occupancy in young forests along Kittatinny Ridge and other areas in PA. The team plans to deploy 120 ARUs within 8-15 year-old forests in southwestern, southeastern, and northcentral Pennsylvania. Each ARU will be programmed to record 1.5 hours each morning from mid-April through late May.
Once ARUs are recovered from the field, Larkin’s collaborators at University of Pittsburg will use super computers to process the recordings using a machine learned classifier that is extremely effective at detecting grouse drumming. The use of ARU’s and the machine learned classifier is a game changer for our ability to rigorously monitor drumming grouse at large number of young forest patches across large spatial extents annually.RGS & AWS thanks the PGC, Jeff Larkin, and other partners who are helping restore habitat at landscape scale along the Kittatinny Ridge and elsewhere.This project description is based on a more detailed version written by Randy Baumann, retired SE Region Forester with the Pennsylvania Game Commission. A longer version of this project description was published in the Summer 2022 issue of Covers.
