Heath Hen.
Frontispiece reproduction of a painting by Louis Agassiz Fuertes: Male and Female Heath Hen. In: Alfred O. Gross’s The Heath Hen (Boston, 1928).
The heath hen, a bird related to the prairie chicken, lived along the eastern coast of the United States. Extremely common at the time when the first Europeans arrived, the bird dwindled in numbers under extreme pressure from hunting. As early as 1792, the state of New York passed a bill for the preservation of the heath hen, one of the first legislative efforts to save a species from extinction. The last remaining populations became the special study of Bowdoin College ornithologist Alfred Otto Gross. Despite efforts to protect the bird and its habitat, the last of the species probably died in the 1930s.
Fuertes’ posthumously published colored print features the male heath hen in its full glory, strutting on its dancing ground—a lek—as it inflates its yellow throat sacks to attract the watching hen.