PRAIRIE HEN. 
PRAIRIE CHICKEN. PINNATED GROUSE. 
Tympanuchus AMERICANUS. 
Char. Above, brownish ochraceous, tinged with gray ; back barred 
'"'tth black ; below, white, barred with dusky brown ; throat huffish ; head 
with slight crest ; erectile tufts of 7 to to long stiff feathers on sides of 
|ieck, and below these, patches of bare and elastic skin. Length about 18 
inches. 
On the open prairie amid tufts of long grass or at the foot of a 
ush; a slight hollow scratched out and thinly lined with grass and 
feathers. 
8-16 (usually about 12) ; dull buff or greenish yellow, some- 
intes with a reddish tinge, and occasionally spotted slightly with brown • 
'•70 X 1.25. 
Choosing particular districts for residence, the Grouse, or 
Prairie Hen, is consequently by far less common than the pre- 
ceding species. Confined to dry, barren, and bushy tracts of 
small extent, these birds are in several places now wholly or 
nearly exterminated. Along the Atlantic coast they are still 
met with on the Grouse plains of New Jersey, on the brushy 
plains of Long Island, in similar shrubby barrens in Westford, 
Connecticut, in the island of Martha’s Vineyard on the south 
Side of Massachusetts Bay, and formerly, as probably in many 
other tracts, according to the information which I have re- 
ceived from Lieut.-Governor VVdnthrop, they were so common 
on the ancient bushy site of the city of Boston that laboring 
people or servants stipulated with their employers not to have 
t le Heath Hen brought to table oftener than a few times in the 
