Rock ptarmigan

Rock ptarmigan eat buds, leaves, flowers and berries.

The chicks eat little bugs and spiders.

Rock ptarmigan eat almost only plants. In winter they nip buds and twigs of willow and dwarf birch from the ground; in the Alps their winter food is mostly berry bushes. In spring and summer they eat leaves, flowers and young shoots, and later berries and seeds.

In winter they sometimes follow caribou or musk oxen and feed where those animals have scraped away the snow. Young chicks eat many insects, spiders and snails at first.

The IUCN gives winter food taken from the ground, mainly buds and twigs of species including willow (Salix), with berry-bearing shrubs such as Vaccinium and Empetrum the main winter foods in the Alps and other southern areas, and a varied spring and autumn diet of leaves, flowers, berries and seeds. ADF&G says Alaskan birds eat mostly dwarf-birch buds and catkins from October to March (crowberry tips in the Aleutians), plants and insects by late June, and berries and seeds from mid-August, and must eat one-tenth to one-fifth of their body weight in food each day.

Audubon notes that adults are almost entirely vegetarian, swallow grit to help digest rough plants, sometimes follow caribou or musk-ox herds in winter to feed where the snow has been scraped away, and that young chicks feed heavily on insects, spiders and snails at first.

In spring, the male flies up high and glides down, calling.

In fall, ptarmigan gather in big flocks.

In spring, each male defends a patch of ground with a display flight: he flaps very fast, glides up high, then flutters down to the ground while calling. When he courts a female, he raises his red combs, fans his tail and walks in circles around her, dragging one wing on the ground. His call is a snoring kurr-kurr.

In September, rock ptarmigan in Alaska gather in flocks of 20 to more than 250 birds. Many move to lower ground for the winter, and they spend winter days eating, hiding from predators and burrowing into the snow.

Audubon describes a territorial display flight of rapid flapping, a high glide and a fluttering descent with a staccato call, and a courtship display in which the male raises his red combs, fans his tail and circles the female dragging one wing; courting males give a snoring 'kurr-kurr', females clucking and purring notes. ADF&G says males are usually monogamous within a season, though some are found with two females.

In Alaska, flocks of 20 to over 250 gather in September, flocks of mostly females move to low-elevation wintering areas, and winter flocks appear nomadic, spending the day eating, avoiding predators, snow burrowing and waiting out storms (ADF&G). The IUCN says most populations make limited, largely altitudinal movements depending on local conditions and weather.

Listen to the sound at the start of this page.

It is a real rock ptarmigan singing in the mountains of Scotland.

At the start of this page you can play a real recording of a rock ptarmigan's display song. Lawrence Shove recorded it in the mountains of Glenshee, Scotland, in April 1967, and the British Library keeps it with its other wildlife recordings.

The recording was made in April; in Scotland, rock ptarmigan start laying their eggs from late May. Audubon describes the courting male's voice as a snoring kurr-kurr. Does this song sound like snoring to you?

The recording on this page was made by Lawrence Shove in the mountains of Glenshee, Scotland, in April 1967 (British Library, shelfmark W1CDR0001418, shared on Wikimedia Commons); the archive describes it as the display song of a ptarmigan. Audubon describes the courting male's 'snoring kurr-kurr' and a staccato call given in the territorial display flight.

There are many rock ptarmigan in the world.

But warmer weather is a problem for them in some places.

The rock ptarmigan is listed as least concern. A very rough estimate puts the number of adult birds at 11.5 to 14.3 million, and it is still very common across the wild north.

In some places it has problems. Ski resorts take over its mountain homes, and birds can fly into ski-lift cables. Too much hunting, too many grazing reindeer in Sweden and a warming climate have also been blamed for drops in numbers. In the United Kingdom it is on the Red List of birds of conservation concern.

BirdLife International assessed Lagopus muta as Least Concern for the IUCN Red List (assessed 5 June 2025, published 2025): an extremely large range and population, with an unknown trend not thought to be falling fast enough to approach the thresholds. The very preliminary estimate of 11.5 to 14.3 million mature individuals builds on 4 million in the USA and Canada (Partners in Flight 2024) and 619,000 to 1.7 million in Europe (BirdLife International 2021).

Local pressures named by the IUCN include habitat degradation and over-hunting (especially in spring), loss of habitat to ski facilities and collisions with cables around ski stations, disturbance in wintering areas, overgrazing by reindeer in Sweden, a 30% decline in a decade in the Swiss Alps attributed to climatic change, and the spread of woody shrubs across the warming Arctic. The BTO says the UK Red-lists it for a severe decline in breeding numbers and a warming climate, though it is still legally hunted there.