402 



PINNATED GROUSE. 



grouse plains of New Jersey, in Burlington county, as well as 

 on the brushy plains of Long Island ; among the pines and shrub 

 oaks of Pocano, in Northampton county, Pennsylvania ; over 

 the whole extent of the Barrens of Kentucky; on the luxuriant 

 plains and prairies of the Indiana Territory, and Upper Louisi- 

 ana ; and, according to the information of the late Governor 

 Lewis, on the vast and remote plains of the Columbia Kiver : 

 in all these places preserving the same singular habits. 



Their predilection for such situations will be best accounted 

 for by considering 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 turn- 

 ings, 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 respectable 

 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 Tennesee, 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. Happen- 

 ing, 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 



