GROUSE, applied particularly to the bird Lagopus scoticus, the red grouse, the only species of bird peculiar to the British Isles, where it inhabits the moors, feeding on the heather shoots. It is distinguished from the closely allied and subarctic willow grouse, L. lagopus, by the fact that it does not turn white in winter, and is rarely found away from heather. L. lagopus has the same rich chestnut-brown on the head, neck, and breast when in summer plumage, and ranges from Scandinavia to Siberia and from the Aleutian Islands to Newfoundland. A third species of the genus, which also turns white in winter, is the ptarmigan (q.v.) (L. mutes), which is replaced in America, Greenland, and Iceland by the scarcely distinguishable L. rupestris. A large form, L. Iiemi leucurus inhabits Spitsbergen, while L. leucurus is confined to the northern Rockies.
The bird to which the name grouse originally belonged is the blackcock (q.t.) or black grouse (Tetrao tetrix).
In America is the forest-dwell ing Bonasa umbellus, the ruffed grouse or beech-partridge, in which males "drum" on a log in spring; while other New World forms include Canachites cana densis, the spruce partridge ; Ceti trocercus uro phasianus, the sage grouse, in which, as in the black cock, the males assemble at definite tournament grounds in spring; Pedioecetes, the sharp tailed grouse; and Tympanuchus the prairie-hen, with the sexes unusually similar in appearance.
See Elliot's Monograph of the Tetraoninae, and Baird, Brewer, and Ridgway's North American Birds; also the article on SHOOTING.