";s:4:"text";s:2529:" Young birds also eat ants, spittle bugs, and other small insects. Males have highly specialized lateral cervical apteria (bare patches on the lower neck/upper breast) that are exposed during display.
The Sooty Grouse is a large game bird of the wet mountain forests of the Pacific Coast. Grouse / ɡ r aʊ s / are a group of birds from the order Galliformes, in the family Phasianidae.Grouse are frequently assigned to the subfamily Tetraoninae (sometimes Tetraonidae), a classification supported by mitochondrial DNA sequence studies, and applied by the American Ornithologists' Union, ITIS, and others. Description. Females are intricately camouflaged in brown, buff, and white. Definitive Basic male Dusky Grouse.
Dusky Grouse feed most heavily very early in the morning and again near dusk, mostly on the ground except when eating buds, shoots, leaves, or fruit from taller trees. Supercilliary apteria (‘combs') of males change color from yellow to red during courtship display.
Adults have a long square tail, gray at the end. Relatively large and moderately long-tailed, grayish grouse. The dusky grouse (Dendragapus obscurus) is a species of forest-dwelling grouse native to the Rocky Mountains in North America. They eat needles, buds, berries, and insects.
Dusky Grouse Male 47-57 cm, c. 1245 g; female 44-48 cm, c. 850 g. Relatively large grouse; male mostly grey or slate-coloured, lacking black breast of Falcipennis canaden Males are a steely gray-blue, but during courtship they reveal orange eye combs and yellow-orange air sacs in the neck. The ranges of Dusky Grouse and Sooty Grouse meet and overlap on the east slope of the Cascades, creating a zone of confusion between the two species.
Dusky Grouse is locally fairly common in all three of these areas in suitable habitat, mostly at middle elevations but extending up to tree line in the subalpine zone in some localities. Until 2006, the dusky grouse and sooty grouse were both called the blue grouse, but they are now recognized as two separate species (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife 2018).