Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having been dancing around the issue of getting a pointer for the past six months, the issue was carried forward on Friday when I was lent Oscar, the Heather Trust mascot. Oscar represents more or less everything I want from a pointer, and I was itching to get him up onto the Chayne on Saturday morning, despite a roaring south westerly loaded with stinging rain droplets. Running the two dogs together (labrador and pointer), the difference was immediately apparent. In the time it takes a labrador to run a hundred yards, the pointer had covered three hundred. While the labrador did a relatively thorough job of working the ground in a fifty yard radius, the pointer scoured everything withing two hundred and fifty yards.

Up onto the hill, Oscar reached the high plateau where most of the red grouse are now settling. They were far too wild to hold for a point, and they stiff little shapes catapulted themselves into the gale as soon as they saw us struggling through the wind. As we turned and began to descend from the far end of the ridge, I spotted Oscar crouching down and working his shoulders into a point position, then saw something rise chaotically up from the moss. It was immediately hidden by a low bump in the ground, but I ran forward and saw that dear, heart-swelling shape curl out and barrel off into the roaring wind. At two hundred yards, it was impossible to tell its age, but there was no doubting the sex or species. For the first time in several months, I was looking at a blackcock on the Chayne.  Whooping, laughing and throwing my hat after the retreating figure, I watched it swirl and tumble through the wind until it was out of sight, almost a mile away.

This bird is extremely significant and will be covered in more detail in due course, but suffice it to say that I would never have found it without Oscar. Once it had gone, the pointer showed me where the blackcock had been lying up in the rushes, and I found five stubby pieces of shit in a shallow form. He had been lying into the wind, tucking his breast behind a tussock of brown cottongrass. Conspicuously larger than red grouse shit, the blackcock had left these white capped cylinders for my dissection, and I found that they were mainly made up of rush seeds, grass stems and shiny brown seed cases. The forage is not great on the Chayne at this time of year, and it will only get worse as the winter comes in and the lack of heather starts to take its toll.

But nothing is quite so motivational as finding fresh hope after months of gloom. The rest of country has had a great year for black grouse production, and yet it had seemed that my birds had gone quietly into non-existence at last. Even this single bird puts fire back in the belly.