Remember this quiz?

Well, the wings are loaded, and ready for tomorrow's trip to the annual wing bee. Where a dozen or so of us will sit in a garage and read wings. Probably a thousand or more, the way some folks are claiming. Listening all the while to the cackling of the pheasants in the nearby pens.

All this occurring Wednesday morning, after the early AM pheasant hunts.

And no, I got no shotgun packed, no license, no stamps, no bird dog. Just a camera, a map, and coordinates for a few benchmarks that nobody else has bothered to look for in the past thirty to fifty years.

So, finally, the quiz answers.

It's a chick wing. A female chick.

As Melissa remembered, the important point is that for most birds, juvenile feathers are pointed. Basically, they're growing long faster than they're growing wide. So, if you look at the quiz wing,

at "A", you'll notice the outer flight feathers are pointed. That means they grew in when the bird was a juvenile. Now with grouse, the outer two flight feathers are usually kept for an entire year or a little more. So a bird with the outer two flight feathers pointed is either a chick, or a yearling. But having a third pointed flight feather is easy proof it was a chick.

If that's not enough for you, right at the bend of the wing, at the wrist joint, is the last secondary flight feather ("B") to moult out and be replaced. Grouse replace all ten of these every year, including their chick year, but around September you are often lucky enough to find them with a remnant chick secondary, and simple proof it was a chick.

And finally, the coverts, or covering feathers of the shoulder of the wing, have a broad white stripe down the rachis, or center vein in chick feathers, and only a narrow white stripe on adult feathers. These ("C") are wide, and the bird was a chick.

And now, I gotta find my key to relearn how to tell adult and yearling wings apart...