Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus) Photo from https://animalia.bio/western-capercaillie
Dear Readers, what an astonishing bird this is! I have been intrigued ever since I watched the film of David Attenborough being menaced by a lusty male capercaillie in the Scottish Highlands, – well worth a look. They are the largest members of the grouse family, and the males are almost twice as big as the females.
Female capercaillie (Photo by By Lars Falkdalen Lindahl – Flickr: Tetrao urogallus – Eurasian Capercaille – Tjäder, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16773482)
Capercaillie males ‘lek’ in quiet patches of Caledonian forest in order to attract females. But where, you might ask, are there quiet patches of forest anywhere? We walk, we cycle, we allow our dogs to roam, we camp, and there are rarely enough undisturbed spaces for a shy bird the size of a turkey to gallivant and preen. In Sweden and Norway there are so many capercaillies that you can see hens and their broods wandering along the road, but in the UK there are probably less than 1500 birds in total. However, help is on the way! A British Trust for Ornithology survey showed that capercaillie were particularly prone to colliding with deer fences, which have been removed or marked in a way that makes them more visible to the birds. There is hope in areas of reforestation, and the use of cattle to graze the underbrush, making a more suitable habitat for hens to nest in, and to give cover for chicks. Only last year there were helpful signs of an increase in capercaillie numbers for the first time in recent years. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed – the forests of Scotland would be so much worse off without this extraordinary bird.
UK capercaillies live only in the north of Scotland, where they live mainly on blueberries during the summer, and pine needles in the winter. They are herbivorous as adults, though the young eat a protein-rich diet of insects as they grow. Interestingly (to me at least), capercaillie have two appendixes which are full of helpful bacteria – this presumably helps them to get the maximum nutrition out of their limited winter diet.
The name ‘capercaillie’ comes from the Gaelic for ‘horse of the forest’, though Benedict MacDonald, who wrote the article on the bird in ‘Into The Red’, thinks that they sound like champagne corks popping. This recording was made by Jarek Matusiak in eastern Poland. But this wonderful article in The Guardian, which features a number of recordings of endangered animals, says that the call of the capercaillie sounds like ‘the sound of clipping horses hooves, followed by a bottle opening and squirting water and ending with knife sharpening.’ See what you think.
The capercaillie became extinct in Scotland in the 17th century, but was reintroduced in 1830, where it did very well until the 1970s. Let’s hope that this time the bird is back for good.
Photo by By Arturo de Frias Marques – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28963698