TETRAONIDiE. 359 



the flight may be said to be a sort of fluttering-, more than anything else : the bird 

 giving two or three claps of the wings in quick succession, at the same time 

 hurriedly rising ; then shooting or floating, swinging from side to side, gradually 

 falling, and thus producing a clapping, whirring sound. When started, the 

 voice is ' Click, cuck, cuck,' like the common Pheasant. They pair in March 

 and April. Small eminences on the banks of streams are the places usually 

 selected for celebrating the weddings, the time generally about sunrise. The 

 wings of the male are lowered, buzzing on the ground ; the tail, spread like a 

 fan, somewhat erect ; the bare yellow oesophagus inflated to a prodigious size, — 

 fully half as large as his body, and, from its soft, membranous substance, being 

 well contrasted with the scale-like feathers below it on the breast, and the flexile, 

 silky feathers on the neck, which on these occasions stand erect. In this 

 grotesque form he displays, in the presence of his intended mate, a variety 

 of attitudes. His love-song is a confused, grating, but not offensively dis- 

 agreeable tone, — something that we can imitate, but have a difficulty in ex- 

 pressing — ' Hurr-hurr-hurr-r-r-r-hoo,' ending in a deep, hollow tone, not 

 unlike the sound produced by blowing into a large reed. Nest on the ground, 

 under the shade of Purshia and Artemisia, or near streams, among Phalaris 

 arundinacea, carefully constructed of dry grass and slender twigs. Eggs, from 

 thirteen to seventeen, about the size of those of a common fowl, of a wood-brown 

 colour, with irregular chocolate blotches on the thick end. Period of incubation 

 twenty-one to twenty-two days. The young leave the nest a few hours after they 

 are hatched." " In the summer and autumn months these birds are seen in 

 small troops, and in winter and spring in flocks of several hundreds. Plentiful 

 throughout the barren, arid plains of the river Columbia ; also in the interior 

 of North California. They do not exist on the banks of the river Missouri ; nor 

 have they been seen in any place east of the Rocky Mountains." — R. 



DESCRIPTION 

 Of a male, in the Hudson's Bay Museum*. 



Colour. — General ground colour of the upper plumage light hair-brown, mottled and 

 variegated with dark umber-brown and yellowish-white. Each feather of the back has three 

 bands of yellowish-white at equal distances from each other: the lowest is narrow, the middle 

 one broad, and the outer one tips the feather and is almost obsolete ; between these the 

 colour is hair-brown, prettily marked with small, irregular zig-zags of light hair-brown ; these 

 colours cross the shaft : but on the wing covers and scapulars the shafts are all marked by 

 a narrow, conspicuous line of yellowish-white. There are about eight bands of this colour 



* Since the above was written, presented to the British Museum. 



