Why is it so difficult to find anyone willing to sell Ruffed Grouse eggs or chicks?
There are very few breeders in North America who succeed in breeding and rearing Ruffed Grouse for more than just a few years. One of the reasons is that you need to hold back enough of your own young birds of each sex each year to replace losses of your breeders, which can be expected to be as high as 20% in a bad year, even worse in the event a wild bird or rodent introduces a virus. For that reason all the grouse breeders I know like to raise all their own young and sex them before deciding how many they can part with for that year. Another big factor in not shipping eggs is that many of us feel it would be unfair to our customers. The fertility of Ruffed Grouse eggs in captivity is often poor, possibly because the female does not have free choice of which male she wished to mate with, like she would in a wild situation, where she approaches the drumming log of the male she selects. Another even more important reason may be that in an aviary situation the male often gets overly aggr
