Endless Corbies

Lapwings are high on the list of birds that I want to encourage. (this one was on the Orkney Islands last year)

It’s frustrating to see that despite my best efforts, crows are still in evidence across the Chayne. I may well have removed the bulk of breeding birds and I’m always on the look out for new nests, but that doesn’t stop the less destructive but still dangerous gangs of non-breeding birds from passing through now and again. My nearest neighbour traps crows with the same enthusiasm that I do, but there’s too much unmanaged sitka spruce to the west and south of the farm which means that, while I take a big bite out of the local birds, others are always waiting to step into the breach.

I watched a curlew chase a crow away from his partner’s nest yesterday morning, then saw a lapwing beating hell’s bells out of a corbie on the neighbour’s land this morning, just over the march dyke. Everybody loves lapwings, but they really don’t do very well on the Chayne. The habitat is not ideal for them, and the foxes are always waiting to descend on the few pairs who try their luck. They have more lapwings on the neighbour’s property, and given that my new game crop is right on the march, I hope that I can draw some of this year’s young over when the crop is drilled next week and the young plants start to show. I remember as a very small child seeing clouds of lapwings on a turnip field which had been recently sown, and I have fingers crossed that the next few years on the Chayne spent resurrecting the old arable ways might see them returning.

Spring Rain

Coming in to land

Each season on the Chayne has its merits, and I must admit that my favourite is always the one currently happening. I love winter in winter and summer in summer, but there’s something really special about May. I was thinking it today as I walked round my larsen traps and was caught out in a passing shower. Being several hundred yards from the nearest cover, I crouched down into a peat hagg and pulled my jacket over my head until it passed.

For twenty minutes I lay in the hagg, and for twenty minutes without interruption a cock cuckoo called from the top of a still naked ash tree. Ash trees are always the last to show leaves and the first to turn in the autumn, but they manage to pack a huge amount of growth and activity into the few months of the year when they’re active. A small scattering of them remains around the ruined farm buildings at the back of the Chayne, and they are not only a magnet for crows and crow nests, but they also draw in thrushes and cuckoos during the spring. These latter love to perch in the tops and pour forth torrents of liquid music, which echo emptily across a hard, bony hill which hasn’t yet clothed itself in absorbant summer growth. The bird that I was listening to was just visible at the very top of his ash tree, flicking his long tail up over his head and calling incessantly through the warm falling water. It became like a heartbeat to the downpour; a rhythm in the rain.

A skylark fought its way up through the droplets and began to sing as the rain passed on and I pulled the jacket from my head. Undaunted, the cuckoo sang on like the bog’s pulse. A snipe began to drum, zig-zagging up and down through the sodden sky like the teeth of a wood saw. He banked and turned, looping over the sweating moss and coming back for another pass. Clouds of condensation rose up from a block of sitkas below the hill, giving the happy but misleading impression that they were on fire. But there was none of the hard form of smoke. The edges of the mist blended into transparency like steam.

I was soon on my way again, and the sphagnum moss wheezed beneath each footfall, forming clusters of peaty bubbles around the toes of my boots. The bog cotton isn’t as puffy as it should be yet, and I often think that there’s more value in those bobbing poms than there is in any field of vulgar tulips or lillies. Their best is yet to come, and the changing seasons will soon bring those Galloway roses dancing back into view.

Discoveries

A terrible photo – all I seem to be able to manage at the moment

My larsen trapping regime has forced me to visit areas of the farm which are normally too inaccessible for me to go to on a regular basis, and I’ve learnt some interesting new things over the past month. I was forced to watch a fox charge away through the rushes yesterday evening when, for the first time in a while, I didn’t have my rifle with me (that won’t happen again), and this evening I flushed a greyhen on my way out to empty a cage trap. I managed to take a very bad photograph at quite long range in terrible weather conditions which proves what I saw, but I’m now worried about its significance.

It’s a bit late to be seeing greyhens out and about, and unless I pushed her off a nest (which I doubt, because she got up a long way away), it’s quite likely that she’s not sitting. It could be that she’s a late starter and has already laid a clutch which she hasn’t gone down on yet, but while I’m pleased to see her, it also causes some concern.

Red and Grey

A grey partridge at four days old (left) and a red legged partridge at five.

Now that the eggs are in the incubator and the first bantam is starting to show some evidence of turning broody, my partridge project seems to be coming together nicely. I don’t know a great deal about grey partridges, so this area of my work on the Chayne is something of a new voyage of discovery for me.

I was passing by the home of a gamekeeper friend on my way back from work this evening and had a few minutes to spare, so I decided to drop in and pick his brain on the subject of partridges. I didn’t realise as I pulled up at his cottage that he would actually have a few grey partridge chicks in his brooder houses, and I was soon crouched down by the cardboard chick rings, peering at the little stripey bumble bees as they raced in and out from the shelter of their electric hen. In amongst the greys were a small handful of red-legs, and it presented an interesting opportunity to compare the two at such an early age. My ‘keeper friend explained that he mixes a handful of red-legged partridges in with each batch of greys because the sprightly little foreign birds are good at showing their English counterparts how to get by, particularly if they are slightly older. He demonstrated his logic by rattling one of the water filled nipples beneath a hanging bucket. Immediately, the handful of red leg chicks responded by dashing towards the sound, while the mass of greys circulated blandly without seeming to recognise it.

