150 AMERICAN GAME BIRD SHOOTING 
dire thinks that the drumming cannot be considered a 
love note because, as he says, “It may be heard almost 
every month in the year and sometimes in the night as 
well as in the day time,”’ I am disposed to think that it 
is really in part a mating call. Other grouse perform 
certain operations usually thought to be connected with 
the mating time in autumn as well as in spring. The 
sharp-tailed grouse holds its dances in autumn, and I 
have been told that the dusky grouse hoots in the 
autumn as well as in spring, though by no means so 
vigorously. Certainly we may believe that at the 
proper season of the year it possesses an attraction for 
the female, and S. T. Hammond, in his capital book, 
“My Friend the Partridge,” gives some testimony to 
this effect. 
The nest of the ruffed grouse is built almost any- 
where, yet perhaps most often on a hillside more or 
less steep, overlooking a swamp or a piece of woods. 
I have found nests among thick cedars on a hillside, or 
perfectly open and exposed, at the foot of a cedar tree 
in a mowing lot close to a fence, and again between two 
cedars in an open piece of cedar wood, where there was 
no apparent cover whatever. The eggs are laid usually 
in April or early May, and by the middle of that month 
the clutch of twelve to seventeen is usually completed. 
The eggs are cream color or buffy, rarely spotted with 
brown at the larger end. If the female is startled from 
her nest she leaves it with a roar of wings, whose rapid 
beats often spread over the precious eggs the dry leaves 
by which the nest is likely to be surrounded. On a num- 
