The signs for a street near my home say Tarmigan. For thirty years that name has made me chuckle. I have always wondered why the developer would bother to name a street when doing so would require it to be misspelled, presumably because the real spelling of “ptarmigan” includes a silent “p” before the “t” and that silent “p” might be too much for people to grasp or maybe for the mail to be delivered. In any case, the Willow Ptarmigan is a gorgeous bird in the grouse family and it is the state bird of Alaska although I took this photograph in Churchill, Canada four years ago.