Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having had no running water in my house for a fortnight now, I must say that this cold weather has really become a serious pain. The ground has reached a state of partial thaw and refuses to go any further, so the water pipes to the house are still miserably clogged with ice. If I didn’t have the ferrets, this would be a particularly depressing time of year.

Given that 2010 was the first full year of this gamekeeping project in the Galloway hills, I have plenty to look back on. Discovering black grouse on the farm was the absolute high point of the year, while finding the remains of dead greyhen on New Year’s Eve was less of a cheering experience. The feathers were strewn across a small section of heather, and under the boughs of a sitka spruce tree, small pieces of the bird remained; knuckles and bones in the pine needles. A fox had obviously helped himself to a rare treat.

This first year has been my ‘year of reconnaissance’ on the farm, and I certainly learned a great deal. I can now tell the difference between erica tetralix and calluna vulgaris almost as easily as I can differentiate between anthus pratensis and alauda arvensis. The heather enclosure was established and continues to demonstrate the pressure of grazing animals on moorland undergrowth, while the oat patches taught a great deal about sowing game cover crops on raw peat. Many trees were planted, and many of them died. Spruces were felled and brashed, while boggy ground was churned and filled with cuttings. Everything I have done has been on a strictly experimental scale, limited as I am by budget, but I now have several good leads and I know what needs to be done.

The plan is that 2011 will see me concentrate on one element of moorland management, in order to get it right on the larger scale. There can be little doubt that that element has to vermin control. Over the last year, I have let foxes, crows and stoats walk all over me, and in return, they killed one of the very few greyhens on the hillside. Expect this blog to detail my progress, because from this moment on, it is war.