Audubon: Early Drawings, Harvard University Press 2008.

The Wood Grouse Male. Tetrao Umbellus. Flatland Ford, June 1805 [i.e., 1810 or later]. Pencil and chalk on paper; 40 x 50 cm. Signed J.J. Audubon. Audubon no. 84, MCZ. Watermark: J. Whatman 1810.

Ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus). Size 15.5-19.5 inches. In The Rarest of the Rare: Stories behind the Treasures at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Nancy Pick recounts the evidence in this drawing of cutthroat competition between Audubon and Alexander Wilson in their quest for dominance of the American ornithological landscape. Although Audubon wrote “June 1805” on the drawing, the watermark on the paper dates it to 1810—several years after Wilson’s drawing of the species. Although grouse are usually considered ground birds, they do feed frequently in trees, usually on the catkins, flowers, and buds of birch and cottonwood. According to Dr. Sergei Drovetskii of the University of Alaska, Anchorage, ruffed grouse in Alaska feed exclusively in the tree canopy for seven or eight months of the year, and their feet exhibit telltale signs of this activity. In Adubon’s drawing (and in Wilson’s), one can clearly see a fringe of comb-like structures around the bottom margin of each toe. These pictinations were traditionally thought to act as snowshoes, but their prominence in grouse species that spend more time in trees, and their uneven pattern of wear incurred by slipping on branches, suggest that they act more as grips—like treads on a sneaker. Grouse frequently feed at the very tips of branches, righting themselves with flapping wings, making the need for extra traction paramount.