The solemn hooting of the species with the widest
throat seemed to us the very wildest of all the winter sounds.
Prairie chickens came strolling in family flocks about the shanty,
picking seeds and grasshoppers like domestic fowls, and they became
still more abundant as wheat-and corn-fields were multiplied, but also
wilder, of course, when every shotgun in the country was aimed at
them. The booming of the males during the mating-season was one of the
loudest and strangest of the early spring sounds, being easily heard
on calm mornings at a distance of a half or three fourths of a mile.
As soon as the snow was off the ground, they assembled in flocks of a
dozen or two on an open spot, usually on the side of a ploughed field,
ruffled up their feathers, inflated the curious colored sacks on the
sides of their necks, and strutted about with queer gestures something
like turkey gobblers, uttering strange loud, rounded, drumming
calls,--_boom! boom! boom!_ interrupted by choking sounds. My brother
Daniel caught one while she was sitting on her nest in our corn-field.
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