He knew his name. He loved his people. He had a best friend named Beau who was a hunting dog.
He, by the way, was a wild ruffed grouse named Brick.
Brick just came out of the woods in Phillips one day in the fall of 2017 and started following Caleb Warren’s father Michael around the yard, Warren said Friday. Warren was away at school when Brick first arrived.
“[Dad] started sending me videos of this partridge that would just follow him around,” Warren said. “We all figured he would just go away after a while, but when I came back from school, my Dad actually had named him.”
Warren got a year-old blue tick hound named Beau trained to hunt rabbits about the time he returned home from school in spring 2018, and the grouse and the dog bonded almost immediately, Warren said.
When they let Beau outside and called Brick out of the woods, the bird would come running every time, he said, adding that the two made an entertaining pair as they played in the yard.
Brick would watch the Warrens target practicing and would stay close when they watered the garden, but he mostly just tugged at pant legs, Warren said. And whenever friends came to visit, the Warrens called Brick by name out of the woods and the bird came on the run.
The extent of Brick’s loyalty to the Warrens and Beau didn’t end at friendships. He also went hunting with them — for deer, rabbits and even grouse.
They weren’t worried about shooting him though.
“It was easy enough to pick him out because, well, like my Dad said, he will be the only bird running at you and not away,” Warren said.
Sadly, Brick died around the start of 2020. Warren did not say how, if he even knew.
But the little grouse named Brick is still the talk among the Warren family and their friends.
“We’ve always had a bunch of birds around, but nothing like him,” Warren said.