Grouse moor

“ On the smaller moors on the north-east of Caithness mixed up with the arable land there is certainly very much less disease, and when the birds get a touch, it is called a bad breeding season; as the tenant of a very fair moor in that district put it, "We never have disease, but we had a season of poor shooting as the birds did not breed that year." ”

“ The following season I joined some other men for a few days' shooting over dogs on a small moor in the county of Durham, and had a few pleasant enjoyable days, getting, perhaps, thirty brace in all. At that time grouse sat very fairly well to dogs for the first ten days in the English counties, as they now do in Perthshire and Aberdeenshire, but there was nothing like the quantity of birds on the English moors that there are now. One odd thing may be remarked: In all my sporting career I never shot but one curlew, and that was on this moor. Of birds, they are the wariest of the wary. ”

“ My reply was, that firstly there was not 150 brace upon the moor, and that if I let it I should be cheating him, and that if I did, shooting the little there was would do me far more damage by the loss of the breeding stock than the value of the £100, or three or four times the £100.
It is difficult to educate people to the knowledge of the fact that the breeding of grouse is like the breeding of other animals or birds, and that grouse are not in some mysterious way showered down by Providence like manna in the desert. ”

“ The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather family; for it consists of [Pg 308] more genera than one. It is so extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway, Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,—the latter continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the family,—the red grouse, or moor-fowl (Lagopus Scoticus) ,—would disappear from creation. ”

“ They will never desert high ground for low ground merely on account of a heavy fall of snow, provided that there is sufficient wind to keep the exposed ridges clear, and thus give access to the heather; and even if the whole Grouse in
snow moor should be covered they will burrow in the soft snow to reach the heather underneath. It is quite common to come upon birds in holes a foot or two under the loose snow. It is only when the snow has become covered with a hard, icy crust that the Grouse begin to feel the pinch of hunger. ”

“ Even if oat stacks with the corn in the straw, and more oats added to it to avoid unnecessary carting of straw, were erected, and protected in the early autumn, in various parts of a moor, these to be of any use would require to be visited in the very worst of the snow, in order that the protection might be removed and the grouse might start to scratch about for food. But there are many parts of many moors where an expedition at such a time would be a work of danger, for many a life has been lost in the snowstorms of the Highlands. ”

“ It has the property of making all things look a little ghostly, deepening the shadows and altering their values, so that all that you see seems to acquire an extra significance, not so much to the eye as to the mind. Slowly I retraced my steps, walking under the high wall of rough piled stones till it ends, at the copse of willows, on the north side of the little moor to which I had seen the pack of grouse fly after it had left the stooks. ”

“ The interesting fact remains, and is amply proved by the figures, that more food is required by the Grouse in winter than in other seasons of the year; and as in winter the proportion of Calluna to all other foods is as seven to one, it is obvious that a very great advantage accrues to a Grouse on a moor in which young and comparatively nourishing heather is abundant during the winter months, i.e., on a well-burned moor, well covered with young heather of a varying number of seasons' growth. ”

“ There are all degrees of bad management, and what we have to do is to go to the moors that yielded the best at the various dates and consider what was the management that brought this about. Some of the best moors in Scotland seem to have been very poorly managed in the great year of 1872. There is Menzies Castle moor, for instance, which lies only half a dozen miles or so from the record-breaking Grandtully moor, and yet in 1872, when the latter surprised all grouse shooters, the former was said to be very badly off for grouse, and the birds killed over dogs were nearly all old ones. ”

“ In autumn, where a moor is near arable land, the birds will often come to feed on the stubbles and corn stooks; they sometimes come in hundreds, and from long distances. This is not, however, the universal rule, for in some districts Grouse feed very little upon the corn, and in some seasons they appear to frequent the arable land more than in others. It has often been observed that by improving the heather on a moor Grouse may be induced to feed less upon the stooks. ”

“ I had not shot it down when recovering from disease, and at last the moor was full of birds, and for the next two or three years, until the scourge paid its next visit, we might shoot and hammer away at the birds, without detriment. Nothing that we could do in the way of shooting could possibly reduce the breeding stock below what it should be, until disease again reduced it. ”

“ Naturally, if you are prevented by weather from burning, the sheep farmer is annoyed, because he does not get his burning done. He argues, "Let me burn; I will burn as much in a day as you will in a week." And so he would, but it would be the fine old heather that will burn, and the shooting value of the moor destroyed for many long years. ”

“ I was very much pleased with Orkney. The land was good, and the climate was better than that of the mainland.
There were some grouse, and, as far as I could learn, the best moor was in Harray parish, where we had been fishing.
The moor was a common, and the whole of the commoners joined in granting a lease to the tenant of the shooting. I think the rent was £35 a-year, and he took off about 200 brace of grouse, and a really considerable number of snipe and plover, and I believe it was true that there was no disease. The game sold for more than paid the rent. ”

“ Growing Grouse.
As to the grouse moors, the damage done to agriculture and to the popular interest in connection with them—though it might not appear obvious at first—is very considerable. A hundred years ago the moors in my neighbourhood—as in many other parts of the country—were common lands. The people had rights of pasture over them for their cattle and sheep, they kept down the rabbits, using the latter largely for food, and they were able to grow farm crops up to the very edge of the heather. To-day these same lands—enclosed on the plea of public benefit!—are given over to grouse. ”

