128 HILL BIRDS OF SCOTLAND 



feet. In Japan it has been reported at the 9250 feet 

 level. It occurs in parts of Russia. It seems to be absent 

 from the Himalayas and the Andes. Of the Ptarmigan 

 found in Europe and North America, the Icelandic form 

 most closely resembles our own native birds. In China, 

 Alaska, and Arctic America numerous forms are found, 

 while from the mountains of Newfoundland comes a grey 

 form, resembling our own. In Spitzbergen a larger form, 

 Lagopus hypoboreus, occurs, much resembling the Willow 

 Grouse. 



In this country the Ptarmigan is nowadays found no 

 farther north than Caithness, though it formerly inhabited 

 the Hoy Hills in Orkney. Early in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury it still bred in the Galloway Hills in the south of 

 Scotland, and a shepherd told Sir Herbert Maxwell that 

 in 1826 he saw a Ptarmigan on the Merrick (2700 feet) in 

 that district. Recent attempts to reintroduce it there 

 have been so far unsuccessful. In the seventeenth century 

 it was written of the Merrick : " In the remote parts of this 

 great mountain are very large red deer, and about the top 

 thereof that fine bird called the Mountain Partridge, 

 or by the commonalty Tarmachan, about the size of a Red 

 Cock and the flesh much of the same nature ; feeds as 

 that bird doth on the seeds of the bullrush, and makes its 

 protection in the chinks and hollow places of thick stones 

 from the insults of the eagles which are in plenty, both the 

 large grey and the black, about that mountain." Ben 

 Lomond is now its southernmost limit. If local rumour 

 be relied on, a few lived in earlier times in the Lake Dis- 

 trict, and one, said to have been killed on Skiddaw, was 

 formerly in a local museum in Keswick. Doubts have, 

 however, been cast on these statements on account of the 

 fact that even nowadays a white mottled variety of the 

 Red Grouse is to be found in that district so resembling 

 the true Ptarmigan that it has been taken for this bird 



