There’s not much life up high this time of year. Or at least, that’s the impression you get as you push through shifting sprindrift and up wind-scoured ridges. You can easily buy into the notion that there’s only you up there. As far as you’re concerned, you’re the only creature mad enough to try.
But it’s often at times like those, when the wind is raging and you feel the need to keep moving to stay warm, that a small, plump white bird crosses your path.
It’s never the case that I catch advance sight of its silhouette on a ridge line, or flying off in the distance. It’s always a last-minute reveal, when I hear them croaking 10 metres away.
The ptarmigan. Content, comfortable, and completely non-plussed by the arctic conditions. No Gore-Tex, no goggles, no highly-honed layering system to keep the elements out.
As enigmatic birds in an extreme environment, ptarmigan are a prized sighting for many a hillwalker. They’re spoken about with an air of the exotic, and I know some lifelong hillwalkers who have, somewhat incredibly, spent years in the hills without ever having seen one.
But while those people have never seen a ptarmigan, they’ve definitely walked in their footsteps along the Tarmachan ridge, on Meall nan Tarmachan. If they’ve done the two Munros north of Glenfinnan, they’ll have walked over Meall an Tarmachain. For ‘ptarmigan’ derives from tàrmachan, the Scottish Gaelic word for the bird.
So why the P? Scouring online, everyone seems to agree that this eccentric spelling came about because Robert Sibbald (1641-1722), a physicist from Edinburgh and a co-founder of Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, made it so.
Some say it’s because he believed the word ‘tarmachan’ to be of Greek origin and, given the tendency of Greek to have Ps in front of bird words that would otherwise start with a T, such as ‘pteron’ (wing), added it. Others say he made it sound Greek to make it sound….well….cool. And by cool I do of course mean, scientific.
Presumably it might have been ‘tarmigan’, had the bird not met Robert Sibbald along the way. Aye, I’ll have a ‘P’, please Bob!
However you spell it, the ptarmigan is a species of grouse (members of the taxonomical group Tetraonidae). There are only four of these in the UK: red grouse, black grouse, capercaillie, and ptarmigan.
Ptarmigan are the smallest of the four, at just over 30cm long, weighing around 400-500g. Small, yes, but size is certainly no indication of hardiness. For ptarmigan are true alpine specialists, rarely found below the tree line across their range, and hardier than almost any other creature you’re likely to encounter in the hills.
They have a wide global distribution, being found throughout the northern hemisphere in places like Canada, Scandinavia, Russia, China and Japan. Across much of that range they’re known as rock ptarmigan to distinguish them from other species of ptarmigan, but in Scotland they’re our only species, so we just stick to ‘ptarmigan’.
Our bird is however considered its own subspecies due to its relative genetic isolation from other populations. Outside of the winter months, it seems to retain its more mottled plumage for longer than those in other countries, presumably to match our more mottled landscapes where we generally have less long-lying snow.
The Highlands is their main stronghold, above about 800m altitude, whereas in parts of Sutherland they can be found lower than that. Regardless, ptarmigan reside up high all year round. Their ability to do this, to inhabit our most inhospitable places at the most inhospitable time of year, is down to their special winter adaptations.
They have very warm feathers, which can comfortably insulate in minus double-digit temperatures. That’s not to say they enjoy prolonged exposure to those temperatures, though, which is why they will burrow down into the snow to wait out the worst of the weather.
Fine feathers cover their nostrils to protect them from spindrift and, unusually for birds, they also have feathers on their feet that splay their footprint, helping their feet to act like snowshoes. Their scientific name, Lagopus, means hare-footed. Essentially, furry like a rabbit or hare.
The other half of their name, muta, means silent, without voice. That’s odd really, because more often than not, I hear ptarmigan before I see them. Not that seeing them is easy, mind, because they blend so well into their surroundings. But there’s certainly no mistaking that peculiar croaking call of theirs. It sounds almost clockwork, or like running your finger along the length of a large comb.
The most obvious and famous adaptation of the ptarmigan however, is its winter plumage, which is kickstarted by the fading light levels of autumn. The male turns almost completely white, save for the black bill, dark eye patch, a concealed black tail and a striking red eyebrow. The female lacks the dark eye patch and the red eyebrow, and so looks whiter overall.
Ptarmigan actually move through three plumages each year. As winter moves to spring, they lose their near-uniform whiteness. They retain white bellies and wings, but the upper half starts to look more mottled brown or grey.
