Stuart Rae

Sitting with Ptarmigan

I have been surveying ptarmigan in the Cairngorms over the past week. Now is a good time to count them as the pairs are all formed, set in their territories, and the females are laying up. This is when they are most conspicuous, well they are never conspicuous, but less likely to not be seen. The males, above, sit on prominent rocks and the females spend much of the day feeding. I found this confiding pair, so I sat about 10 m from them as they went about their business.

They have now moulted out of their white winter plumage, the females are mottled brown and grey, and the males are mostly grey. Although there was fresh snow every day last week, they spent their time feeding on snow-free clumps of herbage and rested amongst rocks. So their colouring didn't expose them to predators. Nor to me except after watching for movement for a long time - about half an hour. They had probably been watching me and decided that I was no threat before they began moving, it was only then that I saw them.

The males spend most of their time watching over their hens as they feed. Watching for predators and chasing away rival males. There were males about a hundred metres either side of this pair, one had one hen and the other had two.

The only food plants not covered by snow were up on wind-swept ridges and the most abundant food in such places is crowberry, Empetrum nigrum. The hen picked the developing leaf and flower buds from the very tips of the shoots.

It's not only food that the hens need to make eggs. They also need water as they might lay 7-10 eggs, which is a lot of water volume, and the most readily available supply was the snow lying all around. So this hen was eating snow.

After about twenty minutes, the hen stopped eating and clambered up into some rocks to rest. Always closely followed by the male. She was heavy at the rear, a sign that she had eggs forming inside her.

The pair settled down to rest, the hen to digest her meal, and the cock to sit alert on top of a nearby rock. His pie-bald spring plumage perfectly matching the rock and snow landscape.