SOL 30- Pinnated Grouse

          Pinnated Grouse are the best. They are also known as prairie chickens, but I call them the large lemon neck birds. Basically, they are large brown birds with lemons in their necks and neon eyebrows. Did I mention that their ears are two inches tall? Yeah, they are pretty dang amazing.

This is a pretty famous Audobon painting of the pinnated grouse.

          While I would not say that they are my favorite animal, I would definitely say that they are pretty high up on that list. Geese are still the winners. Grouse tend to be pretty weird as a whole species, but I love pinnated grouse because they are still really weird but are the most normal out of the bunch. Sadly, many of the grouse populations are really struggling because of chemicals used in farming and contamination into nature. They are also eaten by hawk. They are pretty large, maxing out at two feet in length.
          Most other grouse are VERY weird. Take the greater sage grouse, for example. It has neon green eyebrows and a massive, spikey tail. All grouse are a part of the same family and, boy let me tell you, it is one weird family. Pretty much all of the males have large throat pocket things while all of the females look super normal. All of the different species gather in large flocks, meaning that there are sometimes massive groupings of these weird birds. Can you imagine how hard the females must judge the males? Like dang, your eyebrow game needs to be on fleek.
          This post may seem out of the blue, but I recently had to draw a pinnated grouse for a book I wrote. It is a full page illustration of a male, so it looks very strange. Luckily enough for me, I can just tell anyone that asks about it that that is what it actually looks like and that the bird is just really weird. Honestly, sometimes I wish humans had something like a lemon neck that was just a really weird trait carried for no reason. I think it would be hilarious if everyone of one sex had to walk around with a bulging neon yellow neck. Anyways, this was a long rambling slice about my love of the pinnated grouse.