Recreation Volume 55, No. 3 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 edition. Excerpt: ...almost wiped out. He has been decimated to the point where it is unprofitable to hunt him and only a remnant of the race--the fittest and most adaptable--remain. It is only the supers that are left to stir the imagination of such enthusiasts as Brother Rutledge. If not, why the hankering and talk and experimenting over breeding the bird and liberating him as is done with quail? I am going to speak particularly of the ruffed grouse of Manitoba, as I have known him in that province, which perhaps still has as good upland shooting as may be had in America. Of the three grouse species common there, i.e., sharptailed, pinnated and ruffed (Gray ruffed, Bonasa umbellus umbelloidcs), the latter bird is of so little account as to pass almost unnoticed. Today he is rather much in the same state as thirty years ago; his numbers rise and fall apparently with little regard for man-made laws; the game season has not much meaning to him. The brunt of the battle has been borne, of course, by the other two species, birds that hold to the more open country, are larger, fly almost as well and make more noise and excitement over it, ahd what is much to the point, lie and flush as a game bird should. The ruffed, then, has been left to himself and is to-day far behind the others as a sporting bird, and utterly unworthy of the encomiums earned by his ruffed brother of the East. He has not yet been educated. In Manitoba and the Northwest the grey ruffed is found wherever there is timber; heavy scrub occasionally will satisfy him, but he is a bird of the woods, he must have trees to shelter him. All the wooded river valleys and the poplar bluffs left by the settlers harbor a few of these chaps. Wherever there are scrubby oaks he may be ex pected for a certainty, ..