GROUSE, PTARMIGANS, ETC.: PTARMIGAN 
205 
General Habits. —The diversity of the New Mexico fauna is one of 
its most compelling features, a diversity found in only one other State 
in the union and rarely found by the traveler short of the Tropics, where 
glacier-crowned peaks look down upon groves of spreading palms. For 
within the boundaries of New Mexico the naturalist finds not only the 
birds of arid plains and coniferous forests, but rare Lower Sonoran 
stragglers from Mexico and heritages of the Arctic-Alpine summits of 
the northern Rocky Mountains. Among these the most remarkable is 
the furry-footed, White or Snow Grouse, named locally from its snow 
white winter plumage—which formerly found congenial nesting grounds 
on the highest peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Range in the Pecos and 
Carson National Forests. In the Taos Mountains a few were found in 
1904, and the Taos Indians told us of their greater abundance in former 
years. Sun-Elk, our Indian camp man, spoke of seeing “a whole lot” 
about twenty years previously, and a ranchman told us of finding twenty 
together. But at the time of our visit sheep herders were running large 
bands of sheep over the tops of the mountains, and after scaring up the 
birds with their sheep might easily have killed them with stones. In 
any case white wing quills were found on the trail near where two of the 
tame unsuspicious birds were seen later. In the Culebra Mountains, 
where some men reported killing four Ptarmigan, the same day a band 
of probably two thousand sheep followed along the crest of the ridge, so 
that if the Grouse were not killed at the time, the vegetation on which 
the} r lived was destroyed. 
A local hunter whom Mr. Bailey met on Costilla Peak said that he 
usually found the “Snowbirds,” as he called them, very tame and sitting 
around on the little benches near a snow-bank at about 13,300 feet. In 
the mornings, he said, the cocks could be heard making a noise like a 
hawk. While patches of snow are still on the ground, the Ptarmigan 
apparently do not need to go to water, as they eat the snow; but Mr. 
Warren says that after the snow has melted, they often go to water once 
a day. In the Taos Mountains, we were told by an old Indian buffalo 
hunter, “Dark-Gray Buffalo,” in May and June the Ptarmigan have 
their broods of yellow and white little ones, “like chickens,” at about 
timberline, but the last of July or first of August they go on up to the 
“highest of places.” Here they are found on the grassy slopes and the 
rocks, the brooding mother with a remarkable grass pattern, the cock 
with what Dr. Frank M. Chapman describes as a lichen-covered rock 
plumage made effective by rigid statuesque pose. This statuesque pose 
is even assumed by the young. In one instance, quoted by Taylor and 
Shaw, when an interested woman approached a mother of a brood 
too closely, she uttered her warning. “The chicks feeding close about 
her feet at once ‘froze’—one with his head down, after a bug; one 
with his body stretched up to reach something on a bit of heather. It 
