206 PTARMIGAN. 
and early in March, 1840, a salesman in Leadenhall market 
received fifteen thousand Ptarmigan that had been consigned 
to him. Sir A. De Capell Brooke calculated that sixty 
thousand had been killed during one winter in Lapland: 
and Mr. Lloyd says that a dealer in Norway will dispose 
of fifty thousand in a season.’ It is from these countries 
that such prodigious numbers come, and they are all taken 
in horse-hair nooses. The Ptarmigan is a bird easily kept in 
confinement, and has been known to breed in the tame state. 
Their flight is low, straight, and moderately rapid, and 
causes a whirring noise; they do not ordinarily fly far, and 
when alighting run on a little way. In walking about, the 
back is rounded up and the tail drooped, but if observant 
of supposed danger, the attitude becomes attentive. They 
can run very fast if necessary, and do so if alarmed, dipping 
into the air over some eminence, and so disappearing. At 
night they roost either under a stone or tuft, or else in 
the snow, scooping out a hollow in which they almost 
completely bury themselves, and indeed sometimes it proves 
their grave, in which they are snowed up, though they can 
remain, it is said, for a week, till a thaw or some increased 
exertion on their own part releases them. 
They feed on the buds, berries, leaves, blossoms, and seeds 
of various plants and shrubs—the heath, the cranberry, the 
cloudberry, the bilberry, the crowberry, the dwarf. birch, and 
others, and walk about among them to select such as are 
most to their liking, and also swallow small fragments of 
stone and sand to aid the triturition of their food. Snow 
seems to supply their drink, for they go in search of it im 
the summer months. The young are at first fed with insects. 
Their call or note is a wild, harsh, hoarse, grating croak, 
which harmonizes well with the desolate scenes which the 
presence of the bird almost alone enlivens. it 1s sometimes 
low, and sometimes more loud is heard at a great distance 
in the thin air of the exalted regions which furnish these 
Grouse with a dwelling-place. It is occasionally prolonged 
for some length of time, and is heard occasionally when the 
bird is flying, as well as when he is settled. 
The Ptarmigan pairs early in the spring, and the eggs are 
begun to be laid in June, and to be sat upon by the 
beginning of July, incubation lasting three weeks. The hen 
alone brings up the brood, and has been known to do so 
even when the male had been taken, and so also if one of 
