Bog Myrtle & Peat

My reconnaissance missions on the Chayne are far from over. When I first started to shoot foxes up there in September of last year, I quickly built up a store of information about the terrain, the wildlife and where the vermin could be found. As the seasons rotate, this information invalidates itself periodically. Now we are in June, crows are using territories I have never seen them using before. Grouse are emerging in unlikely spots and the numerous species of dickie birds are moving around in a completely unpredictable fashion. Regular trips around the entire farm are needed almost every week to stay on top of the changes, and when I headed up last night on the darkening, I had no idea what I was going to find.

As I crossed the bridge and drove onto the farm, the black grouse appeared just ten feet from the car, eyeing me curiously from a little tuft of rushes. He stretched his long, skinny neck and flickered his head back and forth as if he were some kind of terrible coward. Having seen him attack pheasants and lambs, I know that he is capable of great aggression and fury, but I don’t know which attitude is closer to his real personality; pompous showman or cowardly wimp. When I photographed him last week, he had a tuft of feathers sticking out of the back of his head. This seems to have been the beginning of his moult, and now the skin around his eyes and onto his neck is patchy and brown. He seems to have fallen a long way from the extraordinary glossy blue days of April, but I’m sure he’ll regain it all when he chooses.

I followed a three mile route through the heather, spying the forest margins every two or three hundred yards to keep an eye out for deer and foxes. Reaching the highest spot on the hill, I surveyed the darkening treeline with the binoculars, spotting a very old roe buck with magnificent horns around three quarters of a mile below me. Finding a dried up river bed, I ran downhill towards it, keeping low and invisible inside the tiny corrie. When I was three hundred yards away, I loaded the .243 and crept up to the lip. The buck turned into the trees and vanished.

I decided to wait and see if he had any intention of coming out, and within minutes, a cloud of midgies had started to swirl and hover over my head. There were so many of them that they whined in my ears and in my nose and they fidgeted in my eyelashes, making my skin buzz. Looking up, a six foot pillar of midgies was hanging over me. Taking advantage of the only remedy available to me, I lit a cigarette and hoped that the smoke would dissuade the merciless onslaught. As I took a draw, the wind suddenly appeared from behind me and swept both smoke and midgies away and down to the trees where the buck was hiding. My cover was blown.

Walking back to the house in the darkness as the new moon rose over the Merrick, I counted seven different snipe drumming overhead. I hope that they are going to provide some sport when August comes around.