Spruce Grouse

What is most remarkable about Meriwether Lewis‘s work as a naturalist is that, considering how many other responsibilities he bore, he observed and wrote so much about the plants and animals he saw. When he had the leisure, as he did during the long wait on the west side of the Rockies in May and June 1806, he wrote in such detail. Indeed, it was only the division of his concentration, no doubt, that made some of his descriptions ambiguous, and occasionally erroneous. He was, nonetheless, persistent, objective, and thoughtful. Moreover, he could easily recognize new species by comparing virtually everything he saw with previous observations. An unusual example is his description of the bird now commonly known in the U.S. and Canada as the spruce grouse.

Lewis’s Description

The large black and white pheasant is peculiar to that portion of the Rocky Mountain watered by the Columbia river.    at least we did not see them in these mountains until I we reached the waters of that river nor since we have left those mountains. they are about the size of a well grown hen.    the contour of the bird is much that of the redish brown pheasant common to our country.    the tail is proportionably as long and is composed of eighteen feathers of equal length, of an uniform dark brown tiped with black.    the feathers of the body are of a dark brown black and white.    the black is that which most predominates, and the wh[i]te feathers are irregularly intermixed with those of the black and dark brown on every part, but in greater proportion about the neck breast and belley.    this mixture gives it very much the appearance of that kind of dunghill fowl^[1]“Dunghill” was then the common designation for domestic, or “barnyard,” chickens, Gallus gallus, more formally classified as members of the biological order Galliformes. which the hen-wives of our country call domanicker.

in the brest of some of these birds the white predominates most.    they are not furhished with tufts of long feathers on the neck as our pheasants are, but have a space on each side of the neck about 2½ inches long and 1 In. in width on which no feathers grow, tho’ tis concealed by the feathers which are inserted on the hinder and front part of the neck; this space seems to surve them to dilate or contract the feathers of the neck with more east.    the eye is dark, the beak black, curved somewhat pointed and the upper exceeds the lower chap.^[2]The chaps are the parts of the beak.

they have a narrow stripe of vermillion colour above each eye which consists of a fleshey substance not protuberant but uneven with a number of minute rounded dots.    it has four toes on each foot of which three are in front.    it is booted to the toes.    it feeds on wild fruits, particularly the berry of the sac-a-commis, and much also on the seed of the pine and fir.—

The Corps might have been amused by this bird’s attitude. Whereas the blue grouse sets sail from the mountainside with a certain nonchalance, and the ruffed grouse explodes into the air with a sound that seems super-avian, the spruce grouse often poses on a log and stares–or glares–at the intruder as if reassured by profound faith in its camouflage

Lewis wrote his description at Fort Clatsop on March 3, 1806. In 1814, Nicholas Biddle paraphrased Lewis’s description as follows, and in 1893 the ornithologist Elliott Coues emended Biddle’s Lewis as noted (and bolded by the present editor) in the brackets:

Lewis had added a paragraph on a “small speckled pheasant found in the same country with that above described,” which differed only in terms of size and “somewhat in colour.” Biddle included an edited version of it. Subsequently, ornithologists concluded that Lewis had mistaken a female of the same species for a variant of the preceding specimen.

The taxonomic history of this bird alone will serve to show how scientific insights have continually changed, as new analytical techniques and understandings have evolved. In 1895, today’s spruce grouse was called Canada grouse, Dendragapus canadensis (“tree-lover of Canada), and a similar bird was Franklin’s grouse (Dendragapus franklinii (“Franklin’s tree-lover”).^[3]John Franklin (1786-1847) was an English sea-captain and arctic explorer who led an ill-fated expedition to the Northwest Territories in 1819-22 in search of a Northwest Passage between the Atlantic … Continue reading In 1910 it was called the Hudsonian spruce partridge, Canachites canadensis (“Canadian noisemaker”). In 1931 its accepted common name in the U.S. became spruce grouse, while its scientific name, as well as that of Franklin’s grouse, remained the same as in 1910. In 1957 the distinction between the spruce grouse and Franklin’s grouse was dissolved by ornithologists, and the spruce grouse became the sole representative of the genus, keeping the name Canachites canadensis. In 1983, the genus of the spruce grouse was changed to Dendragapus, the species remaining canadensis. Five years later the Latin binomial for the spruce grouse was changed to Falcipennis canadensis. (The genus Falcipennis evidently was introduced as early as 1864, but the meaning of the Latin word is obscure nowadays.) In the 1950s and 60s, grouse hunters in the Bitterroot Mountains still called them “Franks,” although few if any Nimrods knew who Frank was.