92 SECOND BIENNIAL EEPORT [W. VA. 



membership of 65,000 to 70,000, which cherish the Bob-white for esthetic and 

 humanitarian reasons, the sportsman who loves the whirr of its brown wings, 

 and ,the farmer, whose enemies it destroys and whose resources it increases, 

 can do much to favor the bird in its natural environment and to protect it by 

 adequate and effectively enforced laws.' 



"It is with much pleasure that I turn now to speak of the Ruffed Grouse. 

 The Bob-white is attractive in song, appearance, manners, and in every way. 

 Yet its home is in the fields. It is pleasant, of course, to the nature-lover to 

 roam over the fields, briar-grown though they may be, but it is more pleasant 

 to betake one's self to the woods and there rest and look and study and won- 

 der, in the home-place of the wildest of birds and mammals. The Ruffed 

 Grouse is distinctly a bird of the woods, imparting the spirit of the wilderness 

 to every sylvan retreat that it inhabits. Only once in a long while does it leave 

 the v:oo(?s to come into the outer borders- of some old field or apple orchard. 



"The Ruffed Grouse is common in nearly all parts of the state, though it 

 is very rapidly decreasing in numbers in many sections. During four years 

 residence in the Ohio valley, a few miles above Parkersburg, I found this 

 species quite rare. In the higher parts of .the Allegheny Mountains this bird 

 is not usually very common. In several summers past I found it to be quite 

 rare in the Yew Mountains, the Spruce Mountains, and in the Black Alle- 

 gheries. In the great hardwood region of the state it is usually quite common, 

 and one does not often travel far in any woodland without being startled now 

 and then by the sudden flight of this bird. Great numbers of these fine game 

 birds are killed every year in the central part of the state, and, unless some 

 effective protection is given them, the places where they are now common will 

 see them no more. 



' ' All sportsmen are interested in the drumming of the Ruffed Grouse. This 

 strange performance is carefully described and illustrated in the last number 

 of Bird-Lore, by Mr. Edmund J. Sawyer. His article is entitled, 'The Drum- 

 ming of the Ruffed Grouse.' I quote from his writing quite freely, for I have 

 seen ro better discription of this act. After speaking of his method of build- 

 ing a blind, Mr. Sawyer says, ' In the morning the drumming is generally first 

 heard at daybreak, but a Grouse will often spend the night on or near his 

 drumming log and drum from time to time through the night. In order to 

 witness the drumming in the early morning, therefore, I spent the night in 

 my blind. To watch the Grouse in the afternoon period I entered the blind 

 about three o'clock. It was sometimes two or three hours later before the bird 

 first appeared, and occasionally I waited in vain till sundown. 



1 ' ' After once seeing a Ruffed Grouse drum, even from a distance of forty 

 feet, it was difficult for me to conceive how any one could be mistaken at that 

 distance as to the bird's way of performing the act. For the beating of .the 

 wings may be easily followed at first though ^heir exact outline, of course, 

 is lost during each lightning stroke, and may be seen to remain essentially the 

 same, only faster, till the end. 



11 'We will suppose now that we are in a blind, say twenty feet from a 

 drumming log. After being repeatedly deceived into expectation by chip- 

 munks, red squirrels, mice and Chickadees, we hear another rustling in the dry 

 leaves which our strained attention does not mistake. It is a measured patter 

 of running feet or a slow tread just heavy enough to crunch the leaves at every 