Everyone likes to see a white ptarmigan of course, but the summer plumage is arguably more beautiful, especially that of the female. A mesmerising and intricate mix of black, brown, tan and white.
In autumn, both the male and the female become greyer on top, and start looking uncannily like rocks. This shifting camouflage enables ptarmigan to blend into the constantly changing upland palettes, remaining unseen by its predators – golden eagles, peregrine falcons, foxes etc.
In the colder months, ptarmigan form flocks for communal defence. But as the breeding season approaches, they become more territorial. Breeding begins in late April to early May. The female lays 7 or 8 eggs on the ground, in a shallow depression lined with whatever vegetation and lichen she can find.
Only the female incubates the eggs, and during those three weeks she relies on her camouflage for protection. At this stage, any kind of disturbance can force her from her nest, allowing the eggs to cool, or revealing their location and drawing the attention of predators.
When the young hatch, they’re instantly mobile and are able to feed themselves, but they will stay with their mother into the autumn.
Ptarmigan eat leaves, berries, buds and seeds etc, but the chicks will also eat invertebrates. The birds are not particularly long-lived, and are doing well if they live beyond 2 years old.
Long term prospects
In 2016 the International Union for Conservation (IUCN) estimated the global population of rock ptarmigan to number around 8 million – enough for it to qualify as a species of ‘least concern’. But least concern doesn’t mean no concern. It just means not as concerning as others.
Many ptarmigan populations across the northern hemisphere are following their ideal climatic conditions up the mountains as warming temperatures push this cold-loving species away from its traditional haunts. Indeed, a study of ptarmigan in the Swiss Alps found they are moving upwards at a rate of 1.5m to 9.4m per year across the last three decades.
Range contraction is underway here in the UK too. A few sources online cite the last English ptarmigan as having gone extinct as long ago as the 1700s, and they’ve long since retreated from southern Scotland. In an 1865 book called ‘On the Natural History of Lewis’, Professor Duns writes ‘ptarmigan are very common, especially on the Lewis slopes of the Harris hills’. Not any more.
Arran too had a small population clinging on into the 21st Century, but reports from there are few and far between these days. Scotland has a tiny proportion of the global total, but ptarmigan numbers here have decreased by 81% since 1961.
Adam Watson, the famous Scottish naturalist and Cairngorms enthusiast, undertook thorough studies of ptarmigan ecology up until the 1990s. He found there was a rough ten-year cycle in ptarmigan population peaks, but in recent years the health of the Scottish ptarmigan hasn’t been studied to the same degree.
Clearly there’s something going on, but as range contraction has been happening in the UK for a while, their disappearance from old haunts likely has several root causes rather than blaming any one thing.
Climate change looms ominously in more recent times though, and to any of us who enjoy winter in the hills, the changes over recent years are obvious. A report on ‘Snow Cover and Climate Change on Cairngorm Mountain’ found that:
‘There has been an observed decrease in the number of days when snow depth is at specific amounts (2-5, 5-10, 10-15, 15-20 and +20 cm). The largest decreases have occurred for shallower depths (2-5, 5-10 cm) of c. 10 days since 1983.’
Retreat of snow cover in spring can benefit ptarmigan at the start of their breeding season, but less so during the winter months. So as a winter-adapted specialist that has a preference for colder environments, can ptarmigan survive without snow?
Later arrival of winter snow, or more frequent and long-lasting thaws in mid-winter, will leave ptarmigan sticking out like sore thumbs when they’ve turned white but the landscape hasn’t done the same. Adam Watson found that even in summer, when snow patches were few, ptarmigan still showed a preference for roosting on snow rather than anywhere else. So if snow is retreating upwards, are ptarmigan doing the same if only to stay safe and stop overheating?
Either way, snow loss and the upwards movement of their preferred habitat/food could be the least of their worries in this changing climate. Breeding success is highly susceptible to adverse weather such as heavy or prolonged rain or unseasonal cold, especially when the chicks first hatch. Think back to June 2024. Summer kicked off with near daily snowfall on the Cairngorm plateau during the first two weeks of June, which wasn’t great timing for ptarmigan chicks. Conversely, drought in the spring and summer can impact upon the availability of insects for the young.
Extreme and variable weather is nothing new of course, and nature can bounce back from the occasional poor year. But in an increasingly volatile climate, with greater or more frequently-occurring extremes, often back-to-back, breeding success will be increasingly challenging for sub-arctic birds like ptarmigan. And it is against this backdrop that we need to view our own interactions with these creatures.
