Bog Myrtle & Peat

I started writing this blog over a decade ago in the hope of documenting a black grouse conservation project. The ensuing years have taken me far away from my original objectives – deep into previously untapped regions of agriculture. A dusty, powder-blue kind of spring at Low Airie has restored black grouse to the forefront of my attention. I don’t regret the roundabout route I’ve taken to get here, but I have been reminded why I was so captivated by these birds in the first place.

It’s not unreasonable to reckon that black grouse are doomed in Southern Scotland. You could say that the writing’s been on the wall for several years now, and while some places offer more hope than others, even the strongest bastion cannot survive in isolation. When I started to write about black grouse in 2009, traditional breeding habitats in Galloway had been badly fragmented by commercial forestry plantations, and even places which had not gone under trees were suffering from a lack of suitable management.

Back then, there was some hope that as birds declined, they would rise to become an important conservation concern. Sure enough, people began to agree that we should take care of the birds, and that allowances should made for them. There are now certain advisory restrictions on what can and cannot happen where black grouse are found, and that alone is an immeasurable step forward from the days when birds hardly mattered.

However, black grouse decline has been inconsistent. Some areas have lost all their birds while others hold on to quite a few. Conservation work has naturally gravitated towards those “hotspot” places where the birds are doing reasonably well, but limited resources and investment have also meant that effort has been withdrawn from those places where they’ve done badly.

It’s always been clear that black grouse depend upon large areas of continuous, well-connected habitat. By homing in on “hotspots” over the past decade, we have allowed important links to vanish between them. Our focus should have been on ways to ensure that surviving populations could remain connected – even when that meant working hardest on land where the birds seemed to have already gone. It’s a counter-intuitive approach, but it would’ve been the only way to ensure success. Instead, we looked at the success of each lek in isolation and made a binary decision to prioritise or ignore the birds accordingly. In consequence, black grouse in numerically marginal but strategically vital areas have simply withered away. As each door has slammed shut, the birds have been left to dance on an ever-diminishing floor from which recovery has become steadily more difficult. It’s a sure fire way to guarantee disaster.

In lighter moments, I imagine that we missed our opportunity to save black grouse for the future because we failed to grasp the fact that these birds depend upon extensive areas of suitable habitat. Being a little more realistic, it’s more likely that we failed because conservation calls for compromise, and economic drivers won.

There is still plenty we can do – in stumbling upon a trio of blackcock displaying at half past five in the morning, I found my dedication restored – a sense of determination sprang back into my step. But the reality is that even in the space of ten years working with black grouse in Galloway, the challenge of conserving these birds has become inestimably tougher.