21G 
WILLOW GROUSE. 
In the summer the food of the Dal Ripa consists 
principally of the blades or leaves of several plants, 
such as Salix herhacea — the hleaherry, f Vaccinum 
mijrtillus,) and the young leaves or sprouts of several 
other species of willow, and especially the seed of the 
Polygonum viciparum, which on this account is in 
Norway called Ripa Grass. In autumn they principally 
live on berries, and in the winter on birch knots, and 
the stalks of the bleaberry bushes. In spring their 
chief food consists of birch knots. 
Although no doubt Willow Grouse would afford as 
o 
good sport to the shooter as the Red 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 
Ripa. 
Beak black, short, thick, and convex; upper man- 
dible 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, convex above, concave beneath, 
white, and only brown at the roots. In summer they 
