RUFFED GROUSE 143 



minutes, and begins again. They may be beard near balf a mile, by which the 

 hunters find them. They exercise their thumping in a morning and evening in 

 the spring and fall of the year. 



Edwards likewise quotes a Mr. Brooke, surgeon of Maryland, who 

 says: 



The beating of the pheasant, as we term it, is a noise chiefly made in the 

 spring by the cock birds. It may be distinctly heard a mile in calm weather. 

 They swell their breasts, like a pouting pigeon, and beat with their wings, 

 which sounds not unlike a drum. 



Edwards then goes on to quote from La Hontan (1703), who in 

 his New Voyages to North America, vol. 1, p. 67, in speaking about 

 the grouse says : 



By flapping one Wing against the other, they mean to call their Mates, and 

 the humming noise that issues thereupon, may be heard half a quarter of a 

 League off. 



" There is the argument in a nut shell ; it is a problem of long 

 standing. Bartram says that the grouse beats its body with its 

 wings; Brooke intimates that it merely fans the air; La Hontan 

 reports that it hits one wing against the other. A further com- 

 plication is advanced by Hodge (1905) when he tells us that the 

 grouse was called ' the carpenter bird ' by the Indians because they 

 believed that it beat upon a log with its wings to produce the drum- 

 ming sound. 



" Let me quote from some of the apparently more authentic descrip- 

 tions and explanations of the act. Audubon (1840) states that — 



* * * the drumming is performed in the following maimer. The male 

 bird, standing erect on a prostrate decayed trunk, raises the feathers of its 

 body, in the manner of a Turkey-cock, draws its head towards its tail, erecting 

 the feathers of the latter at the same time, and raising its ruff around the neck, 

 suffers its wings to droop, and struts about on the log. A few moments elapse, 

 when the bird draws the whole of its feathers close to its body, and stretching 

 itself out, beats its sides with its wings in the manner of the domestic Cock, 

 but more loudly, and with such rapidity of motion, after a few of the first 

 strokes, as to cause a tremor in the air not unlike the rumbling of distant 

 thunder. 



" Between 1842 and 1874 one finds numerous references to the 

 drumming of the grouse, but which of the four beliefs the respective 

 authors hold as to the method of its production seems to depend 

 upon whom they quote. William Brewster (1874), however, writ- 

 ing in the American Sportsman, describes the drumming of a grouse 

 as actually watched by him from a distance of 12 feet : 



Suddenly he paused, and sitting down on his rump and tarsi, crossways on 

 the log, with tail slightly expanded and hanging down loosely over the edge 

 behind, with body exactly perpendicular, neck stretched to its full length and 

 feathers drawn closely to the body, he stretched out his wings stiffly at nearly 

 right angles with the body. In this attitude he remained several seconds, 



