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Encounters With Capercaillie |
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By Antje Neumann
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Saturday, 27 September 2008 |
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Antje Neumann is Oulu’s nature maven. National Geographic, Animal Planet, and the Discovery Channel rolled into one, Antje brings you Oulu wildlife from the comfort of your office chair. This month, we look at that fearsome beast the Capercaille.
My dog Ujo and I often go for walks through the nearby forest. During an autumnal ramble, Ujo suddenly stops and sniffs at something on the ground: a black feather, about 30 cm long! I lift the feather curiously to take a closer look: it doesn’t have any sharp tips–as feathers usually display–but a rounded end.
The feather of the tail of a male capercaillie. Capercaillies, belonging to the family of grouse that occur here in Finland, including black grouse, hazel grouse and snow grouse, reach a height of about half a meter, making them the biggest members of the grouse family.
You seldom have the luck to see giant grouse in nature, since they are usually hiding in the endless forests. They are especially “invisible” now in September and October during the hunting season.
But they are not always afraid of humans. A smile runs over my face as I remember my last wild capercaillie encounter: at the end of April, and the beginning of their courting season. Male capercaillie establish their own territories to which they return each year. They defend it aggressively against every capercaillie intruder and, by a courtship display, try to attract hens.
If they do not find any other male capercaillie to fight with or any hens for company, they can literally go crazy. “Hulluja metsoja” or crazy capercaillies can attack whatever gets in their way: humans, cars, moose; even tractors.
 Antje and the Capercaille
I made my camera ready and took a few shots. Soon it was only three meters away from me. I tried to back up, but my ski got stuck behind some branches, I lost balance – and fell.
So there I was sitting on my backside in the snow at eye height with a crazy capercaillie. Fortunately, I still had my skiing sticks in my hands and could use one of them to hold the big bird at distance. Nearly as crazy as the bird, I used my other hand to take pictures of the capercaillie.
It tried quite hard to get closer: it went to the right, went to the left, ran against the stick, tried to circle me. Sometimes I had to use both sticks and the skies as well to push it back. The situation went on and on.
The big bird didn’t seem to get either tired or bored of me. However, my bum got colder and colder – and I wondered if I’d manage to get out of the forest before it got dark.
Finally I figured out that the bird actually did not try to bite my skiing stick. It was just trying to get closer. If I would stop pulling it back for a minute and try to get onto my feet, it might bite me into my legs or run into me – or it might just do nothing?
In the end, I got cold enough to try the escape. Lifting myself onto my skies, I turned around and simply skied away. A look back over my shoulder: the capercaillie still sat at the same place. It simply looked at me, perhaps too surprised to do anything. Or perhaps it was still so early in courtship that it was not aggressive yet, but had just tried to hit on me.
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