We had been vaguely aware of a reasonably large bird in the vicinity of the place in the woods where we had decided to build a house. The first time I saw the bird, it was about thirty feet away, and I thought it might be a wild turkey. It wasn't until I spent the month of June, 1989, at the Max-Planck-Institut in Garching, Germany, that this bird presented himself to Charlotte, who had been working on her garden and planting pine seedlings about fifteen feet from the edge of the upper meadow.
Each morning I received from Charlotte an electronic mail message
concerning the bird that was making her life miserable. The black flies
and mosquitoes were bad enough, but to have this bird flinging itself at
her legs while she was trundling a load of rocks in the wheelbarrow was a
bit too much. Then he would sail over her head and land in her path.
To make matters worse, each time she dug a hole in which to plant a seedling, the bird would hop onto the pile of dirt and refuse to budge, even when she threw dirt at it or she pushed at it with the back of the shovel. He just stood his ground, stretching up to his full height. She threatened to whack the bird with her hoe, but my German colleague and I prevailed upon her to spare the bird. We wanted to see it for ourselves.
The bird resembled a small chicken, plump and mottled brown in color, and it muttered continually. It had a crest and a dark ruff that it could raise. Consulting our bird books, Charlotte thought it might be a spruce grouse. That it was a grouse of some sort was confirmed when she took a feather to someone that was acquainted with game birds. Later we determined that it was actually a male ruffed grouse.
When I returned from Germany, my first job was to mount the mower deck on the new tractor, which we kept chained to a tree and under a camouflaged tarpaulin in the woods. The job took several hours, with me on my back most of the time. All the while, the bird paced around me watching everything I was doing and grumbling disapprovingly. We soon began to understand the origins of the verb to grouse.
Charlotte had named the bird Pesky, but I felt that Oscar the Grouse might be more appropriate. We compromised on the name Oscar Peskatoon. He remained pesky, and seemed to delight in asserting himself. Once when Charlotte was planting a tiny parsley plant, Oscar pulled it out and tossed it aside. He did not approve of any change, no matter how slight.
My German colleague visited Potsdam later that Summer, and he was quite taken with O. P., as were most people who met him.
It was almost impossible to visit the house site without having Oscar show up. If you just stood quietly you often could hear him as he approached. He made a distinctive noise as he walked over dead leaves, and he would peck the ground, presumably to assert who was really the boss. One of our neighbors' boys told us that Oscar often paced him when he jogged by our house site. It was typical of Oscar to proceed at your speed while maintaining a distance of ten feet or so to the side and slightly ahead.
After we had gotten very familiar with Oscar, we were in a New Hampshire woods in which I heard a sound that reminded me a lot of the sound Oscar often made. Sure enough, there was a male ruffed grouse a couple paces off the path on which we were walking.
Not infrequently Oscar seemed to arrive at the house site as soon as we
pulled up in the car. Indeed, occasionally, he would be ready to fling
himself at our feet the moment we ventured out of the car. We noticed,
however, that a strong wind or rain seemed to prevent his hearing us.
On those occasions we would blow the horn as we arrived, or perhaps go
searching for him, singing "Oscar the Grouse, oh Oscar the Grouse, it's
Oscar, it's Oscar, it's Oscar our Grouse" to the tune of Mozart's horn
concerto. If we sat down at the picnic table or worked around the house
site, he rarely failed to make an appearance eventually.
Oscar seemed to like to be the center of attention. When ignored, he would wander off ten or twenty feet and eat. He liked to sneak up on you from behind. Like a two-year old child, he would stand directly behind you, staring up at you. He was always getting under foot, and we worried about stepping on him, especially when he flung himself at our feet. One often heard him coming, head down and chin out, pitter-pattering. If, at the crucial moment you turned your head, he would sense it and try to stop, often falling over himself or leaving foot-long skid marks in the dust. More than once he grabbed Charlotte's shoe lace as he passed, and if he grabbed the right end, he was able to untie her shoe. He also liked to peck at the bright buckles on her hiking boots.
Once I went to get something out of the car. Unaware that Oscar had sneaked up on me, I turned and kicked him right in his chest with my heavy work boot. How does one apologize to a grouse? I tried to assure him that I was sorry I had kicked him, but for the rest of the day he flung himself at my feet whenever he got the chance.
