GREENE – From the start, there was something curiously afowl.

Jim Roy drove down the old logging road last month, going to check his traps, and a partridge flew up and knocked into him.

Another pass-by and the supposed-to-be-reclusive bird did it again.

“I’m driving down the road to where I’d last seen her and she hit me in the back of the head and knocked my hat off,” Roy said Tuesday, still chuckling in awe.

Eventually, the bird sat on his shoulder, and on his head. He’d pat at the ATV and she’d jump up to sit on its rack.

Clearly, the bird he nicknamed Patty didn’t know he was a hunter. Or that she was in season.

In the wild, ruffed grouse, also called partridges, are extremely skittish, Roy said. “You can’t get within 50 yards of them, normally.”

He knew from the size and markings that it was a hen. Roy doubts she was hand-raised and domesticated; partridges don’t do well like that, he said. He also doubts she was hungry. At their first encounter the first week of December, the ground was still bare, offering plenty of bird kibble.

Yet each time she heard the longtime sportsman coming, “it looked like a football coming straight at you,” he said.

A dark, flighty football.

“She was called to my four-wheeler. This is an odd duck, what it is. It’s not a partridge, it’s an odd duck.”

After two weeks of run-ins, Roy started to worry. He had seen coyote and bobcat prints – and there was that little detail about her being perfectly legal to shoot. Patty was probably going to be a meal for someone.

So he called Maine Warden Dave Chabot.

“I gave him permission, ‘You see it, you catch it,'” Chabot told him.

Surprised to hear about that behavior in a healthy bird, Chabot mentioned the strange story to another trapper who said he’d walked that same logging road and had a partridge fly out and walk the lane behind him.

Neighbors denied feeding her, though one reported that she’d followed him around his woodpile.

Chabot said he was sure there was no way Roy would capture the bird. “Totally blew my mind when I got the phone call (and she was in his truck.) ‘Are you kidding me, Jim?'”

It wasn’t that hard, Roy said. He tucked her under his arm and drove out of the woods. “She never even flapped her wings to get away.”

The bird was relocated Dec. 20 to live with other partridges in an area where there’s no hunting. Patty has since been spotted at a backyard feeder with a bunch of doves.

“That’s the story of Patty the partridge,” Roy said. “She’s happy, I hope.

“I just didn’t want to see her get dusted. Hunting’s a sport. Hunting her wouldn’t be a sport.”