BLACK-GROUSE 
vibrating crooning or cooing note, which is their love-song, and can be 
heard at a long distance on still mornings, but when fighting they utter 
a hoarse crow at intervals. At other times they are remarkably silent 
birds and seldom make any sound when flushed. 
Nest . — ^The nest, a slight hollow scratched in the ground, usually well 
concealed among blaeberry, heather, and grass, is sometimes situated 
in the open, but more often in open fir woods or in fir plantations. 
Eggs . — ^Eight or ten yellowish -buff eggs, spotted with reddish-brown, 
and measuring about 2 inches by 1*4 inch, are laid in May, and incu- 
bation lasts about 24 days. 
General habits . — ^The greyhen is generally considered a bad mother, 
and justly so, for she is easily scared from her nest, and seldom returns 
if once frightened. When her young are hatched she does not exercise 
sufficient care to save them from falling into drains and such like death- 
traps, and in this and other ways generally manages to lose more than 
half her brood before they are many days old. 
At the same time I have known instances when the hen has exhibited 
great devotion, preferring to perish herself rather than desert her brood. 
During a disastrous wood -fire on the Black Isle I once saw a greyhen 
with seven or eight young become surrounded by a ring of blazing heather 
and fir trees. She might easily have saved herself , but as the young were 
too small to fly, she would not leave them, and all perished. For the first 
few weeks of their lives, the young birds feed chiefly on insects, especially 
on ants and their pupae. During the early stages they are very delicate 
birds, and grow so slowly that they take at least four months to reach 
maturity. 
The season for shooting black -game is from August 20 to December 10, 
except in Somerset and Devon and in the New Forest where it is from 
September 1 to December 10. They are not really fit to shoot till the end 
of October. 
Though the blackcock is usually an extremely wary and alert bird, 
his boldness at times amounts to foolhardiness or stupidity, as the 
following instances will show. Some years ago when shooting in the North 
of Scotland two guns killed twenty -four blackcocks in a couple of hours 
between 3.30 and 5.30 p.m., as they flighted from a large fir-wood to 
some stubble-fields about half a mile distant. It was the best bag of black - 
game that had been made for many years in that locality, but the birds 
were much more plentiful then than they are at the present time. A drive 
27 
