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Prairie Chicken — Part 2
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It must be owned these birds show no great intelligence in the selection of nesting sites, large numbers of homes placed in the short grass of dry localities being destroyed by prairie fires annually, others on cultivated lands are crushed by mowing machines, and those built along the marshes or sloughs are often inundated in a wet season. A slight excavation, sometimes thickly, but more often sparsely, lined with grasses and feathers plucked from the mother's body, receives from ten to twenty eggs, ranging from cream to pale brown, regularly marked with fine reddish brown dots, the coloring and spotting differing, however, on almost every egg in a clutch. It is the female that bears the entire burden of incubation, lasting from twenty-three days to four weeks. So perfectly does her plumage mimic her surroundings that one may almost step on a nest without seeing her. Like all her tribe, she is a model mother, she alone caring for the downy chicks, leading them where grasshoppers and other insect fare abounds, and protecting them with courageous and artful tactics.
The young are marvelously cunning in hiding in the grass. Now they lie very close to a dog, and since their flesh is white and toothsome, whereas that of old birds is dark and less esteemed, they fill the game bags after the fifteenth of August. Toward the end of summer, when there is no nursery work left to do, the selfish father joins his family; other families join his, or pack, until in regions where the birds have not been persecuted several scores roam over the prairie together to feed in the grain fields and on small berries and seeds. Now the grouse become wilder, and, except when gorged to indolence, will fly a mile or more, perhaps, so that little sport can be had with them over dogs.
"The true manner of shooting prairie fowl," says Mr. Charles E. Whitehead in "Sport with Rod and Gun," "is to drive over the prairie in a light wagon, letting the dogs range far and wide on either side. . . . When one scents the birds he will come to a point suddenly. . . . as if he saw a ghost. The wagon drives near him, the other dogs coming up and backing him. The sportsmen then alight and take their shots. Rarely the whole covey is flushed together, and frequently the old birds lie until the last, and while the sportsman is loading his gun will dash away uttering their quick-repeated cry of cluk-cluk-cluk-cluk, and looking back over their wings at the sportsman who marks them down half a mile away. As one goes to retrieve the dead bird, still another and another will rise, and it is only until one has been carefully over the field that he feels secure that all the birds are up."
Unlike the rest of their kin, the prairie chickens can fly long distances, though not with such concentrated power as to produce the thunder-like roar of the ruffed grouse, for example. Their flight may not be so swift, for it is accomplished with less flapping and more easy, graceful sailing. They migrate regularly, or, at least, the females do, leaving the hardier males to brave the intense cold at the northern limit of their range. In November and December flocks descend from northern lowa and Minnesota to settle for the winter in southern Iowa and northern Missouri, the size of the south bound flocks being influenced by the severity of the cold, just as the return of the migrants in March and April depends upon the warmth of spring. Most of the pinnated grouse's life is passed on the fertile open prairies, sleety storms, high winds, and deep snow alone driving a pack to shelter in timbered lands.