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Grouse are occasionally driven to terrible straits in winter time. Whilst the snow is light and powdery they easily scratch their way down to the heather, or the wind soon bares exposed situations and renders their food accessible; but if a heavy fall of snow should occur in a dead calm and then be immediately followed by a partial thaw and hard frost, their sustenance is hermetically sealed and they are reduced to an almost helpless condition.
In the memorable winter of 1895 great numbers of Grouse perished from starvation on the Northern hills; and whilst nest-hunting in Westmorland ghylls and Yorkshire dales the following spring my brother and I found skeletons every day, coming across as many as eight in the neighbourhood of Kirkby Stephen on a single ramble. During the extremely rigorous weather it was not an uncommon sight to see the bolder ones feeding unconcernedly along with barn-door Fowls in farm-yards, and even running along the streets of market towns. Whilst in the valleys they fed upon hips, hazel catkins, and the buds of hawthorns, and, curiously enough, some of them roosted in the trees in which they fed.
I had several birds that had been starved to death sent to me for dissection, and not one of them had a piece of gravel in its gizzard. The crop of one female, which had apparently died just after feeding, contained no less than 4,225 buds and small pieces of slender twigs. Some idea may be gathered of the privations these poor birds had to endure when it is mentioned that one male sent me only turned the scale at sixteen and a half ounces. He came from Upper Swaledale, where the late Mr George Brook, an exceedingly careful observer, killed male birds in the late autumn weighing twenty-eight and even up to thirty-two ounces.
The accompanying illustration represents a friend of ours and his loader in the act of shooting driven Grouse on one of the best moors in the North of England.
Grouse shooter in butt
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