Bog Myrtle & Peat

The past few days  have been totally exhausting. Settling a black lab puppy in to its new home when all it wants to do is bite, howl and excrete in prodigious quantities has proved to be quite a chore. Bit by bit the little hound is settling into her new life, and her nightly choral concerts are becoming shorter and shorter. She has been given the name “scoop”, not because of her breathtaking ability to produce mounds of steaming poop which invariably require translocation on a gently curved hand-held tool, but simply because the name has a certain phonetic pleasure to it.

Up on the hill, I have been struggling to keep up with all the chores that need to be done before the cold weather comes in. I now have a few lines of loaded feeders in some of the most sheltered spots on the farm, but several more need to go out if I’m going to get this first winter feeding project right. Pheasants and partridges are already responding well to the hoppers up on the edge of the moor, and they appear as if from nowhere as soon as I have passed on my daily rounds.

Stoats and weasels have gone very quiet over the past few days, so perhaps now is the time to start bringing the Mk.4 traps in in stages to give them some basic maintenance and to check their springs. They have really been pulling their weight this year, and a single mile long stretch of dyke with nine traps has yielded precisely fifty weasels and six stoats since January 17th. I wonder whether that is what I should expect from now on – whether I will trap another fifty next year or whether the number will start to diminish. In theory, the numbers should start to fall, but then again, if you had told me last year that there were fifty weasels on the Chayne, alive or dead, I wouldn’t have believed it.

No more woodcock as yet, but there has certainly been an influx of snipe over the past forty eight hours. A blackcock has been lekking up above the old sheep buchts each morning. His heart’s not really in it, but he can’t seem to resist keeping his eye in. He bubbles away in fits and starts, but there are no other birds for several hundred yards in any direction, so it sometimes seems like he’s just showing off to me.

One thing’s for certain; he won’t like scoop.