My friend Pat.

[Jeff]

Just a typical day in the Eastern U.P. A trip to Cedarville Grocery, got some awesome shots of the approaching lake effect storm, came home and made friends with a Ruffed Grouse, which my Dad called Partridge or just "Pats". Going "Pat hunting" he would say.

I put my camera shots and my visit with "Pat" today into a short video. 
My Sister Calls me Dr. Doolittle. Ruffed Grouse Encounter. WILL I EAT IT? - YouTube

[thecfarm]

I grew up with my Dad calling them partridge too.

[WV Sawmiller]

   In the DNR regs they indicate a common name for them here in WV is "Native Pheasant".

    I did a project near Steubenville OH/Weirton WV and one of the client personnel there showed us short videos on his phone of one following him, pecking at his shoe and jumping up on the log beside him while he was deer hunting. He said the neat thing was he came back to the same area the next day and it came back out and stayed with him again and he got more pictures/videos of it then too. Nobody had any idea why it had no fear of him.

[Southside]

Yup, always called them Patridge.  My wife gets her feathers all in a ruff when I say that as she is from Colorado.  

[barbender]

I call them patridge, to have a little fun with folks from Maine😁 But I grew up calling them partridge (with an "r"😊) or grouse.

My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Partridge (Ojibwe benā") so she was called Faye Benā (rhymes). There is a small village about 20 miles from me that is named Bena, but it is pronounced differently now- Bee-nuh.

A day in the woods after partridge has been some of the most enjoyable and memorable times of my life. The sounds and scents of the forest that time of the year are unmatched.

[SawyerTed]

Where we live we used to have northern quail aka bobwhite, they were called patridge by the previous generation.  I think that was because a short drive west from Stokes County we can find grouse.  So patridge were local and grouse weren't. 

Unfortunately, development and farming practices have reduced quail habitat and we no longer have any in our area.  

[SwampDonkey]

Always called them partridge up here. The grouse thing is more of a forester/biologist term that I've never heard a hunter ever utter in these parts. ;)

[Peter Drouin]

Same here partridge, have some out back. 

[Hilltop366]

We call them (ruffed grouse) partridge here too but then there are spruce partridge (spruce grouse) too which you were not to shoot. There is usually one hanging around the camp driveway.

 

[Jeff]

We have 3 grouse types within a few milles of here, but I only see ruffed here. There are also sharptail and spruce.

[upnut]

Great video! I have several names for them as they duck behind brush and fly away untouched by #8 shot. Beautiful lakeshore vistas, that is a cool drive to the grocery store. Just brought up the Mac Bridge web cams, total whiteout, you must be getting dumped on....Enjoy the solitude!

Scott B.

[Jeff]

It's getting wild here. Ill need to be rescued by the neighbor when this is over. North caribou is pretty much the main drag, so it gets plowed repeatedly, and its not like what happens to my driveway in Harrison when they plow here. They plug this one for twenty feet.

[Jeff]

The lake effect machine just fired up here again. Wind out of the southwest. Worst possible for here. 


 

[SwampDonkey]

Just ruffed grouse in my local area. I have to go beyond settlement in the spruce forest to find spruce grouse. When I used to hunt, we were allowed to shoot them just the same as the other. We never did though, they taste sprucey (I have tried them) and we never felt there was any sport in shooting such a dumb bird. I know some people hunt them back then. A friend shot one one time, and I told him I'd bet he wouldn't eat it. He never shot another one after that. I've shot video of grouse behind the house here. Don't let that fool you, because if I was outside and they saw me they would be out of here faster than you could load a gun. :D However, I have also been in the deep woods hunting on grown in roads and they were just as stupid as the spruce kind. I've seen one place 50 miles from nowhere where a crew was thinning with clearing saws in birch. They hunted to. Well, they shot almost 50 ruffed grouse on that block. Big flocks 10 or more to a flock. You get 30 guys thinning who hunt grouse also, that's quite a slaughter. They wasn't hunting when saws where going. Now, you're not allowed to be within 2 km of a work block hunting. DNR usually posts work blocks. Where I was this fall thinning they came with signs starting in moose season.

[Southside]

I can remember picking up spruce birds by hand, just like a chicken, then set them back down.  Amazing how docile they are.  

[JJ]

When in hand we called them partridge if you got it on the ground, and grouse if on the wing.

Long time ago was a boy scout councilor at Camp Bomazeen (Great Lake, Belgrade ME), there was a roughed grouse that would untie the shoe laces of the scouts on the firing line..   Funny and very tame but quite distracting for scouts and cubs trying to earn marksman awards    .    We called it Peckerhead, or just Peck around the cub scouts.   It was there for both the 2 summers I worked there.

