THE PINNATED GROUSE. 
(oe) 
7 
prairies of the Indiana Territory, and upper Louisiana; and, according to 
the information of the late Governor Lewis, on the vast and remote plains 
of the Columbia River; in all these places preserving the same singular 
habits. 
“Their predilection for such situations will be best accounted for by con- 
sidering the following facts and circumstances: First, their mode of flight 
is generally direct and laborious, and ill calculated for the labyrinth of a 
high and thick forest, crowded and intersected with trunks and arms of trees, 
that require continual angular evolution of wing, or sudden turnings, to 
which they are by no means accustomed. I have always observed them to 
avoid the high-timbered groves that occur here and there in the Barrens. 
Connected with this fact is a circumstance related to me by a very respect- 
able inhabitant of that country, viz., that, one forenoon, a cock grouse 
struck the stone chimney of his house with such force as instantly to fall 
dead to the ground. 
“Secondly, their known dislike of ponds, marshes, or watery places, which 
they avoid on all occasions ; drinking but seldom, and, it is believed, never 
from such places. Even in confinement, this peculiarity has been taken 
notice of. While I was in the State of Tennessee, a person living within a 
few miles of Nashville had caught an old hen grouse in a trap; and, being 
obliged to keep her in a large cage, as she struck and abused the rest of the 
poultry, he remarked that she never drank, and that she even avoided that 
quarter of the cage where the cup containing the water was placed. Hap- 
pening, one day, to let some water fall on the cage, it trickled down in 
drops along the bars, which the bird no sooner observed than she eagerly 
picked them off, drop by drop, with’ a dexterity that showed she had been 
habituated to this mode of quenching her thirst, and probably to this mode 
only, in those dry and barren tracts, where, except the drops of dew and 
drops of rain, water is very rarely to be met with. For the space of a week, 
he watched her closely, to discover whether she still refused to drink; but, 
though she was constantly fed on Indian corn, the cup and water still re- 
mained untouched and untasted. Yet no sooner did he again sprinkle water 
on the bars of the cage, than she eagerly and rapidly picked them off as 
before. 
“The last, and probably the strongest, inducement to their preferring 
these plains, is the small acorn of the shrub oak, the strawberries, huckle- 
berries, and partridge-berries, with which they abound, and which constitute 
the principal part of the food of these birds. These brushy thickets also 
afford them excellent shelter, being almost impenetrable to dogs or birds of 
prey. 
“In all these places where they inhabit, they are, in the strictest sense 
