THE llED GllOUSE. 
51 
discharge hve birds, from one pack. In one of the instances the 
pack consisted of only seven birds. 
On looking to the food contained in numbers of grouse when 
their favourite berries were not to be had, I have found it to be 
chiefly the tops of heath, with occasionally the stem of the bilberry 
[Vaccinium Myrtillus). Portions of the fir club-moss [Lycopodium 
selago), about an inch in length, being occasionally found strewn 
about the mountain-tops, appear to me as indicating its being 
used as food. On opening the intestines of a deceased bird, 
shot on the 14th of August at Ballantrae (but which had been 
wounded perhaps three weeks before), I found them nearly full of 
tape-worms [Tcenim). Its gizzard was entirely filled with the 
fruit of the LLmpetrum nigrum, there called heather-berry. My 
friend just alluded to has very frequently found oats in the crops 
of grouse killed in the last-named locality. They are considered 
to resort to their feeding grounds there in the evening, about an 
hour before black game. 
Although Ireland is deficient in the wood grouse, the black game, 
and the ptarmigan, all of which are doubtless more admired when 
displayed in museums than the red grouse, yet this bird, which 
the island does produce, is, in the estimation of the sportsman, 
and consequently in a pecuniary point of view, by far the most 
valuable of the four ; — more so indeed than any other species of 
grouse.* It is unknown beyond the limit of the British Isles, 
and is the only bird peculiar to them. With the tiighlands of 
Scotland, however, rather than with Ireland, the Tetrao Scoticus 
is mentally associated; vast tracts of mountain heath there often 
deriving their value from it alone. 
Nothing can be more invigorating, mentally or bodily, than 
the withdrawal for a time from the bustle of town civilization to 
the pure air of the mountain solitudes where this bird is found, 
and in the midst of which the sportsman formerly —before grouse 
* See article on ‘Highland Sport’ Quarterly Review, Dec. 1845 (vol. Ixxvii.) — 
(nominally a review of Scrope’s “ Days and Night’s of Salmon Fishing ”) for statistics 
on the subject of the Red Grouse ; also a Letter from the Earl of Malmesbury to Sir 
George Grey on the “ Revision of the Game Laws,” p. 8, &c. (1848.) 
E 2 
