The harriers are back

Almost a year to the day since they appeared on the Chayne, the hen harriers have returned. Last year, more than five harriers at a time were seen cruising over the low ground below the moor, and this morning I happened to come across a cock and hen bird flying together over a patch of thick rushes. It’s possible that there is a communal winter roost somewhere in the vicinity, but I have only ever found evidence to suggest that they roost alone in the winter on my patch.

I look forward to seeing some of their display flights in the next few weeks, and always feel quite lucky that they hang around the Chayne in such numbers. Here’s hoping that next few years will see some breeding birds on the farm – every fox I take off the place brings that possibility a little bit closer.

RSPB lek surveys in Galloway 2012

I happened to notice yesterday that the RSPB are again advertising for paid lek surveyors in Dumfries and Galloway. Candidates are required, in the terms of the job offer, to

“undertake surveys for black grouse, with the expectation of searching approximately fifteen 5km squares for black grouse lekking locations and record relevant information e.g. lek location, number of birds and habitat. You will need experience in survey work, map skills and the willingness to work flexibly (pre-dawn starts required) in remote locations. Post provides good experience in conservation field work, contributing information that is vital to inform habitat management work for the species“.

Now it may not come as a surprise to long term readers of this blog, but I’m not 100% happy with the way the RSPB conduct their black grouse conservation attempts. They certainly have a great deal of money to invest in “awareness” campaigns like the prominent endorsement of the black grouse whisky, but it is unclear as to precisely how public awareness will help the birds. Sure, money is donated to reserves where black grouse conservation work takes place, but the RSPB is obviously unable to sustain the species on its own. Only with the cooperation of private land ownership will black grouse secure themselves in a range sufficiently large enough to prevent genetic stagnation and collapse. Sadly, many of the black grouse’s key habitats are part of estates managed for sporting purposes; areas in which the RSPB are persona non grata.

The whole raptor/grouse moor debate is not very interesting to me, but it has driven a wedge between the RSPB and many private landowners. In many areas, the line of communication has broken down altogether, so there is no way for the RSPB to pass on important conservation information that it is presumably gathering in its experimental reserves. Instead, battle lines are drawn up, with the RSPB supposedly championing the rights of everyone to have access to wildlife and private landowners lying like dragons on their mounds of sequestered gold.

Unable (and possibly unwilling? we’ll see) to do any real good for black grouse, the RSPB don’t want to seem like they don’t care. The Dumfries and Galloway black grouse lek survey takes place every year, but it is very unclear as to its specific purpose. If the paid surveyors find a lek that they didn’t know about before, what do they do about it? Do they approach the landowner and advise him on habitat management at the risk of getting a thick ear, or do they meekly mark the site on a map and visit again next year, when the lek is smaller? I think I can guess that one. If by some stroke of magic a lek has expanded, then the only possible explanation is that raptors are being persecuted, so the site is earmarked for surveillance.

Rather than bury the hatchet and work with private landowners, the RSPB are now passively watching black grouse numbers disintegrate in Galloway, disguising their total inability to remedy the situation by carrying out surveys which supposedly represent “direct action” but which in actual fact are nothing more than them “keeping an eye on things”. How much easier their job would be if they could telephone every farmer in their 5Km squares and ask them to keep an eye out for black grouse. That would be an example of a charity working with the people to get the job done. As it is, surveyors don’t even ask permission of landowners before carrying out surveys – not a legal requirement, but certainly one dictated by good manners. It’s just one of many ways in which the RSPB show themselves to be so clothed in patronising suburban authoritarinism that they don’t trust country people to provide them with reliable data. They believe that we are all backward facing buzzard killing yokels, and that the nation’s wildlife is longing to be freed from the evils of agriculture, field sports and private ownership.

For the last two years, I applied to help with the RSPB’s lek surveys. I live near three leks and I know of several birds that I can guarantee they don’t. I have never even had a letter of acknowledgement for my applications. I found out that last year, lek counts in Galloway were incomplete because they couldn’t find sufficient surveyors, yet I know that my application sat on their desk. It might sound like sour grapes, but I’d have done the work for free, and I’d have done it better than any polyester hat wearing teenager looking to get “survey experience” as part of a progression into a career in conservation. It’s possible that I’ve upset someone at RSPB HQ, and given the questions I’ve been asking them over the past three years, I wouldn’t be surprised if I have.

The RSPB do great work for blue tits, robins and sparrowhawks, but when it comes to dealing with problems on a landscape scale, they are somewhat out of their depth. As a conservation charity, they have their feet (historically and metaphorically) in the town. If they want to do some real good for black grouse, they’re going to have to try a little harder, and maybe go so far as to accept that the countryside isn’t a theme park but is actually a place which provides employment for quite a few people.