“ My own experience has been not to let a moor, excepting on lease, until I am quite certain that it can properly afford the number of birds to which I may limit it, and I think that I have pretty clearly shown that it will not afford birds at all in the first and second years, perhaps a few in the third, the killing of old cocks excepted, which should be done by the keeper. ”

“ Migration is one of the commonest theories, and is supported by the fact Migration. that few, if any, dead bodies are found on the ground. The migration doctrine presents some difficulties, for the Grouse in its earlier stages is not by nature a wanderer, and a brood is usually found, at all events up to the end of July, not very far from where it was hatched out. Then, again, it is difficult to explain how on a large moor the young birds have departed before they are capable of sustained flight, especially if none of the neighbouring moors have received any noticeable addition to their stock. ”

“ Such wholesale migrations often result in a complete loss of the stock, for the birds appear to lose their bearings, and though they may sometimes find a haven on some distant moor, where weather conditions are more propitious, several cases have been recorded of the packs being seen on the low ground 20 or 30 miles from the nearest hill, or even flying out to sea, whence presumably they never return. ”

“ Birds of both sexes will fly a long distance to a patch of black heather during a prevalence of severe frost and heavy snow, but the hens shift about in packs more irregularly than their male companions, and they are less partial to the high grounds, but seek the lower portions of the moor, and such as are most screened from the east winds. Grouse netters say that in fine open weather the birds fly very long distances when shifting about the hills. ”

“ If an April bird has newly and thickly feathered legs and feet, it means, almost certainly, that the "winter" plumage has been put on very late. The healthy Grouse should now be moulting the feathers of the feet and legs, so that bareness or lack of feathers becomes in them a sign of health in April, and thickly feathered legs a sign of sickness; this is the precise contrary of what has almost become proverbial on the moor, that bare legs indicate disease; though for the later autumn months the saying is quite true. ”

“ No discussion is more apt to produce different opinions than that which arises upon the age or the sex of Grouse in certain stages of moulting, either at the luncheon-hour upon the moor or in the game-larder when the day's bag has been overhauled, and hung upon the hooks. It must be admitted that there are individual cases occurring not rarely, in which it is almost impossible to tell the sex until the bird has been cut open and the internal anatomy examined. ”

“ She went fast to find her fires and, while her mind was fixed on them, she was still aware of the vast moor she loved, its darkness, its silence, the smells it gave out, the promise of warmth and fertility in its bosom. She could not clearly see the ground, but her feet knew it: heather, grass, stones, and young bracken were to be overcome; here and there a rock or thorn-bush loomed out blacker than the rest in warning; sometimes a dip in the earth must be avoided; once or twice dim grey objects rose up and became sheep that bleated out of her way, and always, as she ran, she mounted. ”

“ Still there remains the difficulty that the dead bodies are not found in any quantity; it must be remembered, however, that the infant Grouse is a small object, and any one who has searched in vain in the heather for a full-grown bird which has fallen to his gun can realise the difficulty of finding a tiny chick upon a moor where the whole stock does not average more than a bird to several acres. Coccidiosis chiefly attacks the birds when they are very small ”

“ If we admit that the congestion of a large number of birds upon small areas of moor is conducive to the deposit in dangerous numbers of the larval worms which cause disease on the favourite feeding - grounds of the birds, then it follows that the pack formation is in itself a danger to the health of the stock. This view is supported by the fact that where packing is the exception rather than the rule, as in the west coast of Scotland, disease is of rare occurrence. It is obviously impracticable to induce the Grouse to change this dangerous practice of congregating in packs ”

“ If we consider this generalisation with reference to moor management we shall see that a moor carrying its full tale of birds in the summer becomes automatically and unavoidably overstocked in the winter unless the stock is heavily reduced by shooting, for not only is there less food available, but the birds require a much larger quantity of food to keep them in health. ”

“ And though the cause of this may sometimes be that the bird is a weakling and has been driven off the better feed to live upon whatever it can find elsewhere, yet this inferior food is sometimes found in the crop of a bird which is evidently no weakling. It may then be due to the fact that the moor has been left long unburned, and that all the heather within reach is old and rank. ”

“ THE HOOTING CARN One of the grimmest yet most fascinating tracts of moorland in the West is that wild, boulder-strewn district behind St. Just in Penwith, near the Land's End. Here, amid a scene of savage beauty, wind-swept by the great gales from the Atlantic, is a stretch of treeless moor the richest in all Cornwall in remains of prehistoric man. ”

“ Plaintive and eerie the moor-birds protested against this invasion of their haunts. The moon came slowly up over the eastern end of the moor, flinging a silver radiance abroad, and softening the shadows cast by the hills. A strange, dank smell rose from the mossy ground—the scent of rotting heather and withered grass, mixed with the beautiful perfume from beds of wild thyme.
A low call came from a brooding curlew, a faint sigh from a plover, and the wild rasping cry of a lapwing greeted them overhead. ”

“ Shorn of much of its beauty by the disastrous burning of 1908, the great moor has still the charm of space, of long lines of distance only hemmed in by the blue hills above the Needles, and of an infinite play of colour. The average lover of the picturesque fancies a moor is brown all over alike. ”

“ The present modern practice of letting moors from year to year, quite irrespective of whether from the ravages of disease there are grouse to afford shooting, and so leading to the destruction of the little breeding stock that may exist, has ruined and destroyed the reputation of many fine moors that will carry heavy stocks of birds if properly treated.
They year after year yield little or no sport, and naturally get a bad repute until they are again caught by disease and shelved for further years. ”