One day Charlotte stepped on a stick that was partially covered by leaves. The far end of the stick came up and hit Oscar. He didn't understand that it was an accident and was mad at Charlotte for a considerable period.
Oscar's penchant for blocking our way is best illustrated by the time I was hunting for something at the back of our tool shed. The shed was rather full, and I had had to squeeze through a narrow path between bicycles, a wheelbarrow and other things to get to the back of the shed. While I was looking for the desired tool, I heard Oscar's characteristic pitter-patter outside the shed, and I said "Hello, Oscar." I didn't think any more about it until I turned to leave. Oscar had come into the shed and placed himself right in the narrow path between me and the door. Stretching up to his full height, he refused to move. He seemed rather proud of himself, and I had to trick him to get him to let me out.
In Autumn Oscar observed that the car exhaust was warm, and we had to shut off the car engine to avoid asphyxiating him. Sometimes he stood by the open door of the car, looking up at me. The shed episode suggested that he had no fear of enclosed places, and I believe that with a little encouragement he might have hopped up into the car.
Sometimes Oscar would spy on us. Usually we saw him, and would begin talking to him, at which point he would come out to see us. One time he really surprised us. Charlotte had heeled in some small trees and shrubs on a dirt mound that was about six feet high and covered with weeds. We were pulling weeds for quite a while before we stood up and walked a few paces from the dirt mound, at which point Oscar flew down from the top of the mound, from which location he had obviously been spying on us. He seemed very pleased with himself.
Our property was sufficiently extensive (120 acres) so that on a dark cloudy day one could become disoriented in the woods. On one such occasion Oscar suddenly appeared about twenty feet ahead of me. "I hope you know where you are, Oscar." I figured I must have been going in the right direction if Oscar appeared in front of me. Indeed, I soon emerged at the wood road.
When we left the house site, we would try to keep track of where Oscar was, because we didn't want him to end up under a wheel of the car. Sometimes as we backed away, during the first year, Oscar would fly up and over the car. One had to be really careful.
Living in an apartment, we had no place to entertain guests, so we organized some picnics at our house site. To one of these some eighteen guests were invited, including a number of children. Oscar not only made an appearance; he circulated among the other guests as they were eating dinner. At one point he managed to get himself ensnared in some chicken wire fencing that we had erected to protect our wooden ladder from whatever animal had been chewing on it. We did not know that animals, in their search for salt, would chew on anything, no matter how unappetizing it seemed to us. We lost a couple snow tires that way before we erected the tool shed.
Anyway, during the picnic, we folded the fence back on itself to make a door, and Oscar managed to walk into the cul-de-sac that this produced. Once ensnared, he froze. That was the only time that I felt I could have picked Oscar up. On every other occasion, any attempt to pet him, let alone to pick him up, was met with a violent flapping and jumping. One learned that Oscar could touch you, but you dared not try to touch Oscar. I carefully unfastened the fence and Oscar walked off, perhaps a little embarrassed.
Oscar never seemed to get the idea of a fence. Repeatedly he would walk directly into it, as if he couldn't see it. Once Charlotte got him really mad by trying to keep him away from where she was working by erecting a little fence around herself. He persisted in trying to go under it, until she relented and took the fence down.
One might wonder why Oscar didn't fly over any obstacle. Oscar always preferred to walk. Oh, he could fly. On rare occasions, he seemed to hear something of which we were unaware, and he would take off for nearby trees. On other occasions, he would just run off from a clearing into the woods, where he would freeze. But, generally, he seemed to rely on us to protect him when he was out in a clearing. Once, Charlotte had to advise him that there was a fox just a couple hundred feet away.
In addition to the fox there were many other predators of which grouse have to be wary. We had seen a large coyote, and we often heard them howling at night. There were also weasels of various sizes, and hawks were occasionally to be seen flying over the meadows in search of prey.
Another concern to us was the long grouse-hunting season, which lasted until February. In the Autumn of the first year, Charlotte and I went around the two-mile perimeter of our property erecting posted signs. Even though Oscar might spend some of his time beyond our property line, we hoped that this would reduce the probability of his being shot by a hunter.
