Here’s How Ruffed Grouse Make That Wild Drumming Sound—and How to Hear it for Yourself

In the avian symphony of spring, the Ruffed Grouse plays the timpani. At dawn he takes the stage on a log, stump, or boulder. Bracing himself with his tail, he begins his deep, thunderous drumroll: Whump…Whump…Whump. Whump. Whumpwhumpwhumpwhummmmmpumpum.

He will repeat this performance every few minutes, following some inner conductor’s clues. Between shows, he might raise his neck feathers into his namesake ruff and fan out his tail in a crisp semicircle. To females his display says, “This could be yours.” To other males: “Scram.” 

It’s an uncharacteristically striking behavior for one of the more secretive inhabitants of northern forests. These mottled-brown game birds are rarely vocal, only issuing the occasional hiss or squeal, though the whoosh of their powerful wingbeats sometimes blows their cover. “When you get close to them and they flush, there’s that little spark that scares you for a moment,” says Clayton Delancey, an avian ecologist at the University of Georgia. 

With drumming, however, raising a ruckus is the point. Grouse drum all year—Delancey says he’s heard it on Christmas Day—but it’s most frequent in the spring, when males seek to woo a mate. They produce the sound not by clapping their wings together but by beating them so fiercely that they create a vacuum, and air rushing in to fill it generates a booming shock wave. In the 10 seconds or so that each drumroll lasts, a grouse will beat his wings up to 50 times. Find yourself near a drumming male and you may feel the low-frequency sound as much as hear it. “It’s almost like you’re hearing your heartbeat in the back of your head,” says Charlotte Roy, a grouse research scientist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. 

For scientists, the grouse’s thumping provides a cheap way to estimate the population, Roy says. In some states, biologists hit the same spots each spring to count the birds they hear over a given period. While numbers are holding strong in some areas, the surveys paint a concerning overall outlook for the species, with declines of at least 50 percent over the past 25 years across the eastern United States. Deaths from West Nile virus account for some of those losses, but the biggest factor is a shortage of the young, dense habitat that follows disturbances like clear-cutting and fire. 

It falls to professional biologists to conduct drumming surveys, but the public can contribute to grouse studies in other ways. Roy invites community scientists to report grouse they see in Minnesota’s summer woods—a valuable way to gauge how many young birds survive to adulthood. In Georgia, Delancey gathers feather and fecal samples from grouse hunters and other volunteers, part of a genetic study to determine if populations are becoming isolated on mountaintops. And he always welcomes reports from birders about where they’ve heard grouse drumming, which can identify new survey sites.

If those ongoing studies raise alarms over grouse numbers, they’ll also provide wildlife officials guidance on how to respond. In Georgia, for instance, game managers could consider translocating birds to diversify gene pools in the high country. For now, though, despite the growing challenges these furtive forest-dwellers face, the beat goes on. 

This story originally ran in the Spring 2026 issue as “Their Own Drum.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.