Bog Myrtle & Peat

I was beginning to think that there were no black grouse left on the Chayne. Nobody has seen a bird for over two years, and since then they seem to have fallen off the map altogether. My repeated searches across every likely acre of the farm have failed to show fruit, and as I tumbled out of bed at 4:30 this morning, I was certain that today’s investigative foray would be yet another failure. Maybe I was too late to save my black grouse. Maybe I had allowed myself to become captivated by a bird that had died out and vanished just months before the project began.

As a last throw of the dice, I decided to drive the car up to the lambing field and walk on to the moor, but wet ground bogged the wheels and I was forced to turn back. I reversed, turned the steering wheel and stalled the car. Lekking calls echo in my imagination as I lie in bed at night time, so it was with some confusion that in the momentary silence, I heard a strong bubbling noise from the rushes towards the farm house. As if I was dreaming, a white puffy tail began to dance through the dead rushes 170 yards away. I could have died then and there.

A single, magnificent cock bird was turning in slow circles on a small patch of grass near a scots pine tree above the farm house. I had obsessively rehearsed my reaction to finding black grouse on the Chayne, but when the moment came, I was utterly dumbfounded. Black grouse look gaudy and exotic at the best of times, but there was something so shocking and incongruous about this bird’s sudden appearance that I genuinely struggled to think clearly. As he sneezed and flapped his wings, I felt waves of relief and excitement washing over me in the gloom.

I took a series of photographs, but it was still too dark for the camera to make decent images. They only show a black shape in the rushes, but the pictures mean more to me than any I have taken since I began the project. Binoculars came to my shaking hands, and I watched him preening on the hillside where I have sat a thousand times over the last six months. It was all an impossible dream.

He clearly wasn’t comfortable, and as I stepped back to the car to rest my binoculars on the roof, he burst into the air, flying like a supercharged cock pheasant. He climbed and climbed until he was a distant speck, buzzing high up and off over the moor. I sat back in the car and had a smoke. Within five minutes, I had checked the camera twice to confirm that what I had seen had not been sheer fantasy.

I walked around the hill for the chance at a fox, and as I came back, I watched a spidery black shape looping quickly out of a bank of bracken to my left. I looked through my binoculars, saw that it was a second male black grouse, then got in the car and drove home. It was too much for me.