Mountain Chicken

Throughout the mountains of western North America lives a rare and elusive mountain chicken: the White-tailed Ptarmigan. These birds are perfectly adapted to the harsh alpine conditions. They spend most of their time foraging on small plant matter in the tundra, insulated from the wind and cold by their warm layers of feathers. Ptarmigan are also famous for changing their feathers to match their snowy surroundings in the winter, and their rocky surroundings in the Summer. This mastery of camouflage makes them very difficult to find. It’s always a thrill to stumble across a group of ptarmigan, and they are often just a few metres away when you notice their movement among the rocks. I used a wide angle lens for this image, to capture the landscape where this remarkable bird resides year-round.