Identifier: handbookofbritis00hart (find matches)
Title: A handbook of British birds, showing the distribution of the resident and migratory species in the British islands, with an index to the records of the rarer visitants
Year: 1901 (1900s)
Authors: Harting, James Edmund, 1841-1928
Subjects: Birds -- Great Britain
Publisher: London, J.C. Nimmo
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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allas). Length, 15 in.; wing, 10 in.; weight, lOi oz. Although this species has on several occasionsand in different years visited the British Islands inconsiderable numbers, and has even nested in thiscountry (cf. Ibis, 1890, p. 207, PI. 8), it can only beregarded as an occasional and very erratic vrandererfrom Turkestan and the Kirghis Steppes, and forthis reason should perhaps be relegated to Part II. ofthis Handbook. It may, however, be mentionedhere en passant, as the only representative of itsOrder in the British Avifauna. Order VI. GALLING Fam. TETRAONID^. CAPERCAILLIE. Tetrao urogallus, Linnaeus. Length,32 in.; wing, 15 in.; tarsus, 25 in. As to the proper mode of spelling the name ofthis bird, we have it on the authority of the Rev.Dr. Maclauchlan, a well-known Gaelic scholar,that it is derived from the Gaelic cahha7^-coiUe, or bird of the wood, the Snipe being cahhar-athar,or bird of the air (ether). Dr. Maclauchlan con-siders, therefore, that caher-coille is the orthography
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CAPERCAILLIE 129 which comes nearest to the original. Mr. Harvie-Brown writes, Some people assert that to spellit with a 2; is the best Scotch, but there being noy nor z in Gaelic, and the word being distinctlyof Gaelic origin, it is best to adhere in form asclosely as possible to that origin. He accordinglyadopts the spelling Cajpercaillie, which is here fol-lowed. Originally indigenous to the north of England,Scotland, and Ireland, dwelling in the great pine-woods which have been gradually destroyed, itsurvived longest in Scotland, where it is said to havebecome extinct about 1769, in which year Pennantascertained that it still lingered in Glen Moristonand in the country of the Chisholms, in Inverness(Tour in Scotland, 5th ed., i. p. 218, and iii.p. 23; British Zoology, 4th ed., p. 225, pi. xh.).Graves in his British Ornithology (1821) assignsa later date than this to its extinction, observingthat one was killed near Fort William in 1815.However that may be, the species was reintrod

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