The mountain cock

• The Mountain Cock, also known as the mugwort cock (lat. Tetrao urogallus) is a
bird from the pheasant family. It is a very skittish bird and can rarely be seen in
the wild. One of it’s distinctive features are it’s bright red eyebrows. Their
average lifespan is 19-21 years.
• The male mountain cock has a slight crooked yellowish-white beak and claws,
black eyes, bright red eyebrows, black feathers on the head and neck, dark
turquoise on the upper part of it’s chest and black and spotted white on it’s
lower chest and claws. The cock’s wings are the holder of the majority of it’s
dark brown feathers, the rest of them being found in it’s peacock-like fan-tail,
alongside some long black feathers with white spots.
• This bird has a very unusual mating instinct, as it tries to find it’s partner during
winter.
• A male can weight up to 5 kg and his wing opening
can ever surpass 1 m.
• In this bird’s particular case, he is trying to attract
a partner by showing of his fan-tail. 
• For this bird’s female counterpart, the colour pattern is identified by random
stripes of dark brown, lime, black and very little white. The black eye colour is
the same as the male’s. The female’s beak is coloured in dark tan, same as her
claws. This colours help the bird blend in with the surroundings, better hiding
from predators.
• The bird lays her eggs at winter’s end and the chicks crack out of them at the
beginning of spring.
• A female is significantly lighter then a male, only
weighting up to 2.5 kg and her wing opening can
reach at most 70 cm. (There has only been one
exception, one female reaching 73 cm.)
• This female mountain cock is hiding in a tree. 
• The mountain cock chicks look very similar to an adult female, the only
two differences being the size and the wide black spot on the chick’s
forehead. A mountain cock female can have as much as ten chicks at once,
but only 3 or 4 will make it past their first two weeks. There is no way to
distinguish male or female by their feathers at the beginning of their life.
• Here you can see a mountain cock father calling his chicks to him.
 CURIOSITIES
• 1) Many of the mountain cock exemplars can be found in other countries, but in
Germany, Scotland and Romania it is on the verge of extinction because of it’s
overhunting by foxes.
• 2) Only 1 in 3 females are able to lay eggs and that is why all of the mountain
cock families are composed of one male and 2 females. The one female that is
unable to have eggs will leave and will never try to find a new partner again. If
(extremely rearly), both females have eggs, they can both stay.
• 3) The mountain cock , alongside the peacock were considered saint birds
due to their fan-tail which was associated with the saint halo from religion.
• 4) Oddly, the males aren’t able to fly because of their weight, only the females
being able to use their wings in the classic bird style.
A FAMILY OF ONE MALE AND TWO FEMALES A FEMALE COCK FLYING
In the whole world, there was only once found a
blue variant of this bird.