A partridge in a bare tree...

My friend Clistine took this photo of a partridge (or grouse) on a gray winter day.

It's hard to tell if this is a partridge or a grouse in today's picture, but at any rate it seems a rather unusual roosting spot. I'm more used to seeing them on the ground huddling together in snow banks or bursting into explosive low flight if disturbed. But do they roost in trees at night?

We lived in the rural Okanagan for 25 years where Ring-necked Pheasants are a common sight and in all those years, I never once saw where they spend the night. Actually, I never once thought about their sleeping arrangements. After we retired back to Saskatchewan, we were on a trip through Montana when we stopped very early in the morning at a bird sanctuary between Minot and Bismark. When we were driving into the sanctuary, I spotted the first Ring-neck roosting in a scrubby bush, and I had to laugh. The bird looked too big for the spindly shrub with most of its leaves already fallen. But as we continued driving toward the lake, we saw more and more pheasants in big trees and small bushes. Obviously 6 a.m. was too early for them to be out of bed. Later when we were driving out, we never saw a single pheasant in a tree. They were all stalking around on the ground doing their breakfast search.

Actually, if the bird in the tree had a slightly longer tail, it could be a female Ring-necked Pheasant! Pheasant hens do resemble female Sharp-tailed Grouse.

Speaking of hens, I had a brief one-season stint with a few chickens during the time in my life when I kept milk goats for my growing children. John, unfortunately, does not like chickens or any barnyard fowl and was not the least impressed when a neighbor presented me with a Bantam hen and her four newly hatched chicks. In a few days, the mother flew back down the hill to my neighbors' hen house, leaving the fluffy offspring with us. Of course the cute cuddly chicks quickly lost their downy look and turned into proper bantams - one rooster, three hens - promptly referred to as Rooster Cogburn and the Girls.

Rooster Cogburn, for some reason, took great delight in terrorizing to my youngest daughter. When he heard the school bus stop at the main road, he would rush to the top of our driveway and wait, pawing the ground. As soon as her blond head appeared, he would thunder down the driveway in a great show of ruffled feathers and she would detour off the road and race screaming through the trees with Rooster Cogburn nipping at her heels. He always broke off the chase before she reached the house so I suspect he was just trying to add some excitement to his life. Unfortunately, when he extended his terrorizing to my little niece Kim who had come to stay for a visit, he met his Waterloo and ended up fitting into a pint-sized freezer bag and later reappearing on the dinner table with other fried chicken.

As for The Girls, they began laying eggs and since John refused to build a chicken house for three birds, finding the eggs was a daily treasure hunt around the yard. At night, they roosted in the Ponderosa pine trees and when winter came and snow piled on their backs at night, we felt sorry for them. Truthfully, Karen felt sorry for herself; she was usually first out of the house to feed her horse in the morning and would be startled by hens shaking snow down her neck as they dive bombed from the trees. And so we rounded them up and took them back down the hill to our neighbor with the hen house.