Although we had often observed Oscar eating, it came as a surprise to us when we discovered that he was not, afterall, a vegetarian. That revelation came during the second year as Charlotte and I were standing at the edge of the upper meadow and talking to Oscar, who was just inside the woods about two feet away. I had noticed a large grasshopper at my feet, but thought nothing about it until suddenly Oscar darted out and snatched up the grasshopper, devouring it with relish.
Up to this time we had refrained from trying to feed Oscar. However, we went and caught several more grasshoppers and offered them to Oscar, who ran over and snatched them from between our fingers. Occasionally he would miss the mark and peck us on the fingers. We eventually learned how to hold them.
During grasshopper season we began collecting them in plastic bags. They
weren't particularly easy to catch. Often they'd take off at the last
minute and fly off fifty feet before alighting again. We must have looked
like loons chasing them around the meadow. We even bought a net in an
attempt to make it easier to catch them. After collecting a dozen or
more, little ones, big ones, brown ones, green ones, gray ones, spotted
ones, we'd go to Oscar's territory and try to find him. He gradually
learned to associate the plastic bags with grasshoppers. The minute we'd
squat down, Oscar would rush over to us, impatiently waiting for us to
extract a grasshopper from the bag. He'd even peck at the bag, and would
get so excited that he'd sometimes drop his prize. If, to avoid the
escape of the grasshopper, we'd try to catch it, Oscar would as likely
peck at our hands as at the grasshopper. Oscar eventually trained our
neighbors to catch grasshoppers too. Probably he could have made the
Guinness Book of Records as the grouse who had consumed the most
grasshoppers.
Later we discovered other things that Oscar liked to eat. He liked soft maple seeds, but not the seeds of hard maples. He also ate whole clumps of birch seeds. We saw him eat a soft wild mushroom, but store bought mushrooms turned out to be too firm for him. Charlotte had noted that something had been eating the leaves of the broccoli plants in her garden. Eventually, she saw Oscar tearing off pieces. From that point on, we brought him broccoli leaves cut up into nice grouse size pieces. He would also accept young poplar leaves from us, but not birch leaves. Deciding that green was his favorite color, we bought some spinach for him, which he liked very much indeed. We saw him hop up for wild blackberries. We began bending the longer branches down so he could reach the higher berries. Then we began picking blackberries for him. He could eat quite a few, but when he had had enough he would get grouchy and refuse to eat any more. He seemed to prefer the little wild strawberries that grew along the edge of the gravel road. We'd point them out, and while we stood guard, he would eat them directly off the plants. Next to grasshoppers, strawberries were his favorite. He did not seem to have any saturation point for either of these delicacies.
Oscar was willing to try cracked corn, but he seemed to think it was rocks. One day I extended my hand to Oscar, with some ground gamebird feed in my palm. I was a little concerned that he might peck me, but what he did took me completely by surprise. He lunged at my extended hand, and swallowed my pinkey. I had never thought about how the interior of a bird's mouth might feel; it was remarkably soft. He ignored the gamebird feed, which I spilled all over the ground in front of him.
Only once did we note that Oscar had a cold, or at least he was sneezing. Aside from that, he seemed to be a very healthy bird. During the hottest part of the Summer he panted a lot, and he was troubled with mites, but he wouldn't let us do anything to lessen his discomfort. However, on several occasions we watched as he took dust baths. We had often seen small birds take dust baths. A grouse is quite another matter, and can produce a veritable storm of dust. He obviously relished his bath, and kept at it for a considerable time, during which he would not be disturbed. I even went right by him with the garden tractor, which didn't disturb him in the least.
Oscar was not afraid of power tools, at least when such tools were operated by Charlotte or me. Once I had to stop cutting up a fallen birch, because I found Oscar at my feet, and I was afraid he might get hurt by the chain saw I was using. Besides, it couldn't be good for his hearing. As far as I knew, they didn't make grouse-size ear protectors or grouse-size goggles. Charlotte had to entertain Oscar while I finished cutting up the tree.
Eventually Oscar started coming out into the meadow when I was mowing. He'd dart out if I got within twenty or thirty feet of the edge of the meadow, placing himself directly in my path and refusing to move. Once I was mowing between rows of yearling pine trees planted in rows six feet apart. Oscar ran out and placed himself strategically, so I could not proceed without endangering either him or the pine trees. I had to shut down the tractor, and walk him four hundred feet back to the house site. Then I ran back to where the tractor was, and got it out of there before he could return.
