This state's classification carries no date range for the species.
Occurs in Adirondack evergreen forests (WMUs 5C, 5F, 6F, 6J).State-endangered species; illegal to hunt statewide. Ruffed grouse hunters in these WMUs are specifically warned by DEC to avoid misidentifying and shooting spruce grouse, which has an orangish-brown tail band vs. ruffed grouse's black tail band.
Spruce grouse is state-endangered and illegal to hunt statewide, but its geography is unusually well documented for a closed-season species: DEC's own Species Status Assessment / Recovery Plan restricts the entire New York population to 15 small isolated subpopulations located exclusively within the northwestern and northcentral section of the Adirondack Park in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties, a range that has contracted from a wider historical footprint that also included Herkimer and Hamilton counties. As of the state's Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) assessment, 11 subpopulations sat on private land and 4 on state-owned Adirondack Forest Preserve land specifically in the Raquette Boreal, Saranac Lakes, and Debar Mountain state land management units, with a population estimate of fewer than 75-100 adults by 2006 (down from 175-315 in 1987). DEC's just-concluded (August 2025) roughly 1,000-bird international translocation/recovery program released additional birds, including 50 adults from Cochrane, Ontario in the final August 2025 release, and separately, birds captured in Maine released at three Adirondack sites near Tupper Lake and Paul Smiths, directly into this same northwestern Adirondack range to boost genetic diversity and numbers rather than establish new geography.
State-endangered and illegal to hunt statewide, but DEC runs the most actively documented spruce grouse program of any state tracked here: a ~1,000-bird international translocation/recovery effort in the Adirondacks that just concluded (December 2025, announced January 2026), plus a Recovery Plan calling for regular DEC occupancy/habitat surveys at three-year intervals. A clear “monitoring continues despite closure” case (contrast with Maine, which has no active spruce grouse monitoring). No discrete 2026 population count or survey report found distinct from the translocation-conclusion announcement itself; population was estimated at 175-315 breeding individuals (SUNY-ESF, monitoring since the mid-1970s) prior to the translocation effort.
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