216 



WILLOW GROUSE. 



In the summer the food of the Dal Eipa consists 

 principally of the blades or leaves of several plants, 

 such as Salix herbacea — the bleaberry, ( Vaccinum 

 myrtillus,) and the young leaves or sprouts of several 

 other species of willow, and especially the seed of the 

 Polygonum viviparum, 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 

 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, dentate d 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 



