18 THE GROUSE SUBFAMILY 



tells us, took place in Northumberland during the winter of 1884-85. 

 " All food was frozen," he remarks. The grouse soon accepted the 

 conditions before it was too late, and gathered in thousands on the 

 heights of Simondside, and from thence passed in immense packs 

 across the Coquet to the sheltered moors about Cragside. During the 

 severe weather of 1886 and 1895, again huge packs were driven to the 

 low country, where they fed on corn, turnip leaves, buds, and hedge- 

 row fruits, many perching on the hedges and the lower boughs of 

 trees, such as thorn and rowan, to secure the berries still left. The 

 behaviour of grouse during these bursts of inclement weather seems 

 to be just what we should expect. This being so, it is the more 

 remarkable to find another ornithologist, and one who speaks with 

 authority, giving an account of the behaviour of grouse during heavy 

 snowfalls which is utterly at variance with that of Mr. Millais, and 

 seems, further, to be outside the experience of other ornithologists 

 whom I have consulted. I refer to that of Mr. Abel Chapman, 1 who 

 tells us that within twenty-four hours after a heavy fall of snow the 

 grouse indeed disappear, but they are underneath it, having con- 

 structed a "perfect network of burrows most nearly resembling a 

 rabbit warren. You may have seen from afar or you may not just 

 the head of one grouse, the sentry on guard. Quite as often this 

 precaution is neglected, and a whole pack will be asleep in their 

 burrows, secured, they imagine, by the miles of snow-fastnesses that 

 surround them." This habit, of instantly burrowing beneath the snow 

 as soon as it is deep enough, Mr. Chapman holds, is a survival from 

 times when winters were more severe than now, and he reminds us 

 that it is the invariable practice of the nearly allied rock ptarmigan, 

 Lagopus hemileucurus, in Spitsbergen, which enjoys but four months of 

 life in daylight and aboveground, the remaining eight being perforce 

 spent in snow-burrows and tunnels in the dark. In the Arctic and 

 Scandinavia, he writes, " Nature has organised a beautiful provision 

 to meet these cases. For the earlier autumnal snows fall soft and 



1 Bird-life of the Borders, p. 263. 



