36 GROUSE AND WILD TURKEYS OF UNITED STATES. 
Till' 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 sinfjular 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. Kose 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 the}^ make 17.:^ i)ercent 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 cordifolia., are especially liked, 
but also large grapes are greatly relished. The species from which 
cultivated varieties have been derived {Vitis Idhriisca) 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 dej)- 
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 2.4G percent of the 
year's diet. Among the nonpoisonous sumacs selected are the dwarf I 
sumac {Rhus copcdlirKi). 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 
appetite, l^robably, 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 rufl'ed grouse eats many of these berries, as proven by one col- 
lected by l*r()f. S. A. Forbes, at Jackson, 111., December 9, 18S0, 
which had eaten 2(S0 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 ci'op of a ruffed grouse 
shot by Dr. A. K. Fisher at Dake (ieorge, N. Y., October 24, 1892. 
Miscellaneous fruits amount to 19.03 percent of the annual food. 
The two favorite kinds are the partridge berry {Mitchella rcpens) 
and the thorn apple (various species of Crataegus), hoi\\ of which 
were eaten by 40 of the 208 grouse examined. At least two species 