Rotten fence, soon to be replaced with a hedgerow.

With the hill more or less dead and lifeless, now seems to be the time to make plans for the spring. Although it doesn’t seem it, the growing season is almost here, and I’ve got big plans for planting.

One of the most important projects I’m working on this year is creating (or resurrecting in some cases) hedgerows around the low ground. With the exception of two mature conifer plantations, there are almost no trees in the inbye fields, and given that black grouse really dine out on hedge berries, it seems logical to create some ungrazed field margins and fill them with low growing berry trees like hawthorn and rowan. It will do no harm to the open heather habitat on the hill and it will add another dimension to the feeding already available on the low ground.

As always, my budget is very limited for projects like these but in the next few weeks, I will be ripping out a one hundred yard section of rotten fence and re-stock proofing it as a double enclosure. It will be a few years before the first berries appear, but it’s nice to have a few irons in the fire at the same time so that they come to (literal) fruition over an extended period.

Going a little mad after a cold bath.

Just thought it was worth documenting a great walk up the hill this afternoon, under a mild sun with views down to the Lake District and the Isle of Man. My snare midden has been working for the past two weeks and although it hasn’t produced the goods yet, it’s come tantalisingly close. Yesterday, I found evidence to suggest that a fox had slipped in under one snare, picked up a dead hare from the stink pit and then knocked all the other snares over as it clumsily hauled its trophy out of the enclosure. It was frustrating to see how close I’d come to bringing him to book, but since he’s this cheeky, I don’t think it’ll be long before he slips up.

I skirted around the midden this afternoon as I set off for my walk, hoping for some success. There was nothing at all, and I realised that it may take a couple of days for my scent to fade away again after having re-set the snares just yesterday. I carried the .410 with me, which serves as a multi-purpose vermin dispatch tool and is as handy for a snared fox as it is for a rabbit pushed out of the rushes by accident. As soon as I had checked the midden, I went back to the car to fetch scoop. I’m trying not to expose her to the sound of gunfire, so any walking that involves the possibility of a shot requires solitude.

We followed the track up above the midden to the woodcock strip, which took a major beating in the storms at the start of January. I took some little corners out the wood before the winds came, and have been rewarded with some cracking windblow which will save me almost a week’s work. The wood is now broken into sections of flat sitkas, crisscrossing one another and lying with their huge foot plates sitting up at right angles to the ripped peat. The majority of the trees are still standing vertically, but this “mish-mash” effect was what I was aiming to achieve, breaking up the uniformity of a hard forest wall. The timber is so inaccessible that with the exception of a few trees, I will leave them in the wood to rot. Underplanted with silver birch and aspen, the fallen trees will take on a new (and much more wildlife friendly) aspect in 2012, although more on this anon.

Out on the hill, it was interesting to see heather that has been totally destroyed by the sheep. Scoop and I walked a different route from our normal “trap lap” and were rewarded by flushing a red grouse cock, which was so noisy and startling that it in turn flushed a snipe. The deer grass blew in golden waves across the hill, and it was an envigorating experience trying not to run as gusts of wind raged up from the southwest and slapped me in the back.

On the final stretch back to the car, Scoop took it upon herself to roll in a pile of freshly pressed fox shit, with the consistency of primula cheese. Thrilled with her acquisition, she bounded up to me to see if I wanted some. We ran together down to the burn and I hauled her into a peaty pool beneath the waterfall. The little black dog was swallowed up into the amber water as I waded in after her with a handful of moss to scrub her clean. Few things are worse than the smell of fox shit, so after she escaped from the water, I caught her and tossed her back in again, just to be sure that I’d got it all.

She then spent the next ten minutes tearing around the burnside in an attempt to get warm and dry again. Tucking her bottom under her, she ran around like a mad thing, barking and tossing tufts of moss into the air. The entire experience was viewed as a grand and elaborate joke, so I can say with some confidence that she didn’t learn a thing…

Struck by a mystery illness, the Jimny was taken away on the back of a lorry.

I don’t know a thing about cars. I like to think that I’m not a stupid person and I can often pick up new information quite quickly when it interests me. The problem is that cars don’t interest me.

I’ve been driving for almost nine years and have driven a huge assortment of old bangers in that time. To be quite honest, I can’t even remember the makes and models of many of them. I remember details like top speed, colour and ashtray location, and the rest sort of fades into a haze of uncertainty and indifference. I’m sometimes surprised by how much other people think and talk about their cars, but then I remember that I lie in bed and think about grouse every night so I’m not really able to judge anyone for having obscure interests.

