Bog Myrtle & Peat

Most of my information on black grouse is currently coming from an extremely unlikely source. I recently bought an old hard backed book called “six pointer buck” by David Stephen, and when I opened the front page, a shower of article clippings fell into my lap. Sifting through them, I found that they were all about black grouse and moorland management from an edition of the Scottish Field from October 1956. I had stumbled upon a treasure trove of facts, hints and tips for the black game afficionado and I set about implementing the most interesting of them.

According to the longest clipping, the best way to get an idea of black grouse numbers on any specific area is to count displaying males at the lek and use that figure to calculate the local population. Ever since I saw my first lek last weekend, I was itching to see more. Now that I am familiar with what to look for, I headed out to the Chayne this morning to see if there was a lek site on the farm.

Getting up at half past four is a fairly grim prospect at the best of times, but as I sat up in bed and saw a pall of cloud sweeping in over the Solway, I sighed in despair. By 5:15 I had pulled the car up by the abandoned sheep fold and stepped out into the thick navy blue morning. I slung my .243 and digital camera on my shoulders and set off up the track to the most promising area of pasture, two miles over the back of the hill. Within a hundred yards, I had been almost decapitated by a drumming snipe, swooping low over the bog like a smoking messerschmitt. Others rose ahead of me in the half darkness, and I counted five pairs before I had walked a mile.

Passing near the moor, I listened to the red grouse cocks setting the dawn to rights and daring all challengers with a self-important cackle, and all the while curlews fluttered between the rushes, mewing sadly and glaring through the gloom. The last half mile was tricky going, negotiating a glutinous stretch of frothy moss, and I disturbed a roe buck in velvet as he browsed the heather amongst the sheep. He bounced over the boundary fence without a backward glance, and I stopped to have a smoke and see if I could hear that distinctive purring coo of lekking black grouse.

A woodpecker drummed in the forestry, and a cuckoo echoed its call over the steaming moss. I strained my ears, but a another snipe drummed so nearby that it was impossible to concentrate. I reached the boundary and walked it for a mile, but by now it was getting light and any lekking displays would have been winding up for the morning.

Not hearing or seeing a lek doesn’t necesarily mean that there are no black grouse on the farm. There is still five hundred acres of unexplored territory where the display could be taking place, and from what I can gather, birds will often travel some distance to display. Maybe the lek site isn’t on the farm, and even if it is, I was so deafened with bird song that I would have struggled to pick it up.