490 



NA TURA L HISTOU Y. 





adapted to its surroundings. " With admirable instinct she will avoid a 

 place that offers such chances of concealment as to invite curious search ; 

 her willow-bush is the duplicate of a thousand others at hand; her tuft of 

 grass on the prairie is the counterpart of a million others around ; her 

 nest will be found by accident oftener than by design. And when, stoop- 

 ing over a warm nest on the prairie, whence she has just fluttered in 

 dismay? we note how exposed it seems now that it is found, we wonder 

 how the dozen blades of grass that overarch the eggs, or the rank weed 

 that shadows them, could have hidden the home so effectually that we 

 nearly trod upon the bird before we saw her." The dingy, yellow-mottled, 

 dowiry young run as soon as hatched. They rapidly grow, and with 

 winter have attained the size and plumage of the adult. 



The name prairie-chicken is frequently given to the species just men- 

 tioned ; by rights it belongs to another form shown in our cut, and which 



figures in books and 

 nowhere else as pin- 

 nated grouse. It 

 has the same vocal 

 sacs on the sides 

 of the neck, but is 

 able to conceal them 

 by means of small 

 bunches of feathers 

 arising just above 

 them from the sides 

 of the neck. In 

 years gone by this 

 bird extended clear 

 to the Atlantic; but 

 now, with the excep- 

 tion of a small colony on Martha's Vineyard and possibly on Long Island, 

 they are confined to the west, but stopping ere it reaches Colorado or 

 Wyoming. The amount of slaughter to which it has been subjected is 

 perfectly enormous. It has been hunted by sportsmen, and by others, 

 without the slightest particle of the instinct of the sportsman. It has 

 been netted and trapped ; and in the winter the frozen bodies have been 

 shipped east by the car-load. Is it any wonder that it is rapidly disap- 

 pearing ? Unless more stringent laws are passed and, more essential, unless 

 public sentiment enforces these laws, the prairie-chickens will soon be 

 exterminated in the United States. 



Another of the grouse is the sage-cock, or cock of the plains, whose 



Fig. 413. 



•Prairie-chicken (Cupidonia cupido). 



