Western Capercaillie | Tetrao urogallus

Voice

The cock's song runs five to eight seconds and falls into four phases. It opens with separate clicks that accelerate, tock … tock … tock-tock-tock, like a tap beginning to run. The clicks then run together into a trill, which ends in one dry pop, exactly the sound of a cork leaving a bottle. Last and longest comes two to three seconds of whetting, tshee-kree-tshee-kree, as though a scythe were being sharpened. It is during that whetting phase that the muscles of the middle ear contract, damping the bird's own very low-frequency notes and leaving him effectively deaf for a few seconds; hunters exploited that window for centuries to close the last distance unheard. The whole performance is quiet and rarely carries beyond two hundred metres. Lek sites are used year after year and are fragile: repeated disturbance by walkers, dogs and photographers at dawn empties a lek within a few seasons. Stay on paths, keep well back, and do not walk into the wood in spring to look for the source of the sound.

Identification

The cock is slate grey with a dark green glossed breast shield, red-brown wings, a white spot at the bend of the wing and a heavy ivory bill, with a red wattle above the eye. Displaying, he fans the tail into a broad white-flecked disc and thrusts out the pointed beard feathers below the chin. The hen is rust-brown, barred black, with an unmarked orange-buff patch in the centre of the breast and a rounded tail. The size gap is extreme: cocks weigh four to five kilos, hens rarely more than two, and the cock is almost half as long again.

Confusion species

Hens are confused with Black Grouse greyhens. The Capercaillie hen is much bigger, warmer rufous, shows that plain orange breast patch and a rounded tail; a greyhen is colder grey-brown, more finely barred, with a forked tail and a white wing bar. Where the two species meet, the hybrid known as the Rackelhahn also occurs, usually a male Black Grouse on a female Capercaillie. It is intermediate at 65–78 cm, glossy black with a copper to violet sheen on the breast, a broad but only shallowly forked tail — neither the deep lyre of Black Grouse nor the fan of Capercaillie — a narrow white wing bar, and a bill paler than a blackcock's but lacking the heavy ivory of a Capercaillie. Hybrid males usually turn up at Black Grouse leks, where they bully the smaller cocks off the ground, and their calls are a hoarse mixture without the four clean phases of a real Capercaillie song. They are sterile.

Habitat

Old, open coniferous forest with light reaching the floor and a thick carpet of blaeberry, which supplies winter buds, summer fruit and the insects the chicks need. Add ant nests, an open patch for the lek, mature pines for roosting, and grit taken from track edges and burn sides. In Scandinavia and further east bog margins and wet pinewood belong to the picture; in the Alps and Carpathians it is mixed montane and larch forest, and in the Cantabrian Mountains the birds live in old beechwood.

Range and movements

From the Scottish Highlands and the Pyrenees east through the Alps, Carpathians and Balkans, and continuously across Fennoscandia and the northern taiga into Siberia, where the bulk of the population lives. The western edge is fragmented: in the British Isles almost entirely inside the Cairngorms, with a scatter of birds in Easter Ross and Aberdeenshire; in Iberia two cores, the Cantabrian mountains and the Pyrenees with the race aquitanicus; in central Europe the Black Forest, the Alps, the Bavarian Forest and small relict populations in the uplands. From the Ardennes the Capercaillie has long been gone.

• Resident
• Breeding (summer)
• Winter
• Passage
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

How and when to look

The easiest chance is southern Fennoscandia, where lek watching from fixed hides in April is long established; you go in at night and stay until the birds themselves leave. In the Scottish Highlands, the Cantabrian mountains and the Pyrenees do not go looking for a lek: the small populations cannot absorb the disturbance, and at Loch Garten you watch from the hide during the short capercaillie-watch season, booked in advance. In central Europe the Bavarian Forest or Šumava are the places, from the road or a viewpoint. Outside the lek season look for signs: needle debris under roost trees, cigar-shaped droppings three centimetres thick, and feathers at dust baths on sandy tracks.

Conservation status

Not globally threatened, but fragmented and declining everywhere in western and central Europe. The causes are always the same: dense, even-aged production forest without a bilberry layer, wet and cold Junes that prove fatal to the chicks, high predation pressure from foxes and martens along forest edges, collisions with deer fences and ski-lift cables, and disturbance during the display season. Recovery management therefore centres on more open forest, fewer fences and peace and quiet in spring.

Scientific name

Tetrao urogallus | Linnaeus, 1758

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 and placed it straight away in the genus where it still stands. He introduced the genus Tetrao in that same work. Tetrao is the Latin word for a game bird, probably the black grouse. urogallus is a Neo-Latin form echoing the German name Auerhuhn, with Latin gallus 'cock' inside it. The specimen the first description was based on came from Sweden.