It seems that slightly older red legs are quick enough on the uptake to pass on some handy hints, and it makes sense to mix them in this way. I have heard of the same done for quail in America, and that seems to do the trick. This is not particularly relevant to me this year, since, barring disaster, my birds will be reared by bantams, but it goes to show just what a complex science I’m dabbling in, and just how much more there is to gamekeeping than the popular perception.

 

 

Mail Order Partridges

A dozen partridge eggs, as received through the post…

2012′s grey partridge project has begun, but not as I had planned. Originally, I intended to buy partridge eggs from a breeder in the midlands, but for one reason and another, I didn’t get my act in order before the first clutches had been sold. I will still get some eggs from that breeder but not for another few weeks, which was going to mean that I was going to end up wasting the first few weeks of the possible rearing season without any eggs to play with. Looking for a substitute, I asked around and had eBay recommended to me as a possible source of small quantities of eggs.

For some reason, eBay seems like an extremely unlikely place to find gamebirds. If it hadn’t been for the fact that my bantam eggs came from that website, as well as most of my girlfriend’s quail, I would hardly have believed that you can go online to bid for items which will one day become living, breeding birds. A small parcel arrived in the post this morning – 12 little grey partridge eggs, all looking in reasonably good condition.

Shaking up eggs has been shown to dramatically lower their hatching potential, and sending them through the postal system is a fairly good way of making sure that they are exposed to some level of abuse. I only had a 30% hatch from my broody eggs, but that takes into account the fact that the polystyrene box that they were sent in showed some evidence of having been seriously bashed about. However, by comparison, my girlfriend brought 80% of her quail chicks on from a clutch that was sent through the post, so as much as it’s not ideal, it’s better for me to have something to work on than nothing at all. It could be that the hatch will be great but if it isn’t, I’ve got another clutch of eggs on the way.

I’ll get these eggs started in the incubator and then slip them under a broody hen as soon as they start to go down. Fingers crossed that there will soon be the muffled sound of cheeping…

A Suspicious Lull

Nothing to do but take photographs… a skylark on the Chayne

The last week has been really very quiet up on the hill, particularly in terms of vermin. I haven’t caught a crow, stoat or weasel in a few days, and there have been no signs of any fox activity. That’s not to say that the buggers aren’t still out there -

Having accounted for the tricky crow which wouldn’t come into my trap last week, another seems to have learnt to avoid even the larsen mate, and it just sits on a dyke a few yards away from the traps without any promise of comittment. I’ll try and tumble him off the stones with the rifle, but by comparison to the last month, these last few days have been very slow moving for the larsen traps.

I had a moment of excitement when I thought I saw a stoat’s tail sticking out of one of my trap tunnels, but was surprised to see that it was the tail of a hen wheatear. I pulled the bird out of the tunnel to find that she was missing her head from the bottom beak upwards. It was clearly the handiwork of a weasel, and he had pulled the dead wheatear into the “safety” of my tunnel to munch up her skull in peace and quiet. If he had moved three quarters of an inch further into the tunnel, the trap would have had him. As it was, he had his little meal and made off without even firing the trap. I put the remains of the wheatear on the far side of the trap so that if the little blighter wants to come back for seconds, he’ll have one of Mr. Fenn’s finest after him.

I was confident that this would work, but 48 hours later, it seems like it won’t. I have found dead pipits and larks before which have been killed by weasels. The little savages seem to eat out the brain from the back of the neck, then just waste the rest of the bird and let it rot. I have sometimes caught them returning to their kills, but it seems that, at this time of year anyway, food is so abundant that you can eat what you want and throw away the rest.

 

 

The Ploughman Cometh

Nobody has ever looked forward to a visit from the ploughman as much as me.

It seems like an eternity since I got approval from the tenant to take a field and put it under game cover, and during that time I’ve been getting more and more excited about what is essentially just a bog-standard agricultural procedure. I’m excited because of the links between black grouse and arable farming, as well as the fact that turning the soil is sure to bring about a regeneration for all sorts of birds and mammals. It’s not that I expect a three acre plot of game cover to single handedly turn the fortunes of black grouse around in Galloway, but it’s the first in a series of steps in the right direction.

I’ve looked at that hill every day for three years and sometimes feel totally deflated by just how little my efforts have produced. I’ve got no doubt that I’ve made a difference, but the changes I have been working on are on a landscape scale and will be slow to materialise. I’ve got no problem with bashing on at the job, but how fantastic it was today to see that the tractor man had found a spare moment to plough the field inside the main gate. In one fell swoop, an entire field has been turned upside down. Nobody can say that the change isn’t striking and noticeable, and over the course of this summer, as turnips and kale grow upwards, I’ll finally get to see my work improving the farm day by day. It was a miserable soaking wet day (as shown in the picture) and I’m still struggling with the ‘flu, but I was grinning from ear to ear when I saw the field, if for no other reason than because, on a farm where steady decay and collapse are characterisistic features, something positive has happened.

The tractor man will be back with a ton of lime for the field next week, and he will hopefully broadcast the seed on it then. We’ve been getting some pretty heavy frosts in the past few days, so it wouldn’t hurt if he was to leave it for a little longer.