Washington · UplandDusky grouse

Washington carries the legacy 'blue grouse' joint-reporting issue, as Oregon does: dusky and sooty grouse were split from the single 'blue grouse' species in 2006 (a reversion to their early-1900s classification, per WDFW's own publication on the split), but WDFW's harvest reporting still lumps all forest grouse, dusky, sooty, ruffed, and spruce, into one combined 'Forest Grouse' county-level statistic (27,768 birds statewide in 2025), and the current season regulates dusky and sooty together under a shared 3/day, 9-possession sub-limit within the larger 4/day forest-grouse cap. WDFW's own hunting page nonetheless gives a clean, geography-first species split independent of the harvest data: dusky grouse occupies the Cascades' east slope, north-central and northeastern Washington, and the Blue Mountains, while sooty grouse occupies the Olympics and western Cascade slope. Because WDFW's harvest reporting cannot itself speciate dusky from sooty, the geographic split above rests on that description, corroborated by WDFW's forest-grouse hunting page, with combined 'Forest Grouse' county totals for the matching eastern counties (Okanogan 4,140, Stevens 1,434, Ferry 1,326, Chelan 1,556, Kittitas 1,374, Asotin/Columbia/Garfield in the Blue Mountains) used only as a general density proxy for that eastern range.