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Red grouse
Lagopus scotica | Schots sneeuwhoen | Lagópodo escocés
The red-brown grouse of the British hills, and the only ptarmigan that keeps one plumage all year. It has its own entry in this guide because, as the British subspecies scotica of the Willow Grouse, it has both a distinct field appearance and a story of its own: no other bird in Europe is so tightly bound up with the management of the ground it lives on.
Voice
A hard staccato bark that carries across the moor as a warning: go-back, go-back, go-back-back-back, tailing off into a chuckling uk-uk-uk as the bird drops back into the heather. Displaying cocks also call from a short, steeply climbing song flight. Best heard at first light in March and April; for the rest of the year what you usually hear is the alarm bark of a bird you have walked too close to.
Recording: Lawrence Shove / British Library — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
A heavy, rounded grouse with a stout bill and white-feathered legs. Red-brown throughout the year, the cock warm chestnut with a swollen scarlet comb, the hen duller and more closely barred black, which lets her disappear against bare peat. The body is dark and plain, the tail black and the underwing white; those white underwings and white feet are the clearest marks in flight. Flight is low and fast, short whirring bursts alternating with long glides that follow the contour of the hill.
Confusion species
Within the genus this is the straightforward bird, being the only one that never turns white. Rock Ptarmigan, which sits higher on the same Scottish hills, is white with a black tail in winter and adds a black loral stripe on the cock, cold grey with fine vermiculation in summer, and uniform ash-grey in autumn. Willow Grouse of Scandinavia is also wholly white in winter but never shows a loral stripe, warm rufous with coarse barring in summer, and warm brown in autumn. Bill shape separates those two from each other: heavy on Willow Grouse, slight on Rock Ptarmigan. On the moor itself the trap is a hen Black Grouse, which is greyer, forked-tailed and shows a white wingbar.
Habitat
Heather moorland on acid ground, blanket bog with heather and cotton grass, and the rough acid grassland running off the edges of it. The diet is young heather shoots for most of the year, with cowberry, cotton grass flower heads and, for the chicks, insects. The best ground is a mosaic of heather of different ages: young shoots for food, old rank stands for cover and nesting.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Britain and Ireland only, from Devon and Wales through the Peak District and the Pennines to the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides, with the highest densities on the managed moors of northern England and eastern Scotland. Irish numbers have fallen a long way. There is no continental population and no vagrancy record worth chasing.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
Where and when to look
Drive a high moorland road at first light in March or April, the A939 over the Lecht or the roads around Lochindorb being as good as any, and stop at every calling bird. Cocks stand on a boulder or a peat hag beside the road at that season and let a car come close, which is the easiest way to study the comb and the barring. From 12 August the shooting season is running on many estates, and access notices on the moor edge are worth reading before you set off on foot.
Conservation status
Not a threatened bird, with a British population of the order of a few hundred thousand pairs, but the management around it is one of the sharpest conservation arguments in the country. Rotational heather burning, heavy predator control and medicated grit keep densities high enough for driven shooting, while the same management is charged with drying out peat, releasing carbon and going hand in hand with the illegal killing of Hen Harriers. Scotland answered in 2024 by making both the shooting of this bird and muirburn subject to licence, with the licence removable where wildlife crime is proved; England is having the same argument without a licensing scheme, and repeated petitions to ban driven grouse shooting outright have been debated in Parliament and rejected.