r22 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
weighed three pounds ten ounces; but some killed by 
me in the Cascade Mountains seemed to be much larger. 
While on Lake Chelan in 1883, hunting white goats, I 
flushed a covey of grouse and here heard for the first 
time the call note of the female for her young. It 
was low, but distinct, something like that made by the 
bobwhite just before it flushes. At this time, the last 
of August, the birds were well grown. I have always 
found these birds near water. In 1881, while going to 
Indian Valley, Idaho, I rode past some, one being near 
enough to touch with a switch I had in my hand, yet 
they all walked out of the trail as quietly as domestic 
fowls would have done and then resumed their 
dusting.” 
Richardson’s grouse, the form of the dusky grouse 
found in the northern Rocky Mountains from southern 
Montana, north far into British America, resem- 
bles in habits the other forms and is quite abundant. 
About the Continental Divide, specimens are some- 
times seen which show approach to obscurus, or to the 
sooty grouse. In many places, where seldom disturbed 
by man, they are exceedingly gentle and unsuspicious, 
and a brood will walk slowly along before one, feed- 
ing and calling to one another in a particularly inno- 
cent and attractive way. 
It is stated that the birds spend their winters largely 
among the branches of the pine trees, and that they feed 
to a very great extent on the pine needles. 
Mrs. Florence Merriam Bailey says of the winter 
habits of the dusky grouse in New Mexico: 
