The male spruce grouse in the images above was sitting low in a lichen-festooned spruce tree at Twin Lakes, near Churchill, Manitoba.  Although these grouse are extremely tame (earning them the nickname 'fool hen'), they are quiet and unobtrusive, and often quite hard to find.  Despite being told where to search for this guy, I probably would not have found him if he had not been walking around feeding.   These pictures were taken from about 2.5 meters distance while the bird preened and dozed.
              The birds in the photos below are females.   The grouse one of these images walked across a fire road in southwestern Montana and was perfectly willing to let me approach as closely as I wanted.  The others were also quite confiding, but were fairly high up in trees in a wooded park in Anchorage, Alaska.

• Canon 10D or 1D4; 100-400 mm IS zoom lens at about 350 mm (head) and 200 mm, or 800 mm IS lens, most with fill-in flash (2003, 2011)
• bottom: Nikon F3, 400mm f5.6 EDIF, Kodachrome 64 (1996)