Birds. 2945 



utter a harsh, grating noise, called by the Norwegians "singing," 

 which may be heard at a considerable distance : they are now 

 so taken up with their own mellifluous voices, that they have no ears 

 or eyes for anything else. Seizing the moment when this " singing" 

 begins, up starts the sportsman from his concealment, and darts 

 towards the sound as quickly as possible ; but in about five and thirty 

 seconds the singing is over, and the bird recovers the use of its hear- 

 ing and sight. The instant the sound of its voice ceases, the sportsman 

 stops quite still, wherever he may be : whether in water, in a bog, 

 half over a huge rock, or bending under a fallen tree, he must stand 

 perfectly still till the singing once more begins, which it is sure to do 

 in a few minutes. The instant the singing is heard again, away goes 

 the sportsman as before, and approaches nearer his victim, and again 

 stands still at the finale of the strain. Thus he proceeds through the 

 forest, till at length he gains the foot of the tree where the bird is 

 perched, and then, while the poor unconscious fowl is delighting itself 

 with music, a cool, steady shot from below brings him down with a 

 tremendous bounce, and the sportsman's bag is at once filled, for the 

 bird is as large as a turkey. In any other country but Norway (where 

 an Englishman is constantly hungry, and generally half starved, from 

 the difficulty of procuring any eatable food) I should say that the ca- 

 percailzie was a very inferior bird for the table ; the meat is too coarse 

 and dry, and scarcely resembles the meat of any bird I know : the 

 brown meat on the breast (for like its congener, the blackcock, it has 

 two different meats there) is more like beef than anything else. The 

 food of the capercailzie consists principally of the berries and leaves 

 of a great variety of dwarf shrubs which abound in Norwegian forests. 

 I opened the crops of several, and invariably found them filled with 

 the blue and red berries so well known in these forests ; the berries 

 and leaves were always whole, and the crops generally stuffed quite 

 full. In the crop of one bird I counted above a hundred berries, and 

 above three hundred leaves. Norwegian sportsmen have told me that 

 they feed on the leaves of the Scotch fir ; I never found one in the 

 crops of those I examined, but perhaps that constitutes their food in 

 the winter, when the berries and their leaves are gone, and the bushes 

 are hidden in snow. 



Great Black Woodpecker {Picus mar tins). While driving through 

 the immense forest of the Glommen, through which our road lay for 

 a hundred and fifty miles, and which stretched on either hand over 

 the mountains for some thirty or forty miles, the stillness for which 

 these Norwegian forests are so remarkable was suddenly broken by 