Anyhow, my new suzuki jimny ceased to work altogether last week, and despite advice from some well qualified and talented mechanics, there seems to be no way of making it work again. That is how it has been phrased to me, because mechanical words of more than one syllable mean nothing at all in my brain. Without my 4×4, my lamping routine is as restricted and as unpleasant as it ever was, being forced to carry battery packs over thick moss. It’s a real pain, and until they can find out what is stopping it working, stop it and get it working again, I’m reduced to driving my girlfriend’s car…

A last minute addition to the book - now in the final proofs.

The last few days have been incredibly hectic, heading down to visit the publishers of my black grouse book while trying to keep on top of the puppy and scouting around the hill for foxes. I caught the train down to England on Tuesday morning, and had the misfortune of sitting next to the ubiquitous drunk Scotsman who abused our fellow English passengers with xenophobic insults and persistent claims that Scotland will only really rise again one we have lifted the shackles of “foreign oppression”. It was interesting to finally meet a Scottish nationalist after twenty six years living North of the border, and can happily assume that if his fellow SNP voters are of a similar calibre, then the Union is safe for the forseeable future.

Seeing my book (entitled The Black Grouse) actually being put together on a computer screen was an odd experience, and all sorts of fond, wet-moss memories came drifting back in the clean publisher’s office as my illustrations were man-handled into position by the click of a mouse. It was exciting to think that I have been allocated an ISBN number, and all being well, advance copies of the book will be available in July for a release date in August. More details will be posted on this blog as the time approaches, but as I look over the final proofs, I must say that I’m quite pleased with all the work I’ve been doing for the past three years.

Keep your eyes peeled for publicity material in the next few months!

Hunched in thick cover - he's actually quite difficult to spot.

Having finally got my camera up and running again after almost a month, it’s been good fun picking up where I left off in my attempts to document the Chayne in photographs. One of the first things I managed to swing the lens onto today was this blackcock, lurking in the debris of zome old horsechestnut trees. Despite their loud electric blue colouring, blackcock are sometimes pretty well camouflaged, particularly at a distance amongst peat haggs and thick cover, (as above).

The thinking behind the blackcock’s garish colour scheme is presumably the same as that of the cock pheasant – Once you reach a certain size, being strong and fast enough to evade most predators is as effective a safety mechanism as camouflage. It’s almost as if a refusal to blend into the surroundings is a metaphorical middle finger to predators, sending out a signal to say “don’t bother messing with me – I’m fast, strong and I back myself to such an extent that I don’t even need to hide from you”.

That’s not to say that blackcock are immune to predation. Many are killed every year by a variety of predators, but since blackcock don’t have to sit on eggs like greyhens, they can afford to be black in an environment where almost every other bird is speckled, brown and almost totally invisible.

The view from my bedroom window this morning - grouse country, Galloway style

Just thought it was worth including this picture which I took this morning from my bedroom window, looking across the loch to the Bogrie Hill. I’m thrilled to bits to finally be living within earshot of grouse, particularly in an area with reasonable heather coverage. The Chayne is a white hill, with the majority of the heather hidden in the thick overgrowth of grass and moss. There is enough heather to support red grouse, but a total lack of mature heather coverage leaves chicks painfully vulnerable and exposed to predators. The Bogrie (pictured) has a better heather coverage, and consequently there are quite a few red grouse up on the heights.

Encroaching bracken is starting to be a major problem on the lower slopes, but the presence of willow and rowan scrub make a great habitat for blackcock. Most hills in Galloway are now overgrazed or planted with sitka spruce trees, so it’s perfect for me to be living in a spot that, aside from the bracken, hasn’t changed much in the past century. It is the sort of hillside which once made Galloway famous as a sporting destination – a place where red grouse never really caught on but where sportsmen travelled from across Europe in search of blackgame.

At four months old, scoop is growing like bracken and learns more every day.

Every day that goes by, the little black dog makes her presence more and more obvious. No longer confined to the house on wet days or longer walks, she accompanies me across the hills as a matter of routine – and what a difference it is to walk with her. At four months of age, she is still almost totally useless, but there is the occassional spark of evidence to suggest that there the potential for some intelligence in that skull. So far, she has accidentally flushed her first woodcock, snipe and black grouse, but has no idea. All birds beat a hasty retreat as she blundered through the undergrowth, and while she followed their scent, she’s not yet wise enough to know what the smells mean. When they got up, she was either distracted by something else or viewed the event as being totally unrelated to her presence.

