ANAKTUVUK PASS 59 



The females feed busily and frequently while courting and nesting. 

 By June 5, the females in their beautifully patterned summer plumage 

 are difficult to detect. 



During the whole period of mating and nesting, the females are 

 as secret and retiring as the males are conspicuous. The secrecy of 

 the females conceals them and their nests. The display of the males 

 looks provocative to predators and it would be interesting to think 

 that the males in this way distracted predation from the brooding 

 females. As a predator myself I have often been attracted to the 

 vicinity of nests by the displays made by the nonbrooding parent, and 

 I conclude that the occasional danger of predation must be less than 

 the constant need for advertising the occupation of a territory by a 

 family of nesting birds. For successful breeding each family must be 

 kept as a distinct unit within the society of rock ptarmigan. Thus 

 both the isolation of families and their cohesion in an orderly society 

 is effected by the display of the male. The inclination for display 

 dominates the behavior of breeding male birds to degrees varying 

 among the species. For the rock ptarmigan this concern for its family 

 and society seems to suppress the attention for individual protection 

 which is apparent in its behavior at other seasons. 



Pedioecetes phasianellus (Linnaeus) 



In addition to spruce grouse another timber grouse is called 

 Odgillyim kadgia^ "birch grouse," by the Nunamiut. At Bettles a 

 sharp-tailed grouse was clearly described by David Tobuk, an Eskimo 

 long resident there, who said that he had not seen one in recent years. 

 Simon Paneak recalled taking one at Hunt Fork about 1939. Older 

 Eskimos at Kobuk related to me the occurrence during one period in 

 that region of "birch grouse." I have not yet been able to develop a 

 chronology which would enable me to estimate the years when they 

 were well known, but I suspect that sharp-tailed grouse have been 

 rather common near the northern limit of timber during a period 

 which ended some 20 years ago. 



Cade and Buckley (1953) relate various accounts of sharp-tailed 

 grouse which indicate that in 1934 the population became dense in the 

 Tanana Valley. On one occasion in that year a large flock was seen 

 to fly away. This movement seemed to mark their disappearance from 

 that part of the Tanana Valley for thereafter there were no reports 

 of their occurrence near Fairbanks. Since that date these grouse have 

 not been widely common throughout interior Alaska. It seems pos- 

 sible that the reports of sharp-tailed grouse which I obtained in arctic 

 Alaska may be related to a date when they were abundant in much of 

 the subarctic interior. 



