Monitoring of the wood grouse in Chasseral Park will evolve. It has become difficult to analyze this little hen of the woods in recent years. The cause is climate change. The snow, so useful for looking for clues left by the species, is no longer present on a regular basis. Diligent monitoring is therefore no longer possible. Anatole Gerber, the species and habitat project manager at Parc Chasseral, explains that: “measures have been taken to promote the habitat of the grouse for more than 20 years”. But the idea of monitoring was also to know if these measures were effective. “For that, we need to know the number of grouse and its evolution,” he explains. Except that today, the methods used are no longer enough. The manager of Chasseral Park specifies that: “We carried out a first phase of survey from 2013 to 2015, then a second phase of survey on the same sites between 2015 and 2019, to compare the two periods. But we realized that the snowfall was too variable to have a standardization to be able to compare the readings.”
The wood grouse is more present in the Neuchâtel part of the Chasseral Park
Another observation: the grouse is more common in the Neuchâtel part of the Park, where garden forests are widespread. A method of forest management which favors grouse habitats, compared to the large areas of exploitation which constitute the norm on the Bernese side.
The methodology favored between 2013 and 2019 consisting of detecting the traces of the hazel grouse in the snow will therefore no longer be continued, as it is too random. Instead, Anatole Gerber talks about an acoustic recorder, trying to capture the song of the hazel grouse. A technique that the canton of Neuchâtel already uses in some places for species monitoring./tbu
Swiss
