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Dusky Grouse — Part 3
Images coming soon.
While there is anything like work connected with raising a young family the father absents himself, to rejoin it only when the covey has agreeable society to offer and makes no demands. Yet this is the cock that in the mating season gave himself the airs of a turkey gobbler as he strutted along the mountain road in front of your wagon, tail spread to its fullest, wings dropped until they trailed over the ground--a picture of self-importance. This is the season when he woos his mate with booming thunder on a small scale, which passes for a love song. A small sac of loose, orange-colored skin, surrounded by a white frill of feathers edged with dusky, at either side of the neck, may now be inflated at will; and as the air escapes, a strange grumbling, groaning sound comes forth, seemingly from quite a distance, when perhaps very near, or, at least, from just the direction that it seems not to come from. This sound, that has been aptly likened to the distant laboring of a "small mountain sawmill wrestling in agony with some cross-grained log," may be uttered from a stump or rock, or in the air as the cock flies about from limb to limb of the evergreens. When disturbed, he has the habit of erecting the feathers on the back of his neck, a feeble, showing as compared with the imposing black frill of the ruffed grouse.