40*2 
PINNATED GROUSE. 
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 
Louisiana ; and, according to the information of the late 
Governor Lewis, on the vast and remote plains of the Columbia 
River : 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: — 
Pirst, 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 turnings, 
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 confine- 
ment 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. Happening, 
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 shewed 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 of dew, and drops of 
