Note 81 — Chapter II

The cappercailzie, or tjäder, as he is called in Sweden, is a bird of singular habits, and seems to want some of the protective instincts which secure most other wild birds from destruction. The younger Læstadius frequently notices the tjäder, in his very remarkable account of the Swedish Laplanders—a work wholly unsurpassed as a genial picture of semi-barbarian life, and not inferior in minuteness of detail to Schlatter's description of the manners of the Nogai Tartars, or even to Lane's admirable and exhaustive work on the Modern Egyptians. The tjäder, though not a bird of passage, is migratory, or rather wandering in domicile, and appears to undertake very purposeless and absurd journeys. "When he flits," says Læstadius, "he follows a straight course, and sometimes pursues it quite out of the country. It is said that, in foggy weather, he sometimes flies out to sea, and, when tired, falls into the water and is drowned. It is accordingly observed that, when he flies westwardly, toward the mountains, he soon comes back again; but when he takes an eastwardly course, he returns no more, and for a long time is very scarce in Lapland. From this it would seem that he turns back from the bald mountains, when he discovers that he has strayed from his proper home, the wood; but when he finds himself over the Baltic, where he cannot alight to rest and collect himself, he flies on until he is exhausted and falls into the sea."—Petrus Læstadius, Journal af första året, etc., p. 325.