North American Grouse. 649 



The color of the cock is dark brown or gray interspersed with 

 black, each feather having three cross-bars of a still darker gray. 

 On its "breast is a large angular or crescent patch of black\ the 

 point of the angle coming up the neck. Its throat is black directly 

 under the bill, and is mottled further down by little white feathers, 

 and still larger white feathers patch its breast.* Its legs are 

 feathered, but its toes are bare, as are all of this genus. The hen 

 is quieter in color, mottled all over in red and brown. It has the 

 habit of ks race of making a drumming noise with its wings, but 

 seems to do it' by repeated blows on its own body, and sometimes 

 makes this noise when in the air. Some authors note another bird, 

 called Franklin grouse, which is a variety of this one. The tail 

 feathers being carried out wide to the ends, and the upper and under 

 tail coverts being tipped with white. These variations, when unac- 

 companied by any difference of structure or habits, seem to be of no 

 importance to the ordinary reader or to the sportsman. 



The spruce grouse makes its nest on the ground, generally shel- 

 tered by some low evergreen bush, and lays fifteen to twenty buff 

 or fawn-colored eggs, spotted with brown. Often, when one is fish- 

 ing from a canoe in some of the narrow brooks in Maine or Canada, 

 a brood of these birds will be seen threading their way among the 

 bushes or, if the weather is hot, coming to the water to drink, so 

 gentle in their remoteness from man that they scarcely notice the 

 passing boat. At times like these, they make use of a little piping 

 cluck that is most gentle and familiar, by which the old bird calls the 

 young ones of the flock to her whenever she finds any attractive 

 food in the rotten wood or among the fallen mast. Again, they may 

 be seen among the upper branches of the tallest spruce, picking the 

 winter buds, and at their great elevation looking as small as snow- 

 birds. When pursued, they take quickly to the trees, and seem to 



lecture in their elevation, and are then easily shot. In the coldest 

 winter, when the caribou hunter is making his camp in the evening 

 forest, when the deep snow creaks under his snow-shoe, and the 

 thermometer sinks to thirty degrees below zero in the still air, some 



• All the male birds of this species which I have shot during the latter part of 

 September, in the woods of north-western Maine, had around the eye a characteristic 

 broad oval band of bare flesh of a bright deep orange-color. In the funnies this col- 

 ored band is narrower, and borders only the upper half of the eye. — Editor. 



