Crops & Breeds › Grouse & Ptarmigan

🍗 Sharp-tailed Grouse

Grouse & Ptarmigan · breed reference

THE DANCING GROUND: cocks gather at dawn, drop their wings, point their tails at the sky and RUN IN PLACE with their feet going like a drum roll, spinning and stopping dead in unison — a display that gave several plains nations their grass dances, and the one lek in this family a person is still fairly likely to see. The most widespread and least threatened of the prairie grouse, from Alaska to New Mexico, and the one most used in restoration — though note carefully that restoration here means TRANSLOCATING WILD BIRDS from a healthy population, not rearing them, because rearing prairie grouse works about as well as rearing ruffed grouse. Purple neck sacs, against the prairie-chicken's orange. State permit; hunted across much of its range.