Rock Ptarmigan live in Arctic and alpine habitats and change plumage with the seasons. The population in Japan is the subspecies known as the Japanese Rock Ptarmigan.
Both sexes are white in winter, while breeding females are mottled brown and black. Males keep their winter white plumage later than females.
Japanese Rock Ptarmigan chicks under temporary protection have been observed pecking their mother’s fresh, soft cecal droppings. After she warms them under her body, chicks may gather around newly passed droppings and leave peck marks.
In June–July 2016, researchers studied three hens and twenty chicks temporarily protected in cages on Mount Kita in the Southern Japanese Alps, with supervised outdoor foraging. All three broods left peck marks on maternal cecal droppings between three and eighteen days of age.
Many of the main bacterial groups present in the mothers were already detected in one-week-old chicks. The researchers suggested that consuming maternal droppings may help chicks acquire microbes involved in plant digestion early in life.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The 2019 study identifies gut-microbe development as relevant to captive conservation of Japanese Rock Ptarmigan. The authors call for further work on bacterial strains, their functions and their relationship to chick survival.