         JJ

[barbender]

I've always read the tame grouse stories with a little jealousy, after spending my whole life in grouse country and never experiencing one. I suppose it didn't help that I was usually hunting them?🤔

One summer the harvester operator and I were shuffling his pickup to the next cut block. We came to a good sized popple tree blown over the road, so he grabbed a his chainsaw and started blocking it up while I threw the pieces off the road. Well we were standing there by our idling diesel pickups visiting as loggers often do when they finally get a chance to get out of their machines. As we were talking, I noticed something on the ground out of the corner of my eye. I saw it was a partridge, by this time it was about 3' from my feet. I told the other guy, "keep talking, but look down at your feet." "What the heck is that thing doing, my chickens won't let me get that close to them?!", he said. It just slowly walked around, looking up at us with it's head cocked. It continued to slowly walk around and watch us, finally jumping up on the bank of the road 10' away. It was still watching us when we left🤷‍♂️

 About 10 years ago, a neighbor gal's little boy (about 4 or 5 yo at the time) would come in from playing out in their yard, that bordered the woods. Well he kept telling her about "Buddy". She would listen to stories about what he and Buddy would do playing out in the sandbox. Assuming Buddy to be his imaginary friend. After a bit, she started to get a little concerned about the Buddy stories. She asked him one day, "who is Buddy?". "He said, he's my friend that comes out of the woods and ays in the sandbox with me." Well she was starting to get a little concerned about how convinced her son was that Buddy was real, not to mention he just came out of the woods! So she went outside with him, and he said, "I'll just call him and he'll come out!" So he calls, "Buddy! Buddy!" and pretty soon a partridge comes running out of the woods😂 The thing would get right in the sandbox with the kid, and just stand next to him. It was really cute!😊 She had pictures of them, they had a story in the local paper about it. Hey, everyone needs a Buddy!

[SwampDonkey]

A fellow I know had the same thing happen with his boy. And he has video of the partridge with the boy. :D

[Ricker]

I had a partridge around the house that wasn't happy I lived on his turf. He would follow me thru the woods 20-30 feet away making a fool of himself drumming, flying by my head etc. I have a workshop about 100' from the house that was on the border of his territory I guess, since he was claiming about 10 of my acres as his own near as I could tell. For about 6 years this bird would charge at me to about 5' away. And when I was in the shop there a big pine stump just out back of the shop and he would get up there and drum for as long as I was in the shop.  Didn't matter the time of day, might be 2 hours after it got dark, I turn on the lights to the shop and within 10-15 minutes the drumming would start.  He was a big, big bird the last couple years.  One spring he came drumming once and then never see him again. I enjoyed the experience of having him around.m I hunt birds, but the experience ended my hunting around home, I go to the big woods up north now.

[Mooseherder]

Penny on a Maine atv trail.  She would come out to greet riders and was known to many people.

Penny on my Hat - YouTube

[Jeff]

Howard Shelly was a wildlife film maker for Michigan outdoors when I was a kid, anybody growing up in michigan when I did knows this voice. This film probably contributed to my fondness for the bird. I don't think it was the time when I was about 5 years old, first time ever to go hunting with my dad, and being quietly horrified watching him ring the neck of a downed Partridge. That has never left me. This is a better memory.  The film was made way before this airing on this later show.
1978 Fred Trost & Howard Shelly Talk Grouse - YouTube

[WV Sawmiller]

   Neat vids. I'd have to quit hunting if all the game was like that. I had several deer last year and in years past I never could shoot even though they were legal and I wanted/needed the meat.

 I used to catch various wild animals by hand, especially raccoons, and they would be very vicious  when I caught them and again when I released them. In several cases I'd turn them loose then have to run away from them as they were mad at being locked up. I never had the heart to shoot them after I had caught/"conquered" them while if I had shot them when I first found them it would have been no problem.

[beenthere]

 first time ever to go hunting with my dad, and being quietly horrified watching him ring the neck of a downed Partridge.

Was the same way my Dad and Uncles would finish off a downed pheasant. Learned when I was later hunting on my own, that a bird will lay low after being shot down and could unexpectedly take flight. So a show stopper was to quick grab it and dispatch it with a "neck ringing". Discourages them from flying away then. 

[KEC]

This brings back a couple of Ruffed Grouse memories. In the 70's I was motoring down a back road (badly crowned) in the Tug Hill area with a full trailer load of hardwood logs, grossing ~90,000lbs. Up over a knoll and there's a grouse in the middle of the road. Sorry, little bird, but there's no way to safely avoid you, so I straddled him/her. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw him fly out from under the trailer, unscathed. Another time, I was driving on I-81 when cars up ahead were stopping. A hen grouse with chicks was in the middle of the highway and she was challenging any vehicle that got near her babies. Finally, the hen and some chicks went off the highway on one side and the other chicks went off the other and traffic resumed. I don't know if they got safely re-united; I hope so. Saw one behind the house yesterday. They've become scarce here is recent years.  I think biologists say  they suspect disease may be a factor. Funny how one will sometimes act tame. I have seen that, but not for a long time.

[KEC]

The origional "Fools Hen" was the Heath Hen which occurred along the Atlantic coastal lowlands. They were so unwary that hungry colonists would kill them with sticks. Between over-hunting and habitat destruction they became extinct. There is some good reading about them on Wikipedia.