Oscar was a strict conservative; he didn't like any change. When Charlotte planted the pine seedlings, Oscar objected. When, several years later, she tried to move them, Oscar objected again. He definitely liked the status quo.
The larger trees that had been felled professionally and stacked in piles near the edge of the upper meadow were eventually picked up by a logging truck. The operation took quite a few hours, during which Oscar spied from a convenient vantage point at the edge of the meadow. Hours after the truck had left, we found Oscar still watching and fretting.
Not once did Oscar allow anyone to touch him, but he felt free to touch
us whenever he pleased. When I sat on a big rock or tree stump, Oscar
would approach from the back. If there was room enough, he would hop up
on the rock or stump, and look up at me. I learned that if I turned to
one side he might hop up into my lap. He did this three or four times
during the second year that we knew him. I discovered that on these
occasions I had to keep my hands still, or he would fling himself at
them. Any attempt to pet him met with the usual violent response.
Unfortunately, on none of these occasions did we have a camera along.
Most of the photos we did take of Oscar were portraits taken at eighteen
inches with an ordinary lens, although we do have a few that show him at
our feet or next to the car.
Once when Charlotte and I were sitting at the picnic table, Oscar hopped up onto the bench behind me. I didn't think anything about it until he went from there up onto the table. We were somewhat concerned that one of us might get pecked in the face, should he take that into his head. On another occasion, during the third year, Oscar pecked on the bright buckles that Charlotte had on the back of her jeans. When she turned around to ask Oscar what the idea was, he surprised her by hopping into her lap. That was the only time he did it, and she was quite nervous about his being so close to her face.
Oscar's demeanor changed markedly when he had only one of us to contend with, and when that one person sat down. Squatting did not count. On certain occasions when I sat down, either at the picnic table or on a tree stump or rock, Oscar would hunker down at my feet. Once he spent ten minutes like that, while Charlotte was off retrieving something we had left at the house. When Oscar heard the car coming back, he stood up and looked to see who was coming. Until then he seemed utterly content to sit and simply look around, softly clucking and cheeping all the while.
Oscar rarely was silent, but he always spoke very softly. Sometimes the sounds he made clearly displayed his annoyance, while at other times he uttered little cheeps of contentment. When he was really upset his tail would go up and he'd poop. He would raise his crest and extend the little feathers beside his eyes, and breathe heavily. The first time we heard the contented cheeps, which sounded like those of a baby bird, Charlotte had to ask "Is that you, Oscar?"
We were never too sure what was in Oscar's mind. We attempted to show him his reflection in a mirror, but he either didn't see it or was completely uninterested in what he saw. Once I dangled a knitted tan hat in front of him. I thought he might fling at it, but he did more than that, stomping on it, grabbing it, and triumphantly carrying it off a couple feet. When he flung himself at our feet, we didn't know if he thought he was driving us off, or he didn't want us to leave. When we did leave, he always looked so sad. A grouse lives such a lonely solitary life.
During the first year Oscar roosted right at the entry of our wood road. We found many droppings beneath his favorite tree, and one time at dusk we inadvertently flushed him as we emerged from the wood road. In subsequent years he found other favored places.
Each August Oscar went through an annual molt. He may well have molted in the Spring too, but we never witnessed it. During his molt he lost all his tail feathers, making him look a little silly and very vulnerable. Anyway, after his August molt he was a handsome fellow. In preparation for Winter, he acquired feathers on his legs, which produced the impression that he was wearing boots. We especially liked the buff color that appeared under his chin, and we always oohed and aahed to show how nice we thought he looked.
During the Winter we would see Oscar only rarely. When we did see him, he looked larger than life, for, to keep warm, he fluffed himself up into a ball. We were reluctant to disturb him during the dead of Winter, as we didn't want him to waste his energy, but we were happy just to see grouse tracks once in a while. His tracks were always very distinctive, for it was his habit to place one foot directly ahead of the other. Three of his long toes faced forward and one faced toward the rear. When the tracks were fresh, you could see the impressions of the individual toes, but later you would just see a single line of holes four to six inches apart. If the uncompacted snow had had an opportunity to melt, you might find a single line of raised circles of compacted snow.
