THE PRAIRIE CHICKEN, OR SHARPTAILED GROUSE. 409 
The young are hatched in about twenty days (!) and are covered 
with yellow down. From the first, like all their kind, they are 
strong and able to help themselves. By about the tenth day, 
though still weighing under two ounces, their wings are large and 
strong, so that when tke startled mother rises with a ‘whirr” there 
are a dozen little ‘‘ whirrs,” and away she flies followed seemingly 
by a flock of sparrows, but they are only her young, still clothed in 
the yellow down all except the wings which shew the long strong 
quills of flight. When half grown they are readily mistaken for 
young turkeys. At about two months they are full grown but still 
with the mother. At this time the family generally numbers from 
four to six or eight individuals, but the average number of eggs is 
about twelve, so we can imagine the numbers that fall victims annually 
to their naturai enemies. It is noticeable that all summer I never 
found grain in their crops, so that they cannot be injurious to stand- 
ing grain; indeed, I have never seen them in it. But now that the 
young are grown, they find their way to the stacks so regularly and 
pertinaciously that they form a considerable item in the autumn 
dietary of the farmer, while they can only damage the grain that is 
exposed on the very top. They continue on the plains and about the 
farms until the first fall of snow, which immediately sets them 
en masse to the timber. In summer they rarely perch on trees (even at 
night, for they sleep squatting in the grass), but now they make them 
their favorite stations, and live largely on the browse there gathered. 
This is the time for the sportsman, for they are fat and well flavored. 
Any small clump of birch or willow is sure to contain some dozens 
every morning. As the winter advances, they cease to come on the 
plains, their haunts then being sparsely timbered country, especially 
if sandy and well supplied with rose bushes. They now act more 
like a properly adapted tree-liver than a ground-dwelling “ Tetrao,” 
for they fly from one tree to another, and perch and walk about 
the branches with perfect ease, seeming to spend much more time 
there than on the ground. When in a tree they are not at all 
possessed of that feeling of security from all hunters, which makes 
the “ Ruffed Grouse” so easy a prey to pot-hunters, when so situated 
the ‘“Pintail” on the contrary is very shy and disposed to fly at 
150 yards. 
Like most wild animals, they have a foreknowledge of storms, and 
when some firewood hunter returning from the woods reports that 
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