CHAPTER VII 



PINE AND HEATHER 



(Capercaillie, Blackgame, Grouse) 



THE capercaillie is so named from the Gaelic capull- 

 coille, or "" horse of the woods/' which somewhat 

 incongruous distinction Yarrel considers to be in 

 connection with its size, as in ** horse mackerel, horse- 

 ant, horse-fly, and horse-radish." It is by far the largest 

 of our game birds, and an adult male will weigh as much 

 as ten pounds. There is, however, a peculiar difference 

 between the size of the males and that of the females, 

 the hen birds weighing as a rule less than half the cocks 

 — say four to five pounds. I believe that the Scandinavian 

 capers attain almost twice the weights of the Scottish 

 samples. 



Nature seems to have run riot in the production of the 

 cock capercaillie. One cannot imagine two birds of 

 the same order more completely dissimilar than the 

 cock capercaillie and the cock pheasant. They have 

 hardly a point in common, yet the hen birds of the two 

 species retain a very strong family resemblance. The 

 cock caper is, indeed, more like some gigantic offshoot 

 of the race to which the hen birds belong rather than 

 the father of it. My observations of this bird have 

 occurred principally in the Perthshire Highlands, particu- 

 larly the Loch Tay and the Dochart country, where 

 numbers of capercaillie are to be found if one knows the 

 glens they frequent. On the south-east shore of Loch 

 Tay they favour the birch forests, though in other parts 



127 