Hares are weighing quite heavily on her mind at the moment, and since they don’t fly, they are more interesting altogether than those weird feathery things which seem so tempting but then vanish into thin air. She hunts for them on the hill behind the house, and when she finds them, she sits down and barks. They bound away with hardly a backward glance, and she follows at a distance, tracing their scent through the rushes, before being distracted by some fresh piece of sheep shit. Her concentration span is still basically non-existent, but there are new signs of progress every day.

Her first lesson has been to come back to me, not only when I call but also when I blow the whistle in two short peeps. She is getting the hang of this, but I need to be firm with her. Distractions are not hard to come by on the hill, and what looks to me like a simple pile of sheep shit is, in her eyes, a smorgisbord of gastronomic delight. No wonder she sometimes hesitates to return when the grass is littered with malteser-like treats, but I hope that I’m convincing her that I am always more interesting – it just feels like rather a shame that I need to.

A great bonus of keeping a dog is that I am now forced to walk extended distances every day. It’s not always easy to get up to the Chayne to walk her, so I take her up behind my new house, into the heather and willow scrub. From the top of the hill behind the house, you can see straight down onto the Chayne just two miles away, and the terrain and undergrowth are fairly uniform throughout. As I range further and further on my dog walks, it’s a matter of time before I come across black grouse. There is some very promising country just a mile or so away from the back door which I will have to explore come April when the leks build up a head of steam. It’s important for me to find out where the leks are in the area, and with the fortunate combination of a new house and a new dog to help me explore the hills around the Chayne, I’m looking forward to the spring.

For an animal that has not helped me with anything over the past four months, I’m surprised just how devoted to her I am. Just imagine how much I’ll like her when she’s actually pulling her weight – working the heather and retrieving shot birds.

Brown hares might be making a comeback on the Chayne

When you set out to create a wild shoot, you can’t be picky when it comes to which game species responds to your efforts. Although pretty much all of the work I have done over the past two and a half years on the Chayne has been in the name of black grouse, snipe seem to have been the main benificiaries so far. I look forward to visiting the Chayne over the next six or eight weeks to hear the first drumming birds over the bog, and it really has been surprising just how quickly these little waders have responded to vermin control and the management of rushes and wet ground. Looking back, snipe really flourished last summer in an area where I was running three larsen traps, so it could well be that their numbers up to that point had been limited by theiving crows with an appetite for eggs. This summer, I flushed two broods of four snipe from an area where there were only ever lone pairs, so it’s clear that breeding successes have improved markedly as the result of just two springs spent trapping.

Next to respond to my work seems to be hares. Although the Chayne is sadly not high enough to hold blue hares, there are one or two brown hares up on the inbye fields. When I say “one or two”, I really do mean it. In all the time I have spent working up on the hill, I have never seen a single hare, but droppings and footprints in the snow give me a vague idea that they’re around. These past few months have brought more signs than ever before, and the shepherd tells me that she put one up on the lekking ground as she drove through it on the quad bike. It was the first hare she has seen on the Chayne in nine years, and it gives me hope that it is there because of my work.

Most country people look at hares as being little better than rabbits, but I’m a big fan of those grand, lolloping critters. The idea that they are responding to my attempts to manage the hill is very heartening, and I will bear them in mind in future. I wouldn’t have much interest in shooting them, but if I can get them up to a reasonable number, I certainly wouldn’t have a problem bagging the odd one for the pot. Hare is a great meat, and the animal itself can be an exciting thing to shoot when it rises unexpectedly infront of a team of walking guns.

My planned experiment for game cover crops this year should see some elements of arable farming reintroduced to the farm after an absence of more than twenty years, and I feel confident that if anyone is to benefit from this new project, it will be hares.

Not many shoots allow hares to be shot nowadays, and this has become so even in my lifetime. Apparently, the logic of “no ground game” has its roots in the fact that so many people are new to shooting and that hosts can’t rely on their guests to take safe shots at running game. On some shoots, even foxes are taboo, and while this makes sense on rough ground where spotting beaters and neighbouring guns can be tricky, it is a little inappropriate on a broad partridge stubble or a carpet of fresh heather where it’s obvious who is where. This is a great shame, since hares were once a valued game species and many thousands were shot every year as part of walked up and driven shoots. Given that my ultimate goal is to recreate the same sort of mixed rough shooting on offer to a 1930s sportsman, I need to be able to offer hares to complete the (now lost) sense of variety which defined that period of shooting, and it will be up to the guns themselves to decide whether to take the shot or not.