We already know recreation can have an adverse impact upon wild birds. In 2011 a review was undertaken of 69 journal articles that had included the impacts of nature-based recreation on various bird species as their subject. All the different articles studied non-motorised recreation in cool, temperate areas of the world, and the review found that 61 of them (88%) recorded negative impacts.
This is an undeveloped area of study in Scotland. Currently, most evidence here tends to be anecdotal, but disturbance from recreation certainly has the potential to be an issue for ground-nesting birds such as ptarmigan.
When we strike out across open high ground, away from established routes, our simple presence risks reducing the quality of that ground as a potential nesting habitat. We risk inadvertently driving birds from their nests, or flushing them into the air when they’d be better conserving their energy reserves. I’ve seen the latter happen with my own eyes, albeit unintentionally, and I’d be first to admit I’ve been responsible for this kind of disturbance myself over the years.
Dogs too, have the potential to compound the issue. Even when we follow established, direct lines between summits, some dogs off-lead won’t do so. They’ll follow the same general line as us, but I’ve seen dogs zig-zagging widely either side of that line. Even if they’re only wandering 10, 20, 30 metres from their owners, dogs increase the potential zone of disturbance beyond just one individual, increasing the likelihood that birds further away will be disturbed.
A single disturbance event on any given day might not seem particularly impactful in itself. But as with all our interactions with the great outdoors, we need to remember that when we’re there alone…….we are in fact not alone. This can be hard to view objectively when we’re there on a wind-blasted arctic plateau with nobody else in sight.
“I’ve got the whole place to myself!”, we think.
Yep, for that moment we do. But what about in an hour’s time? Or this afternoon? What about tomorrow? Or the day after? And the day after that?
The impact of a single brief disturbance in the course of a month can easily be absorbed. It’s natural for upland birds to be driven from nests or stressed by other animals, especially their predators. That’s already factored into their ecology.
But regardless how much of a winter specialist you are, in sub-arctic environments like the Cairngorms, energy expenditure is expensive and food isn’t always easily available, so it’s best not to move unless you have to. So when disturbance happens regularly, perhaps once or twice a day, week after week, then low impact becomes cumulative impact.
Adam Watson, in his study of ptarmigan in and around the Cairngorm ski centre, found similar adverse impacts of development and disturbance on ptarmigan breeding success, chiefly from predation by crows that were attracted to the area by the presence of humans. One wonders whether something similar happens across the ptarmigan’s range in the Highlands, our presence attracting predators to the summits and plateaux where ptarmigan like to breed. Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not sure anyone knows for certain.
Disturbance in a Scottish context might not have mattered quite so much back when ptarmigan were more numerous and widespread than they are now. But given they have recently moved from Green status to Red in the UK’s ‘Birds of Conservation Concern’ List, all potential impacts need to be considered objectively.
Given these pressures, it might come as a surprise to learn that ptarmigan are considered a game bird and can, like red grouse, be shot legally from 12th August to 10th December. I don’t have any data on how many estates offer this, but my impression is it’s not many, and that it’s generally only done when the local population is above a certain threshold.
Clearly more study is needed into the reasons behind the ptarmigan’s recently-recorded decline. The bird’s potential problem is that its apparent tameness belies its vulnerability. I was certainly fooled by that in the past, thinking that their tendency to appear tolerant of my presence meant I wasn’t really at risk of disturbing them. But I’ve changed my mind about that in recent years. I’d rather opt for a precautionary approach in the absence of hard evidence either way.
If I see ptarmigan now (or indeed, dotterel) I veer to one side and give them a wide berth. I don’t linger. And between April and August I’m generally wary of striding out across open terrain above 800m, which I wouldn’t have thought twice about in the past. This is their space too, and it can be shared.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t be heading to the hills. I’ll certainly continue to do so. Rather it’s simply to bear in mind that even if it’s just us passing by that day, with nobody else around, we might nonetheless be contributing to a collective impact that is much larger than just ourselves.
Thankfully, for the moment, ptarmigan remain a familiar and very welcome feature in the hills. I see them regularly, sometimes in large numbers (a group of 20 last year) but whether that apparent abundance is genuine or illusory remains to be seen.
One thing’s for certain, I’m not going to take them for granted any time soon, and I’m hoping I’ll see my life out in the company of these remarkable birds. Well, that’s assuming I still have knees capable of getting me up to the high tops when I’m into my 70s, which is far from certain!