Types of Grouse in California: Meet the Sooty Grouse and Greater Sage-Grouse
September 19, 2026
Two very different types of grouse in California call the state home, and finding either one usually means leaving the coastal cities behind for deep forest or open sagebrush country. The Sooty Grouse hides in the shadows of Sierra Nevada conifers, while the Greater Sage-Grouse struts across high desert flats near the Nevada border. Both birds are large, both stay hidden for most of the year, and both face very different futures shaped by land management and a changing climate.
This guide covers where each species lives in California, how to tell them apart, and why one is thriving while the other is a candidate for state protection. Birders willing to hike into the backcountry or drive out to the Eastern Sierra in early spring have a real shot at witnessing one of North America’s most dramatic courtship displays firsthand.
Sooty Grouse
The Sooty Grouse (Dendragapus fuliginosus) is a large, dark-bodied grouse that makes its home in western coastal forests and in mountain forest habitat within California’s Sierra Nevada. Ornithologists only recently separated it from a close relative — the Sooty Grouse and Dusky Grouse were formerly lumped together as one species called the Blue Grouse. According to the National Audubon Society, the bird remains slow-moving and easy to approach compared with most game birds.
It is a large game bird associated with the wet mountain forests along the Pacific Coast, according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds guide. Males wear steely gray-blue plumage that hides bright orange eye combs and yellow-orange neck air sacs, both revealed only during courtship. Females wear a mottled camouflage pattern of brown, buff, and white that all but disappears against the forest floor, a trait that keeps nests safe from most predators.
That steely blue-gray plumage puts the male Sooty Grouse in the same visual family as several other blue-toned birds found across California, though its coloring serves camouflage far more than display. Sooty Grouse favor the edges of coniferous and mixed forests in mountainous terrain, ranging from lower elevations up to the alpine and subalpine tree line, and do best in mature forests with a mix of plant and tree species. Within California, the species reaches south through the Sierra Nevada and into parts of western Nevada, with especially good numbers turning up in the mountains of Trinity, Humboldt, Shasta, Siskiyou, Modoc, and Lassen counties.
Their diet includes needles, buds, berries, and insects, often gathered from choke cherries, blackberries, and low-hanging manzanita bushes along mountain streams and dirt roads. The same old-growth conifer stands that shelter these birds also provide roosting cover for several bat species native to California, particularly where standing dead timber is common.
Males become most noticeable each spring, delivering a series of deep hoots from a perch that can be more than 100 feet up in a dense evergreen tree. Unlike the closely related Dusky Grouse of the Rockies, Sooty Grouse display from these elevated perches, and their deep, rhythmic hooting carries far but is hard to pinpoint on the ground. Come autumn, many birds abandon the relatively open breeding areas for denser coniferous cover, making them even harder to find outside spring.
Pro Tip: Listen at dawn in Sierra Nevada conifer forests during April and May, when male Sooty Grouse hoot most often. The same high-elevation meadows frequently host hummingbirds returning to Northern California for the season, making early spring a strong window for a mixed birding trip.
The IUCN classifies the Sooty Grouse as a species of Least Concern, though populations can climb temporarily after clear-cutting before declining as the regrowth matures, and the species fares poorly in even-aged tree farms compared with old-growth stands. Sooty Grouse share this rugged high country with other upland species, including the mountain quail found throughout California’s forests and the band-tailed pigeons and native doves that nest across the state, both of which forage in the same berry-rich understory.
Greater Sage-Grouse
The Greater Sage-Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) is the largest native grouse species in North America. Among fowl-like birds, only the wild turkey grows bigger, and males run nearly twice the size of females and show far more color. It could not look or behave more differently from its forest-dwelling cousin.
In California, it lives year-round in the northeastern corner of the state, from the Oregon border down the east side of the Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada to northern Inyo County, with Lassen and Mono counties holding the steadiest populations. A second, genetically distinct group — the bi-state population — occupies ground east of the Sierra Nevada, spanning Alpine, Mono, and Inyo counties on the California side of the border.
The birds cluster where sagebrush, perennial grassland or wet meadow, and water all come together, often alongside bitterbrush and alkali desert scrub. That dry, shrub-dominated terrain overlaps with habitat used by many lizard species native to California’s high desert, as well as mule deer that move through the same sagebrush corridors described in guides to deer species found in California. The wet meadows sage-grouse depend on also draw many of the water birds found throughout California during wetter months.
Males converge from several square miles onto traditional strutting grounds each late winter and early spring, using bare patches of ground ringed by moderately dense sagebrush. From March through May, dozens of males gather at sunrise to perform, inflating and deflating twin bright yellow throat sacs into a sound often likened to popping champagne corks. Nests amount to little more than a shallow scrape lined with a thin layer of plant material, usually tucked beneath a sagebrush plant. Despite a bulky build, the birds fly fast and far — recorded speeds reach 50 mph, with single flights covering up to six miles.
The table below lays out how these two types of grouse in California compare across range, habitat, and conservation standing.
| Trait | Sooty Grouse | Greater Sage-Grouse |
|---|---|---|
| Size | Medium-large forest grouse | Largest native grouse in North America |
| California Range | Sierra Nevada and coastal mountain forests | Northeastern California and the Sierra Nevada bi-state region |
| Habitat | Coniferous and mixed forest edges | Sagebrush flats, wet meadows, desert scrub |
| Signature Behavior | Deep hooting from tree perches | Group lekking with popping air-sac displays |
| Conservation Status | Least Concern (IUCN) | CESA candidate species; hunting closed |
Conservation status is where the two species diverge most sharply. In June 2023, the California Fish and Game Commission voted to advance the Greater Sage-Grouse as a candidate for listing as threatened or endangered under the California Endangered Species Act. On the hunting side, the state’s hunting season has stayed closed since the Commission set quotas at zero across all sage grouse zones back in 2017, and that closure carried through the 2025 season. At the federal level, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opted not to list the bi-state population under the federal Endangered Species Act, a decision that groups such as the Audubon California chapter have continued to scrutinize.
The birds face a long list of pressures, including habitat loss, fragmentation, land development, mining, invasive species, wildfire, climate change, competition from domestic and feral livestock, and off-road vehicle use:
- Habitat loss and fragmentation from land development and mining
- Wildfire and the spread of invasive plant species
- Long-term shifts in sagebrush ecosystems tied to climate change
- Competition for forage with domestic and feral livestock
- Disturbance from off-road vehicle traffic
Many of the state’s sub-populations now sit below the minimum numbers needed for long-term stability, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Only the Bodie Hills group within the bi-state area has shown real stability in recent years, while most other sub-populations remain fragile.
There is some encouraging data behind the decline. A 2024 U.S. Geological Survey analysis found that while bi-state populations kept declining overall, cooperative conservation work lifted abundance by roughly 4.4 percent a year since 2012 — enough to leave numbers about 37 percent higher than they would have been without any intervention, according to the USGS report on the Bi-State Distinct Population Segment.
Important Note: Greater Sage-Grouse hunting remains closed statewide as of the 2025 season. Anyone planning an upland bird trip should check the California Department of Fish and Wildlife page for current regulations before heading out.
Taken together, California’s two types of grouse show just how differently one state’s mountains and deserts can shape a bird’s fortunes. The Sooty Grouse still hoots from Sierra treetops each spring with little cause for alarm, while the Greater Sage-Grouse’s future now depends on sagebrush restoration, lek monitoring, and the outcome of ongoing listing decisions. Anyone hoping to see either bird should plan around late winter through spring, when both species are most active and most likely to be heard, if not seen.