CAUSES OF MORTALITY IN THE RED GROUSE 147 



on to say that hand-reared Grouse can live for several years 

 in perfect health without seeing anything but corn ; and that 

 whereas on the Dalnaspidal and Rannoch moors the birds 

 were too far from cultivation ever to see corn, yet they suffered 

 badly from disease in 1873. 



As with theories based on the belief that Grouse feed on 

 frost-bitten heather, so with those that are based on their 

 feeding upon corn, post-mortem examinations produce little 

 evidence to show that they suffer any serious harm from the 

 latter food, or that they ever under any circumstances fill 

 their crops with the former. 



Turning now to the dangers and risks attendant upon the Risks of 

 natural processes of reproduction and moulting, we find tSn 

 that the exigencies of courtship, mating, and moulting in P rocesses - 

 the male, of moulting, the laying of eggs, and the hatching 

 out and rearing of a brood of chicks in the female, 

 constitute the sequence of a taxation which bears heavily 

 upon the Grouse. It is worth while to look at these in 

 detail to see how far each may fairly be burdened with 

 responsibility. 



If an inquiry is made into the cock bird's life he will be 

 found engaged in constant vigilance and warfare from the time 

 of pairing, generally about the end of February or March, 

 onwards for a month or two at least. The battles are more 

 bloody and more disastrous to the weaklings than is generally 

 supposed, and many of the half-starved and parasite-infected 

 cocks, the so-called cases of" disease " found dead along the 

 burns, have really been killed in fighting. It is a fact, testified 

 by more than one reliable gamekeeper, that two or more healthy 

 cocks will sometimes set upon and kill a weakling before they 

 settle their own dispute ; and of the urgency of their own dis- 

 pute the following quotation by Macpherson in the Fur and 

 Feather Series affords a good example. He quotes a Perthshire 

 keeper, who " saw two male Grouse engaged in combat, so 

 completely blinded by fury were the birds that they dashed 

 against the wall of a stone building, one of them killing himself 



