[Dean Romig]

Here's the picture I promised . . . actually two pictures, in both pictures you can see the broken band of the black stripe of the tailfeathers on the gray phase bird indicating it is a female while the big brown phase bird has the solid black stripe of the male ruffed grouse. The second picture shows half the contents of his crop - thornapples! It was about all thornapples but I only removed about half. There are some remnants of mushrooms and apple peckings but, surprise - no green leafy stuff at all! There's a story that goes with this big brown phase male grouse but I'll save it for a Parker Pages story. So, once in a while we really do connect with "the trickiest thing in feathers."