South Dakota · UplandRuffed grouse

A habitat-obligate case, sourced directly from SD GFP's own ruffed grouse species page: ‘In South Dakota they only occur within the Black Hills National Forest’, the legal hunting area is statewide (folded into the combined 'Prairie Chicken and Sharp-tailed Grouse' bag listing), but the species itself is a single-forest habitat obligate found nowhere else in the state. Within the Black Hills, distribution is itself uneven: GFP states birds are ‘most abundant in the northern Black Hills where aspen are more abundant,’ since ruffed grouse depend on multiple age-classes of aspen and aspen extent has declined Hills-wide since European settlement due to fire suppression, forest management, and livestock grazing, disproportionately affecting the southern Hills. This is the same population geographically adjoining, but functionally isolated from, Nebraska's extirpated Pine Ridge-area ruffed grouse, and separate from any eastern-SD population, which does not exist for this species.