What is "ptarmigan"

Usage examples of "ptarmigan".

Ptarmigan and dotterel clucked contentedly in the heath and silver-studded blue butterflies fed upon its honey-scented nectar.

After making camp Miyax and Kapu went out to snare ptarmigan and rabbits.

Larks and pipits were everywhere on the steppes, willow grouse, ptarmigan, and partridges, sand grouse and great bustards, and beautiful demoiselle cranes, bluish-gray with black heads and white tufts of feathers behind the eyes.

It was a place she had hunted willow grouse and ptarmigan, and an assortment of animals from marmot to giant deer, who found the enticing spot of green impossible to resist.

Though quail often traveled longer distances, both partridge and ptarmigan, the grouse that turned white in snow, normally stayed within a general area close to their birthplace, migrating only a short distance between winter and summer ranges.

It was the wrong season for the greens she liked to use -- coltsfoot, nettles, pigweed -- and for ptarmigan eggs, or she would have stuffed the cavity with them, but some of the herbs in her medicine bag, used lightly, were good for seasoning as well as healing, and the hay she wrapped the birds in added a subtle flavor of its own.

Ptarmigan shrieked from the cover of snow-laden ground birch, and far in the distance a black-tailed deer brayed like a mule.

Tern had packed two whole smoke-cured ptarmigan, a brace of hard-boiled eggs, and enough strips of hung mutton to mend an elk-size hole in a tent.

I scouted alone all day and in my wanderings came upon the first ptarmigans of the trip and shot one of them with my rifle.

Some geese and ptarmigans were killed and a good many of both kinds of birds were seen, as well as some ducks.

Now, two years later, I realized that from Windbound Lake we could have reached Michikamau in five or six days at the very outside, and less than two weeks, allowing for delays through bad weather and our weakened condition, would have brought us to the George River, where, at that time of the year, ducks and ptarmigans are always plentiful.

Bursts of willow ptarmigans shot up around us from the berry thickets like brown rockets.

There were lemmings that burrowed beneath the snow, ptarmigans that dove into drifts for insulation, even plants that managed to flourish in pockets of warm air beneath the ice.

And in the winters the snow-clearing of the mammoths exposed grass for hares and willow buds for ptarmigans, and the wells they dug were used by wolves and foxes and others, and even now the insects stirred up by the mammoths' passage served as food for the birds.

A bevy of white-gowned girls rose like a covey of ptarmigans, and whirled flags of maroon and gray.