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Updated: May 18, 2025
A score or two of them drive into town daily, each with his four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The pile is frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse, there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow intervales in extraordinary numbers.
The eagles and the hawks built their nests in its towering trees, while the cranes fished and the ruffed grouse drummed. Nightly, too, the owls and the loons hooted and laughed at the quacking ducks and the honking geese as they flew swiftly by in the light of the moon.
Their volubility is proof against the hush laid upon the forest by the westering sun, and you can hear them sputtering their way through the underbrush from afar. Birds in the wood mostly leave a trail for the ear rather than the eye. On such a day, even in the cold of January, you may hear a ruffed grouse drum.
There are still black ash swales and dry beech ridges, but they are not as massive as further south. There are still the haunting deer and the black bear and the ruffed grouse, the "partridge" in the idiom of the country, the "pheasant" of the South and Southwest.
It is caused by the ruffed grouse, who, amusing himself by drumming, is little aware that it will bring the cruel sportsman towards him. The bird produces it when standing on an old prostrate log. He lowers his wings, erects his expanded tail, and inflates his whole body something in the manner of the turkey-cock, strutting and wheeling about with great stateliness.
It has two clear brooks which, owing to the comparative inaccessibility of the place, still contain trout and grayling, though there are few spots where a fly can be cast on account of the dense underbrush. The woods contain partridge, or ruffed grouse, and other game in smaller quantities. I believe my client entertained some notion of establishing a preserve here.
Even the wary Ruffed Grouse will leave the shelter of the barren woods, and the farmer finds her in the morning sitting among the branches of his apple tree, relieving the twigs of their buds.
So we get the religion of Jesus, siphoned through the personality of Paul, fused with paganism, and paganism being the stronger tendency, the whole fabric reverts to type. We loose the pouter, the tumbler is forgot, and we get slaty-gray men and women ruled by ruffed Jacobins. Christianity is one thing; the religion of the Christ is another.
It was a huge day's sport a day's sport to talk about for years afterward Tom Draw does talk about it now! Fifty-one woodcock, forty-nine English snipe, twenty-seven quail, and a brace of ruffed grouse. A hundred and twenty-nine head in all, on unpreserved ground, and in very wild walking. It is to be feared it will never be done any more in the vale of Warwick. For this, alas! was ten years ago.
"Thus does the Ruffed Grouse drum up his mate, as the Woodpecker hammers or the Thrush sings. You remember the booming sound made by the wings of the Nighthawk, when the air whizzed through them? When Bob White and his Grouse brother fly, their wings make a whirring noise that is equally startling." "And does his mate understand that the drumming is meant to call her?"
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