16 THE CHINA OR DENNY PHEASANT IN OREGON 
one meets the Dusky, Richardson, Franklin, and the Sooty; all timber birds of unusual 
size, the male dusky being over twenty inches in length, remarkable dimensions for a bird 
so stocky as the grouse. Several species of Ruffed grouse appear throughout the forest 
tracts, while high on the mountain sides by the rims of perpetual snow lives the beautiful 
White-tailed Ptarmigan. On the plains the Sage and Sharp-tailed still live, largely unmo- 
lested. For some of these the story of extermination may soon be written. ‘Their very 
nature is against them. One at least, the sooty, is even now having its diminishing ranks 
rapidly filled by the imported bird from the Orient. 
Pioneers of the early days tell of the strange henlike birds, met with on their journey 
across mountain and plain. “*Fool-hens,” they called them; birds without apparent 
fear of man, that stood calmly eyeing him from the path at his feet, or craning their necks 
from the lower branches of a near-by tree, often to be actually clubbed to death, for their 
flesh was good to the sturdy traveller. Remote mountains hold them yet. Fool-hens 
they were, fool-hens they are still, to their own destruction and possible extermination. 
Of these, the sooty, or “ hooter,” or “blue” grouse, deserves more than passing notice ; 
for it, with the Oregon ruffed grouse or ‘‘ drummer,” now popularly spoken of as “natives” 
in distinguishing them from the exotic bird, together with the Mountain Partridge or 
“quail,” constituted the original upland game birds of the Willamette Valley, and it 
