Bog Myrtle & Peat

I have been doing some research into the relationship between pheasants and black grouse. Many Victorian sporting commentators held serious reservations about  the increased number of wild pheasants in traditional black grouse habitats, and some went as far as to suggest that the imported pheasant was actually ousting the native black game from their traditional strongholds.

“It seems likely”, wrote Hugh Gladstone in the early nineteenth century, “that the increase of the pheasant and its subsequent extension of range, thereby making two hungry mouths to fill where the food supply has already been diminished to a point below the proper requirements of one is a fundamental cause of the black grouse’s decline in upland situations”. Some moor managers shot pheasants hard throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to hold back the decline of black grouse, but having spoken to Dr. Phil Warren at the GWCT, it seems that their efforts were in vain.

It is possible for black grouse to contract diseases from pheasants, and some greyhens can be upset and disturbed by noisy pheasant displays, but direct conflict appears not to be a factor in black grouse decline. Since late April, I have been watching black grouse attack and defeat cock pheasants on the lek site, and the native birds are more than capable of taking care of themselves. However, dwindling stocks of black grouse have clearly been replaced by pheasants over the past seventy years.

Dr. Warren suggests that pheasants represent nothing more than a simple replacement. As black grouse numbers fell, farmers looked to fill their gamebags with a bird that was easier to manage, so while the rise in pheasants followed the decline in black grouse, the two were not linked. To some extent, it is possible that pheasants are keeping the door closed for black grouse to return to their former haunts, but the idea of the two birds fighting it out for supremacy on the moor is entirely false.

Pheasants aren’t exactly the black grouse’s best friend, but they will hopefully distract the local predators, and at least I’ll have something to shoot come winter…