128 WILLOW PTARMIGAN. 



bircli knots, and the stalks of the blaeberry bushes. In spring their 

 chief food consists of birch knots. 



Although no doubt Willow Grouse would aiford as good sport to 

 the shooter as the Eed Grouse, scarcely any one ever shoots them 

 here in a fair manner, and they are principally taken in snares in 

 the winter, and sent down frozen to the different towns for sale; 

 and some idea of this traffic may be formed by the fact that a single 

 dealer in one of the northern provinces, according to Nilsson, during 

 one winter when the birds were plentiful, sent off about fifty thousand 

 Dal E-ipa. 



Beak black, short, thick, and convex; upper mandible tolerably 

 blunt, and a little longer than the lower, (but out of a great many 

 which I have examined scarcely two are alike.) Iris dark brown; 

 eyelids covered with down, the edges brown. Over the eye in the 

 male a large half-round vermilion spot covered with small warts, and 

 fringed upwards with a red comb, three or four millemetres high, 

 dentated at the edges. This spot and comb is smaller and paler in 

 the female, and in both sexes is most apparent in the breeding 

 season. The claws vary in form and colour at different seasons; in 

 winter they are long, of an even breadth, tolerably straight, thin, 

 concave beneath, white, and only brown at the roots. In summer 

 they are shorter, oblong, oval, and flat (not concave) underneath. 

 They are shed in July or August. 



The old male in summer dress. — Head, neck, breast, and sides, red 

 brown, sometimes chesnut, with black spots, especially on the top of 

 the head and back of the neck, sometimes even with black transverse 

 streaks or wavy lines on the breast; under chin for the most part 

 black, with a white spot on each side. The eyelid white, and some- 

 times a white spot over the nostrils. Back, shoulders, over rump, 

 upper tail coverts, and the innermost wing feathers, as well as the 

 middle coverts, black, transversely speckled with rusty yellow or red 

 brown lines. The smaller wing coverts, most of the wing feathers, 

 belly, thighs, and legs, white; the six first primaries with brown 

 shafts. Tail feathers — the fourteen black, with white feathers on the 

 tips, which are broadest on the middle ones; the two feathers which 

 lie over them and their coverts speckled with black and red brown. 

 The under tail coverts red brown, speckled with black, and marked 

 with a streak in front of the white edge at the end; tarsi in front 

 and toes on the inner half covered with dirty white hair-like feathers; 

 tarsi behind and the front part of the toes naked. 



Female in summer. — Head, neck, breast, and sides, rusty yellow, 

 with black spots or transverse streaks; these are especially thick on 



