Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s been a while since I went out and did the rounds with the rifle. Seeing the afternoon set fair, I headed out this evening for a bit of a wander. Two cock pheasants strolled aimlessly through the rushes where the blackcock sits, but the hero himself was absent. I drove the car up to the top buchts where there is a fine view out over the hayfields and scanned the distant treeline with my binoculars. Roe deer occasionally hop over the boundary fence in the late evenings, and it would have been ideal to have knocked one over tonight as we are expecting guests this weekend and nothing is more impressive than a fresh haunch of roasted venison served with potatoes dauphinoise and purple sprouting broccoli.

It was not  to be. The long grass was empty, so I shouldered the rifle and set off on a two mile circuit of the lower ground. I hadn’t gone more than three hundred yards when a noisy clatter rang out off to my right. An odd, long necked pigeon swept round in a vast semi circle infront of me, and I just had time to swing the camera onto it before it disappeared. The blackcock was winging his way through the warm evening light, flying like a rocket and turning his head to look back at me as he swung over the dyke to land on the hill.

As soon as I had gathered my wits again, I headed on along the road. Clouds were gathering over the Rhinns of Kells as I stopped to see whether or not I could squeak a fox out from the bottom bog, and as soon as I had scanned the boundary fence for deer, the wind had picked up and the evening was looking altogether less hospitable. As I stopped to inspect the trees planted in the little wood, I was horrified to see that they have all been nibbled by deer, some of them so badly that they probably won’t recover. I would have been really irritated if the little wood hadn’t been a side-project, thought out at the last minute. New trees will have to be planted next year, and I will pay better attention to protecting them this time. A stonechat watched me from the dyke as I poked about my wasted efforts.

By this time, it was almost dark. A fine half moon poked over the shoulder of Ben Gorse as I wandered home through the dusk. Grouse rattled in the darkness, and a pair of tawny owls called from the windbreak where the blackcock roosts. All around me, snipe creaked and huffed in the gloom. They have started to make their “winter noise” now; no more drumming and squeaking, just the evocative screech which they make when flushed by dogs on a cold afternoon in January.

A pair of crows came noisily out of the trees behind the house as I got into the car, bawling and yammering in the deep blue sky. One flew right over my head, and it would have been an easy shot to have brought him tumbling down, the cheeky swine. His time will come… Even though I had come home empty handed, there is always something to be seen up on the moors.