PTARMIGAN • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Ptarmigan

"Ptarmigan" Quotes from Famous Books

... had it, and presently Miss Rutherford was winding deeper into the great hills that skirted Flat Top. Far in the gulches, dammed by the small thick timber, she came on patches of snow upon which the sun never shone. Once a ptarmigan started from the brush at her feet. An elk sprang up from behind a log, stared at her, and crashed away through ...

— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... other colours of female birds seem to me exactly analogous to the colours of both sexes in such groups as the snipes, woodcocks, plovers, ptarmigan, desert birds, Arctic ...

— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... farces, if it was the possession of children that had changed me. For when you're with children you must in some way match their snowy innocence with a kindred coloring of innocence, very much as the hare and the weasel and the ptarmigan turn white to match the whiteness of our northern winter. Yet I was able to wring pure joy out of Rachmaninoff's playing at Carnegie Hall, with a great man making music for music's sake. I loved the beauty and balance and splendid sanity of that playing, without keyboard fire-works ...

— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... overflow water is grateful to the teeth that do not disdain this most effective way of securing an intimate union between sole and upper. Even the children are busy: here is a boy whittling out bow and arrow—and they do great execution amongst rabbits and ptarmigan with these weapons that entail no cost of powder and shot; here is a girl beating out threads from sinew with a couple of flat stones. Some of us, troubled with unconscientious tailors, wish that a law could be passed requiring all buttons ...

— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... world. The ptarmigan in Chilkoot Pass discards his winter white feathers for brown; the Patagonian Beau Brummell oils his chignon and clubs him another sweetheart to drag to his skull-strewn flat. ...

— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

Words linked to "Ptarmigan" : grouse, moorbird, Lagopus scoticus, moorgame, Lagopus, moor-bird, red grouse, genus Lagopus, moorfowl