We currently seem to have a foot in both camps; this is an odd middle-ground between autumn and outright winter. The leaves are off the trees but the grass is still growing. We’ve had two frosts, but both have been burnt off before seven o’clock in the morning. It was possible to head out to the… Continue reading

Also worth recording in brief some bizzare buzzard behaviour noted on the walk back off the hill last night. The sun was long below the horizon and the first woodcock were beginning to flight from the willows around the house as I watched a buzzard drop down out of a scots pine and sit on… Continue reading

As a post-script to a blog written in September about a mousing fox on the Chayne, it is worth recording that he was brought to book shortly before sunset last night after a stalk that took in three quarters of a mile of hillside so open that crawling was the only means of approach. By… Continue reading

Just in passing, it was worth posting this picture of a greyhen from near Fettercairn taken last spring. It turned up during a search on my laptop for something else, and rather than let it vanish again into the doldrums of my hard-drive, I thought it was worth an airing. Continue reading

Worth mentioning in brief that after a few weeks without seeing any blackgame on the Chayne, I was pleasantly surprised to have a thrilling reunion last night when walking in off the hill just on the darkening. I looked up in the blue gloom and there was a blackcock blasting downhill just twenty feet over my… Continue reading

As part of my work to improve the farm for the sake of black grouse, I have been really encouraged by the way that the roe deer have responded. Within two or three years of removing stock from a piece of ground, roe simply move in and make the space their own.  I was always… Continue reading

In the certain knowledge that any discussion based on rifle calibres will be subject to laborious and self-righteous analysis, suffice it to say that change has blown in on the wind since July this year. Having shot several bucks with a .222 during the summer, I can well understand why these light 50gr rounds are… Continue reading

The past month has provided some extraordinary opportunities to spend time with hen harriers. Owing to work and the logistics of moving house, my notes inform me that I have only been up around the Chayne seventeen times since returning from my honeymoon, but each occasion has yielded at least one harrier, and on one… Continue reading

Interesting to notice the sudden and very dramatic collapse of the red squirrels on the neighbouring ground below the Chayne over the past year. A few grey squirrels have passed through now and again, but squirrel pox appears not to be the explanation for this particular decline, which rests more in the realm of predation… Continue reading

Having been put out of the loop by BT, who are unable (or unwilling) to connect the internet to my new house and have been lying doggo for five weeks without even the faintest spark of demonstrable initiative, this blog has fallen behind a little. Trying to catch up at this stage is probably hopeless,… Continue reading