Solving the great grouse mystery

OUR jays, coal tits and stoats are deemed to be special. The Irish members of these species belong to unique Hibernian races and are not to be found elsewhere in the world.

Dippers too have their own local subspecies, although our variety of dipper is also found in the western isles of Scotland.

There is, however, another claimant to sub-species status; the red grouse of Irish mountains and bogs. Until quite recently it was regarded as special and in Ireland’s Birds, published in 1966, Robert Ruttledge declared that “the Irish red grouse, Lagopus lagopus hibernicus, is a subspecies peculiar to Ireland (and the Hebrides).”

More recently, however, this claim has been challenged and in the 2nd volume of the definitive Birds of the Western Palearctic, which appeared in 1980, Stanley Cramp and K.E.L. Simmons don’t even mention a hibernicus race of grouse. The birds in Ireland and Britain, they state, belong to a race referred to as Lagopus lagopus scoticus.

But not everyone regards the case as closed and the claim of a special status for Irish grouse is still very much alive. Now, a project has commenced to decide the issue once and for all; genetic research on the Irish red grouse is being carried out by Dr Barry McMahon and Dr Emma Teeling at UCD.

The red grouse is a familiar bird, because its image adorns labels on Scottish ‘whisky’ bottles. To see the bird in the flesh, however, you must become a hill-walker. Be prepared to do plenty of hiking; grouse numbers have been declining since about 1920 and this is now a very scarce bird indeed. There could be as few as a thousand pairs left.

This medium-sized member of the chicken family tends to stay under cover but will occasionally show itself when defending its territory during the breeding season. Your best chance of seeing one is to wade across expanses of heather, in the hope of flushing the bird. When disturbed, the grouse flies off powerfully, seeming to turn its head sideways to look at you and shouting ‘go back, go back, go back’ in alarm. As it soon drops back under cover, it is difficult to see the plumage features and, according to Mike Brown, it is one of the most difficult of our birds to photograph. Looking a bit like a stocky pheasant with a short tail, the legs are feathered, giving the impression that it is wearing thick stockings. Indeed, the Latin name lagopus translates roughly as ‘hare-footed’.

Irish red grouse are lighter in colour than those found in Scotland. The heather moors here are more brightly coloured than Scottish ones. Grassy patches give our bogs a lighter hue and Irish grouse may have adapted their colouring as camouflage. The colour difference suggests that the bird may have other, less obvious, local peculiarities, hence the suggestion that there is an Irish subspecies. On the other hand, the colour variation may reflect nothing more unusual than differences in diet between the Irish grouse and Scottish ones.

That there may a distinct local race is plausible, given the range of variation in this species elsewhere. Sixteen subspecies of red grouse are currently recognised. Although grouse in Siberia may migrate to escape the intense cold of winter, grouse are among the most sedentary of birds and it is this which has helped local forms to evolve. The birds are found throughout northern latitudes, on both sides of the Atlantic, although they never reached Iceland or Greenland. Everywhere, they have tended to form isolated populations. Mainland European birds are referred to as ‘willow’ grouse. The most striking difference between them and their Irish and British cousins is that they turn white in winter.

Grouse, it is thought, arrived in Ireland at the end of the last ice age and have been on this island long enough to develop ‘Irish solutions to Irish problems’. But the grouse situation is complicated. Birds have been brought to Ireland from time to time to improve the local stocks for shooting. Also, the Irish population has become fragmented into isolated pockets. The grouse in Wicklow, for example, never meet those of the Slieve Blooms, nor do those of the Galtees encounter their cousins of the Clare hills.

The only reliable way to adjudicate on the sub-species claim is to examine the bird’s DNA and compare it with that of birds elsewhere, which is what Barry McMahon intends to do.

Barry needs your help. He wants grouse feathers from which to extract DNA. If you are a wildfowler or a hill walker and you come across feathers which, you suspect, may belong to a grouse, send them to Dr Barry McMahon, School of Biology and Environmental Sciences, Agriculture and Food Centre, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4. You will be helping to solve one of Ireland’s ornithological mysteries.