Every time a month went by without any sign of Oscar, we would get really worried, and I would go looking for him. Late in April, following the third Winter, after we had seen no grouse for almost six weeks, he suddenly appeared. "Oh, Oscar, how happy I am to see you." Both Charlotte and I always addressed him as one might address a child, using a voice with an elevated pitch.
For a long time we had no idea how Oscar managed to survive the cold Potsdam Winters, when temperatures often dropped into the minus twenties (Fahrenheit) at night, and when the daytime temperature rarely got above the freezing point. Finally, Charlotte confirmed that the grouse must spend the coldest days and nights beneath the snow, for in a small clearing we found many localized piles of grouse droppings. Now, grouse are not fastidious, and certainly do not collect their droppings into neat piles, so she figured that the droppings were all together in one spot because the grouse had spent a considerable period of time right there at that very spot (under a layer of insulating snow).
When we said "goodbye" to Oscar on January 24th, 1993, little did we know that we would never see him again. He looked so healthy, as he nipped buds from the blackberry bushes that stuck out above the snow, and he had survived (at least) four other Winters. About a week later, the first blizzard of the worst Winter in many years descended upon the North Country. For two months it seemed that the snow wouldn't stop, and the temperature made dramatic swings, dipping down as low as -35 degrees, while the wind howled mercilessly.
Charlotte and I did get to the woods a number of times on our cross country skis, but we saw no sign of a grouse, not even an occasional track. As the weeks passed, and then the months, we became increasingly of the opinion that Oscar was no longer with us. In a distant clearing we did find grouse droppings, but it was far from Oscar's territory, and we doubted it was he.
On Palm Sunday, April 4th, we saw some grouse tracks just inside the wood road, where Oscar used to roost when we first got to know him. On April 22nd, at the same location, I thought I saw something hop down from a log. Indeed, it turned out to be a grouse, but it was walking away. Nor did it respond to calls of "Oscar" and we suspected it was not our grouse. That night we had another twelve inches of snow, the last of many blizzards that Winter. A few days later, on April 25th, we flushed a grouse from the same location. Oscar would not have flown away. If another grouse had moved into Oscar's territory, it meant that Oscar was no longer alive.
On May 5th, as I drove the tractor into the woods up by the house site, I saw a male grouse in full display, about twenty-five feet away. He looked like a small turkey, with his tail fanned out to the maximum. I stopped the engine, and sat there making cheeping sounds. Directly in front of the male grouse was a groundhog that had come out of its burrow to see what was going on. After a couple minutes, I became aware that I was being watched by a female grouse that was standing on the limb of a tree by the edge of the road and about ten feet away. It was the first female grouse I had ever seen. She was a good deal scruffier than the male grouse, and her tail was narrower. She exhibited no fear, only caution, slowly walking along the branch. After a couple minutes she flew about one hundred feet to the rear of our tool shed. Then the male, who had been motionless, started to move off in the other direction, keeping his tailed fanned out all the while. I restarted the tractor, and got out of there as rapidly as possible, hoping that they would find each other again, and that they might have some young.
Charlotte and I joined the Ruffed Grouse Society, and we learned from their literature that once grouse mate, the male has nothing more to do with either the female or her chicks. Only one of five chicks survives a year. After that there is about a forty-five percent chance of a grouse living another year. Thus, only two percent of grouse survive as long as Oscar did, and almost all suffer violent deaths, for grouse are near the bottom of the food chain.
Grouse chicks reach almost their full adult size in four months. It is quite possible that Oscar was born in June of 1988, when we were clearing trees at our proposed house site. Late the following year we did come across the remnants of a nest at the base of a tree at the edge of the area we had cleared for the house. The remains of the egg shells we found there were very rubbery. We are not even sure it was a grouse nest, let alone the place of Oscar's birth. If Oscar had been born there during the time we were felling trees, perhaps that might explain his unusual behavior toward us. Ordinarily grouse are very secretive, flying off with a great clatter of wings when they are flushed.
Throughout the period during which we knew Oscar, he made it quite clear that his friendship was to be on his terms, and that he wanted to remain a wild grouse, not a domesticated pet. Not once in almost five years did he permit either of us to touch him. Accordingly, we doubted that the comfort and security that we could have provided him as our pet could have compensated for his losing the freedom which he seemed to value so highly. We understood, however, that one day he most likely would disappear, and that we might never know what really had happened to our dear friend, Oscar Peskatoon.
