36 GEOUSE AND WILD TURKEYS OF UNITED STATES. 



The taste for rose hips, seedy and husky, as they are, and often 

 beset with fine bristles which irritate the human skin and would seem 

 really dangerous to internal tissues, is one. of the singular freaks of 

 bird feeding. It reminds one of the cuckoo's liking for caterpillars 

 which are so bristly that its stomach becomes actually felted and 

 sometimes pierced by the stiff hairs. Rose hips hang on the bushes 

 throughout the winter, accessible to the hungry grouse as they journey 

 about in the snow for food, and are usually swallowed whole. 



The bird likes grapes also. No less than 3.01 percent of the year's 

 diet consists of them, and in November they make 17.2 percent of the 

 total food for the month. All experienced sportsmen know of this 

 taste, and during this month they always count on getting their best 

 shooting in the vicinity of heavily fruited grapevines. The wild 

 grapes with small berries, such as Vitis cordifoUa, are especially liked, 

 but also large grapes are greatly relished. The species from which 

 cultivated varieties have been derived {Vitis labrusca) appears to be 

 commonly selected. Thirty to forty grapes are often swallowed at 

 a meal. From this taste one might expect the grouse to commit dep- 

 redations on cultivated grapes, but no reports of such damage have 

 come to the Biological Survey. 



Like many other birds, the ruffed grouse eats the berries of sumac 

 and other species of Rhus. This food contributes 2.46 percent of the 

 year's diet. Among the nonpoisonous sumacs selected are the. dwarf 

 sumac {Rhus copallina), the staghorn sumac {R. hirta), and the 

 scarlet sumac {R. glabra). Not uncommonly from 300 to 500 berries 

 of the dwarf sumac are swallowed at a meal. This liking for the dry 

 and apparently nonnutritious sumac is another curious freak of bird 

 ai^petite. Probably, as with the bobwhite, the seeds are broken up in 

 the gizzard and the inclosed meat, or endosperm, set free for diges- 

 tion. The immunity of the bird from poisoning by poison sumac 

 and poison ivy, which also it eats, is interesting. That these seeds 

 retain their virulence after being eaten was shown in the case of an 

 investigator in the Biological Survey who was poisoned while exam- 

 ining stomachs of crows that had fed on poison-ivy berries. At times 

 the ruffed grouse eats many of these berries, as proven by one col- 

 lected by Prof. S. A. Forbes, at Jackson, 111., December 9, 1880, 

 which had eaten 280 of them. Where grouse are numerous, poison 

 sumac is usually less abundant than poison ivy, and consequently it 

 appears less frequently in stomach examinations. One hundred and 

 sixty poison-ivy berries were taken from the crop of a ruffed grouse 

 shot by Dr. A. K. Fisher at Lake George, N. Y., October 24, 1892. 



Miscellaneous fruits amount to 19.03 percent of the annual food. 

 I'he two favorite kinds are the partridge berry {Mitchella repens) 

 and the thorn apple (various species of Cratwgus) , both of which 

 v:ere eaten by 40 of the 208 grouse examined. At least two species 



