About an hour after we left the Hanna House B&B we saw the first cyclists on the road coming toward us. After a salutary greeting, a ruffled grouse bolted from the side of the road and stopped in front of my bike. I slammed on the brakes and the grouse did nothing but hold its ground. It just stood there and started to walk around my stationary bike. I called Ted to come over though he was initially hesitant as he has been through many nature calls only to be thwarted by the animal moving out of camera range.
But that wasn’t the case here.
The ruffled grouse is a lovely bird with a long fan shaped tail and a black band around its neck, which it ruffled out as it pranced (hence its name.) It kept walking around me strutting like some feathered John Travolta of ‘Saturday Night Fever’ fame. And its behavior told me that it was a male.
Once Ted arrived, the bird made its way into a nearby drainage ditch and we thought our opportunity to take a picture was lost. But no, this bird came out to pose for Ted. It stopped in certain spaces, turned around and walked the equivalent of a fashion runway to give Ted the best perspective. We figured how lucky could we get?
Well as it turns out the bird wanted a handout for its work. It got uncomfortably close and seemed to want food. I was wondering if we were being taken for a ride and then I realized something: This bird was a hustler and because we stopped for it, we were its marks.
Like a con artist who falls in front of a car to collect insurance payments, this grouse worked the bicycling crowd. And let’s face it, who is an easier mark?
When Ted and I realized this, we laughed, got on our bikes and started to leave. But the grouse was not having any of it and started to chase us in a menacing fashion. It was almost comical to see it run at us with its little legs and for the first 50 feet it would not give up. But after a while it realized that it could not catch us and returned to the side of the road, waiting for the next sucker.
