44 The Ruffed Grouse 



larly and arose from similar physiological causes. This dispersal of 

 the family groups is called the fall shuffle. 



When a bird is driven from its family group it seeks its lebensraum 

 (living room) elsewhere. However, it may soon encounter another 

 grouse or brood of grouse, and is then more than ever likely to be 

 driven out again. With each failure to find a fall territory it can de- 

 fend, the bird becomes more nervous, and more desperate as a re- 

 sult of its growing inferiority complex. It is alone in a strange and 

 unfriendly world for the first time. Although it was brought up in 

 an area of only forty or fifty acres and had never traveled over a half 

 mile before, it may now find itself many miles from its summer home. 

 Under such circumstances, a grouse often will fly far out of its normal 

 coverts and many times come to a sudden end by flying into obstacles 

 such as buildings.^ This phenomenon has been termed crazy flight. 

 Various explanations have been given for these actions, such as a 

 nervousness brought on by the leaves falling, or irritation caused by 

 internal parasites. While the falling of the leaves may well add to 

 the nervousness of the birds, the crazy flight is merely an aberration 

 of the normal fall shuffle— a social phenomenon that likely occurs 

 with most sedentary species of birds and is well known in the bob- 

 white quail. 



A-Hunting We Must Go. If we may assume that the young grouse 

 in our biography did not reside on a survey area of some ruffed 

 grouse study, it is quite probable that they have never encountered 

 that most formidable of adversaries, man, up to this time— mid- 

 October. Then comes a day, according to the calendar and the laws 

 of the state, when the status of the grouse changes from a protected 

 bird to fair game: the hunters, who have been chafing in their anxiety 

 for weeks, swarm over fields and woods as the hand of the clock 

 passes the fateful point. 



Since our grouse famfly has now dispersed into four different 

 coverts, with only two of them remaining together, we find it con- 

 venient to continue the life story through the experiences of only 



^ These escapades often result in human interest stories; for example, the March 

 27, 1942, issue of The Boston Herald headlined: "Shipyard Worker Keeps Bird Fly- 

 ing," then recounted: "The supper which William Catterall, Fall River shipyard 

 worker, was enjoying . . . last night, was interrupted when a grouse entered the 

 kitchen amid a shower of broken glass. Catterall, unperturbed, patched the bird's 

 cuts . . . and released it. . . ." 



