Birdpass
English
Black Grouse

Black Grouse

Lyrurus tetrix

Identify the Black Grouse by sound or photo and log your sightings with Birdpass.

  • Download on the App Store
  • Get it on Google Play

The Black Grouse is a large, sedentary grouse of the northern Palearctic that lives where forest meets open ground – bogs, moors, heaths and clearings. Males are glossy blue-black with red eye combs, white wing bars and undertail and a lyre-shaped tail, while females are mottled brown. Males gather each spring at traditional leks to display. It has declined in parts of western and central Europe but remains widespread in the north.

Did you know?

  • Its outward-curving tail feathers form a lyre – hence the genus name Lyrurus.
  • Male Black Grouse sometimes hybridise with Capercaillie, producing a hybrid known as a “rackelhahn”.

Voice

Sound

About the species

Identification

The male is mostly black, with a clear white wing bar, white undertail coverts and red eye combs; the tail is clearly lyre-shaped. The female is grey-brown and densely barred and also has a white wing bar; the dark barring on the throat and breast separates it from female Capercaillie, which is larger with a rufous breast patch. In flight both sexes show a white wing bar and pale underwings.

Family

Phasianidae

Size

Large (crow)

Colours

black, white, red, blue

About the habitat

Coniferous and mixed forest edges and mosaics of young woodland, wooded bogs, heaths and moorland; leks on open bogs or fields near cover.

Diet

Buds, catkins, shoots, leaves and berries; in winter especially birch buds and catkins and some conifer needles, in summer bilberry and other berries. Chicks feed mainly on insects.

Behaviour

Males gather at traditional leks on open bogs, fields or ice, displaying with bubbling cooing and hissing while fanning their lyre-shaped tails; females choose a mate and then nest and rear the chicks alone. Outside the breeding season birds form flocks, often feeding in birches, and roost at night in snow burrows.

Sources

Photo: Steve Garvie from Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flickr - Rainbirder - Black Grouse (Tetrao tetrix) Male.jpg

Sound: Carl Steinbeißer, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Black_grouse_-_rolling_and_hissing_sounds.ogg

Text: Wikipedia (English) + FinBIF species descriptions + Wikipedia (Finnish), CC BY-SA 4.0; FinBIF: CC BY 4.0; Wikipedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_grouse

See also