14 



NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 



Nor does the loss of our black game prove the only gap in the 

 fauna Selborniensis ; for another beautiful link in the chain of be- 

 ings is wanting, I mean the red deer, which towards the beginning 

 of this century amounted to about five hundred head, and made 



Red Deer. 



wild berries, and the seeds of various rushes and other plants, but chiefly on the young and 

 tender shoots of the heath ; and, in winter, when these are uo longer procurable, upon the buds 

 and tops of the birch and wild alder, and the embryo shoots of the different firs. These they can 

 readily obtain, as unlike the ptarmigan (lm>opus)) to which genus the red grouse of sportsmen 

 belongs, they are capable of perching upon trees, and always retire to roost at nigbt, like phea- 

 sants, on a horizontal bough. They frequently descend, too, in the vicinity of cultivation, to 

 peck some grain in the cornfields. The black grouse also differs from the red, and the other 

 members of the genus lagopusi in being a polygamous bird, as indeed are all those which now 

 range in teirao- The latter considerably resemble, in their manners, the common domestic poultry, 

 and the males of them spread the tail, and strut, and drop'their wings in the style of the turkey 

 and pea-fowl, a habit which is observed in no species of the ptarmigan genus, nor in any mono- 

 gamous kind with which I am acquainted, but which is curiously noticeable in the cow-bunting 

 of Wilson's "American Ornithology," the only known member of the extensive natural family to 

 which it belongs which' is not so. Most polygamous birds are indeed provided, at least in the 

 breeding season, with some kind of curious display, and this is remarkably exemplified in the 

 case of the ruff (machetes variabilis), the only known species of its numerous tribe which does 

 not pair, and also the only one which is adorned in spring with a singular mass of produced 

 feathers about the head and neck. The true grouse hybridize very readily in confinement with 



