NOTES. 87 



During the last year or so I have made several " surveys " 

 of the moorlands that lie (roughly speaking) between 

 Manchester and Huddersfield, and have more than once 

 walked for miles and seen many scores of Grouse without 

 meeting with a single plant belonging to the order Ericaceae. 

 The plant that is called ling by all the sportsmen and keepers 

 on these moors is the crowberry (Empetrum nigrum) ; true 

 ling, when it does occur, is called " heather," and the heaths 

 are called " bell heathers." 



In the earlier months of the present year I made a thorough 

 search over some five or six square miles of a particular series 

 of Grouse moors without seeing a solitary plant of either 

 heather or heath. Yet Grouse were numerous, and I saw 

 several nests during my later visits. Where heather and 

 crowberry grow side by side, as they do on some moors, it is 

 easy to persuade anybody that they have been wrong in their 

 botany ; but the task is naturally harder where the real 

 heather happens to be altogether replaced by crowberry. One 

 experienced keeper refused to listen when I suggested that he 

 had not a plant of heather on his moor, and I rather think 

 that this will be the mental attitude of many another person. 

 The vegetation of these moors has been made the subject of 

 an elaborate memoir by two authors (Smith and Moss, 

 Geographical Distribution of Vegetation in Yorkshire, Geo- 

 graphical Journal, April, 1903), who have quite omitted to 

 refer to the absence of heather from many hundreds of acres 

 of the moorlands they write about. It is hardly necessary 

 for me to add that no hint of this state of affairs appears in 

 the writings of any of our North Country naturalists. I have 

 spent many hours, at every season of the year, on Grouse 

 moors in both Wales and Scotland ; but as my interest in the 

 food of the bird is very recent, I cannot speak with any 

 confidence of the heather on moors other than those 

 I have lately visited in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. 

 So far as I can gather real Grouse disease is altogether 

 unknown on these heather-less moors : the discussion of the 

 subject with the keepers soon makes this evident ; and it is 

 rather interesting to read that this happy state obtains on 

 many moors in the West of Scotland, a part of the world 

 where the crowberry (fide many Scottish "Florae") appears 

 to be common. There may be something in this, for, without 

 going too far into the botany of the subject, I may say that I 

 have never yet found the crowberry growing anywhere except 

 on more or less pure peat, a soil that supports a peculiar 

 flora, and, presumably, a correspondingly peculiar fauna. 



