Bog Myrtle & Peat

In a previous post, I mentioned that I had found a female black grouse feather on the farm. After a few hours of reflection, I was not so sure.

The yellow feather is around three inches long and has two dull grey bars across it which almost meet in a point two thirds of the way along its length. My initial reaction was one of optimistic certainty: that this was the feather of a hen black grouse. Then doubts began to creep in. Was it dark enough? Was it striped enough? It was similar in colour to a feather from a hen mallard,  but after a great deal of debate with friends and family, it was widely agreed that the down was too thin and black to have belonged to a duck.

Then, it was suggested that it could be a barn owl feather, and as part of an increasingly heated discussion, the idea was dismissed on the grounds of its being too coarse and pointed to belong to a delicate owl. Hen harriers and short eared owls were each offered up as potential sources, but the feather seemed to have such a gamebird-like shape that no one could quite believe that it belonged to a raptor.

A visiting friend ventured the opinion that it might have belonged to a hen pheasant, but he was laughed out town by an ever expanding gathering of increasingly volatile and opinionated family members. Falling back to the Collins Gem birdbook, we began to speculate wildly on the irrelevant differences between hen black grouse and hen capercaillie. For reasons best known to herself, my girlfriend decided that we had discovered the tail feather of an egyptian nightjar and refused to be convinced otherwise. Another friend staunchly returned to his original diagnosis of ‘barn owl’ and became quite vocal on the subject. It seemed as if the argument would boil over into physical violence when I found a photograph of an almost honey coloured female black grouse online and satisfied myself that it was possible for the birds to have pale yellow plumage on their flanks and armpits.

The identification has ultimately been a process of elimination, but as we all now loosely agree, it is hard to imagine it having belonged to anything else but a black grouse. Judging by the freshness of the feather, it was shed within the last few days…