RUFFED GROUSE Bonasa Umbellus CREDIT CURRENT YOUTUBE VIDEO WALDEN: As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, gives a voice to the air; a fishhawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reed-birds flitting hither and thither; and for the last half hour I have heard the rattle of railroad cars, now dying away and then reviving like the beat of a partridge, conveying travellers from Boston to the country.... The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side. As they come under one horizon, they shout their warning to get off the track to the other, heard sometimes though the circles of two towns. RUFFED GROUSE HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER WALDEN: When the ground was not yet quite covered, and again near the end of winter, when the snow was melted on my south hill-side and about my woodpile, the partridges came out of the woods morning and evening to feed there. Whichever side you walk in the woods the partridge bursts away on whirring wings, jarring the snow from the dry leaves and twigs on high, which comes sifting down in the sunbeams like golden dust; for this brave bird is not to be scared by winter. It is frequently covered up by drifts, and, it is said, “sometimes plunges from on wing into the soft snow, where it remains concealed for a day or two.” I used to start them in the open land also, where they had come out of the woods at sunset to “bud” the wild apple-trees. They will come regularly every evening to particular trees, where the distant orchards next the woods suffer thus not a little. I am glad that the partridge gets fed, at any rate. It is Nature’s own bird which lives on buds and diet-drink. RUFFED GROUSE Greater Prairie-Chicken Tympanuchus cupido cupido (Pinnated Grouse or Heath Cock) Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus (Partridge) Spruce Grouse Dendragapus canadensis (Black Grouse) ALPHABETICAL BIRDS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER WALDEN: Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer? If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute? We will not be shipwrecked on a vain reality. Shall we with pains erect a heaven of blue glass over ourselves, though when it is done we shall be sure to gaze still at the true ethereal heaven far above, as if the former were not? DIFFERENT DRUMMER THE INNER LIGHT ALPHABETICAL BIRDS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER I’m sorry, but I need to issue a warning: this PDF may throw you for a loop! You may be expecting this to be merely about a species of bird (the ruffed grouse) as it is featured in the Journal and other writings of Henry David Thoreau and only about that species. If you are expecting, for instance, a mere chronological extraction of Thoreau’s comments about this species, “birder” style, if you are expecting the sort of appreciation than any mere “bird-book” like that of Helen Gere Cruickshank would deliver you, then you are going to wind up simply baffled — for this listing although entirely chronological includes far more than such easy stuff. If that’s what you’re after, please go away now. For the topic of the drumming of the male ruffed grouse will need to be allowed grow in your mind, until it encompasses as well Thoreau’s talk about “stepping to the beat of” a different drummer, because A.) Thoreau made use of God’s creatures as stand-ins for his thoughts, and because B.) Thoreau as a nonspeciesist awarded equivalent recognition to all of us rather than assigning some special elevated station in the universe to the ones of us who are human beings. When the grouse drummed it was for Henry as if nature spoke — this sound activated both inward nature and outward nature. If you’re not ready to go there you shouldn’t read this. Then, having stretched your mind and added, to the drumming woodland bird, the different or distant drummer, sorry, gentle reader, I won’t be done with you yet — because I will then ask you to proceed onward to consider in addition not only the sound we can hear with our ears (drumming) but also the light we can see with our eyes, because of C.) Thoreau’s deployment of synesthesia, in which he considers that his soul has a green color — in his creation of metaphors he freely alternates between visions and auditions. The claim will eventually be made here, that not only is Thoreau’s “distant drummer” to be understood to be a woodland bird (rather than some human drummer-boy in military formation), but also, his “distant drummer” is to be understood as an exact aural match with Quakerly talk you may have heard about our need to “attend to the light,” a light that shines within. That is, where Quakers discourse in visual terms of the primary importance of the light within, and where Thoreau discourses in aural terms of stepping to the beat of a different drummer, I will hold it to be indeed accurate to describe these two quite different metaphors as, guess what, offering precisely the identical thought! Let the mind-stretching begin. ALPHABETICAL BIRDS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER 1620 The period from initial white settlement of the ruffed grouse’s habitat until the middle of the 19th Century would be the period in the existence of this bird in which it would be a creature of the forest edges, benefiting from opening of clearings and settlements in the forest and making itself a pest in gardens and orchards (then heavy market hunting would set in and populations would decidedly decline). Matchlock muskets had been almost useless for hunting because blowing the match tended to frighten the game, so the white people had been relying on crossbows. At about this point the “snaphaunce” muskets began to be used to hunt birds (larger game was becoming scarce due to deforestation). While German marksmen had begun to attempt to shoot birds in flight as early as 1560, and Japanese hunters were doing this as early as 1612, aerial shooting would not be mentioned in English sporting literature until 1686 (the rule about “not shooting a sitting duck” was not yet invented; by the 1710s “sporting” aerial shooting would be all the rage in France, and during the 1720s it would become popular in Britain as well). ALPHABETICAL BIRDS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER AN ACCOUNT OF TWO VOYAGES TO NEW-EN to the year of Christ 1673. The Partridge is larger than ours, white flesht, but very dry they are indeed a sort of Partridges called Grooses. From the year of World BY John Josselyn Gent. ALPHABETICAL BIRDS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX RUFFED GROUSE DIFFERENT DRUMMER 1634 April: William Wood’s NEW ENGLANDS PROSPECT. A TRUE, LIVELY, AND EXPERIMENTALL DESCRIPTION OF THAT PART OF AMERICA, COMMONLY CALLED NEW ENGLAND: DISCOVERING THE STATE OF THAT COUNTRIE, BOTH AS IT STANDS TO OUR NEW-COME ENGLISH PLANTERS; AND TO THE OLD NATIVE INHABITANTS. LAYING DOWNE THAT WHICH MAY BOTH ENRICH THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE MIND-TRAVELLING READER, OR BENEFIT 1 THE FUTURE-VOYAGER, published in this year in London by John Dawson, described Boston’s bay: “The chiefe Ilands which keepe out the Winde and the Sea from disturbing the Harbours, are first Deare Iland, which lies within a flight-shot of Pullin-point. This Iland is so called, because of the Deare which often swimme thither from the Maine, where they are chased by the Woolves: Some have killed sixteen Deare in a day upon this Iland.” Deer Island, Long Island, and Hog Island next to Noddle Island in the upper Boston Harbor were leased to the town for 21 years at a rent of £3 per year.2 This NEW ENGLANDS PROSPECT featured a woodcut illustration entitled “The South part of New-England, as it is Planted this yeare, 1634” prepared by Thomas Cotes for John Bellamie. Said map would be reissued in conjunction with another early map, as a lithograph, in 1846 in Boston by William B. Fowle. This map, and the other one, a 1677 map by John Foster (1648-1681), were the 1st to show both the Algonquian name, “Musketaquid,” and the English name, “Concord,” for the 1st 1.