"Let's say you have an aspen stand that was logged off," he continued. "It's really not good grouse habitat for about eight to 10 years. Then all of a sudden it gets really good from about 10 years old until it's about 20 years old. Then it opens up naturally and it's not as good from 20 years to 40 years old. After that long a span you might get some brush coming up and it gets better, but there's a period when this habitat just isn't as good for grouse. Now if you cut it again when it's 20 years old, then you start the cycle again."

Horton's recommendation?

"The best way to maintain quality habitat on a piece of property is to clearcut a patch knowing that in 10 years it's going to be good habitat. As soon as that section gets good, you clearcut another patch, so that when that first one is going out, that second one is coming in. So every 10 years you should be cutting some of your property in order to always keep something on your land as prime habitat."

It's a bit tougher on public hunting land where there is little control over how the timber is managed. Federal management of late has leaned toward shying away from clearcutting to a more selective cutting of aspen and thinning programs. In our national forests, it's all about conifer restoration in aspen stands. The harvesters take all but a few of the aspen and then plant all conifers. The stands are then converted to pine forest. It isn't good for grouse.

The state forests are better options where some clearcutting continues.

"On public lands, it's a fight we fight daily where we're telling the managers we need to create a balance of young and old growth," said Horton. "Out East, it's all old growth, so we're always lobbying for whatever we can get. Even a 20-acre clearcut in that region is a big deal. There are thousands of acres of overmature hardwoods, and we just want a little piece to provide some habitat for the grouse. If you create habitat, it will draw these birds in from all over."

This was noticeable last year where I hunt in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. On my first trip there in early October the spots we have had good luck in during previous year's hunts were not producing like they had in the past. On the second trip two weeks later we checked out the region where the wind had blown down huge swaths of trees, thus creating a natural clearcut.

The hunting was tough, but the grouse were plentiful. These birds would flush when the dog nosed them, and they would fly up onto the big horizontal trunk of a downed tree and glance back for a split second before flying off. We saw a lot of birds in this heavy cover, but even the dogs had trouble maneuvering through the heavier patches.

Hunting in a lot of spots in the northwoods of Minnesota in 2004 allowed a number of hunters to save on shotshells. There just weren't many birds there.

"The areas of the state where hunters had a tough time last year were in the northern tier, especially the northeast," said Horton. "Every time I talked to one of my connections up in the far northeast zone he would tell me that he had been out and wasn't seeing any birds, and that other hunters he talked with hadn't been seeing any birds either. The Koochiching County area also provided reports of tough hunting, along with northern Beltrami and St. Louis counties. The northern sections of those counties had bigger drops in numbers than elsewhere in the state.

"There are multiple reasons for this," continued Horton. "There wasn't a lot of snow there that winter and that was harsh for the birds without that snow, and when the predators come down from Canada and the grouse don't have good cover, the predators only come down far enough to find what they need to survive."