00 GALLING. 



too readily, so that the sportsman cannot get within range of 

 them, though he sees them in considerable numbers. When 

 the young had acquired their full strength of feather, which 

 is commonly in November, but sooner or later in the month, 

 according to the season, the families, or broods, which till then 

 kept apart, mingle with each other, and flock in packs of 

 two or three families. They are then strong, and range to 

 greater distances, sometimes approaching the stubble-fields 

 of the upland farms ; but they are shy in proportion. But 

 even then they never remain long on the wing, but make 

 their journeys by short stages. Their flight is low and pecu- 

 liar, and apparently performed with considerable effort. It 

 is well expressed in the lines of Burns : 



" The moorcock springs, on whirring wings, 

 Among the blooming heather." 



When the winter is very severe, they descend in consider- 

 able flocks, and many of them remain, and breed rather 

 lower down the next season ; but in these cases they rather 

 avoid the plantations; and when they begin to pair, or 

 rather to fight for the females (for they are polygamous), which 

 is as early in the season as the snow will admit, the call of 

 the male bird, which is heard at a very early hour, and after- 

 wards all the night long, till the young are hatched, is 

 always heard from the open moor, and from the centres of 

 those detached tracks of heathy waste, which they continue 

 to haunt in the lowlands. 



Their natural enemies, the birds of prey, for, like the 

 ptarmigan, they have not much to dread from quadrupeds, 

 the few of which that remain are in the brakes and copses, 

 have been much thinned ; the seasons have been rendered 

 milder in their haunts by the progress of cultivation in the 

 neighbouring parts ; the practice of burning the heather in 

 close-time, which, though forbidden, could not be altogether 



