210 BIRDS 



crested; yellow line over eye; sides of neck of male with 

 large tufts of glossy greenish black feathers tipped with 

 hght brown, much restricted or wanting and dull in 

 female; long tail, which may be spread fan-like, yellow- 

 ish brown or gray or rusty, beautifully and finely barred 

 with irregular bands half buflf, half black; a broad sub- 

 terminal band of black between gray bands; throat and 

 breast buff, the former unmarked; underneath whitish, 

 all barred with brown, strongly on sides, less distinctly 

 on breast and below; legs feathered. 



Range — ^Eastern United States and southern Canada west 

 to Minnesota, south to northern Georgia, Mississippi, 

 and Arkansas. 



Season — Permanent but roving resident. 

 {See plates, pages 210-211.) 



Neither a "partridge" nor a "pheasant," it is by the 

 former name that this superb game bird is best known to 

 the New Englanders, and by the latter that it is commonly 

 called in the Middle and Southern states; but this most 

 typical grouse appears in Uterature and the market stalls 

 alike as a "partridge," a misnomer (shared by the bob- 

 white) which strictly belongs to a race of European birds 

 of which we have no counterparts on this side of the 

 Atlantic. 



Partial to hill country interspersed with cultivated 

 meadows and dingles, or to moimtains, rocky, inaccessible, 

 thickly timbered, and well watered with bush-grown'^j 

 streams, it is only rarely, and then chiefly in autumn, that 

 coveys leave high altitudes to feed along the edges of milder 

 valleys. The dainties preferred include crickets, grass- 

 hoppers, caterpillars, beechnuts, chestnuts, acorns of the 



