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Updated: May 18, 2025
The railroads have brought security, comfort, prosperity, intelligence, and the best of the world's work, physical and mental, fresh at the door every morning. Whirr! There goes a ruffed grouse from the snow, scarce a rod ahead. In a moment, up goes another. Too bad to rout them from their bed under the roots of a fallen tree. Farther on a rabbit scurries from another log.
Does not even an old trout know more about hooks than a young one? Birds of any kind that are much hunted become wilder, even though they have not had the experience of being shot. Ask any duck or grouse or quail hunter if this is not so. Our ruffed grouse learns to fly with a corkscrew motion where it is much fired at on the wing.
It is not unsportsmanlike, it is in fair chase to shoot, and then there comes to the ground, with a great thump, the cock of the northern woods, and you have one of the prizes man gets by slaying. But this is only in the wood. In the open it is quite another thing. What a toothsome bird, too, is your ruffed grouse, how plump and yet gamey to the taste! You must know how to cook him, though.
Ferriss sent me the following account: "We bought another axe of a moonshiner, and, with a week's provisions on our backs, one of the guides and I took the Consolidated American Black Bear and Ruffed Grouse Line for Mount Guyot, twenty miles farther by map measurement.
"The most difficult shot in the world," Alderdene was explaining, "is an incoming pheasant, sailing on a slant before a gale." "A woodcock in alders doing a jack-snipe twist is worse," grunted Mortimer, drenching another apple in port. "Or a depraved ruffed cock-grouse in the short pines; isn't that the limit?" asked Mortimer of Siward.
CONNECTICUT: Passenger pigeon, Eskimo curlew, great auk, Labrador duck, upland plover, heath hen, wild turkey; puma, gray wolf, Canada lynx, black bear, elk. DELAWARE: Wild turkey, ruffed grouse, passenger pigeon, heath hen, dickcissel, whooping crane, Carolina parrakeet; white-tailed deer, black bear, gray wolf, beaver, Canada lynx, puma.
In the first of these cases the visitor will notice the wood grouse of Scotland, and the ruffed and other grouse of America; in the second case, the sand-grouse of the scorching deserts. The last case of the scraping birds is occupied by the Sheathbills, which, as the visitor will perceive, closely resemble grouse.
The land on the east side of the lake had been burnt over, and was now mostly grown up with wild cherry and red raspberry bushes. Ruffed grouse were found here in great numbers. The Canada grouse was also common. I shot eight of the latter in less than an hour on one occasion; the eighth one, which was an old male, was killed with smooth pebble-stones, my shot having run short.
In the afternoon Preble and I pushed on in our boat, far in advance of the brigade. As we made early supper I received for the twentieth time a lesson in photography. A cock Partridge or Ruffed Grouse came and drummed on a log in open view, full sunlight, fifty feet away. I went quietly to the place. He walked off, but little alarmed.
The birds were on three branches of the maple, one over the other. Silently the four boy hunters raised their firearms. Shep looked at them and then along the barrel of his piece. "Fire!" said he, and one shot rang out after another quickly. There was a mad whirring and fluttering from the ruffed grouse. Two dropped like lead, while two others flew around in a circle, badly wounded.
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