Bog Myrtle & Peat

I did the walk I always do in the middle of August. I picked a moment before the rain came, then I looped out through the calving fields to the moss. It’s a three mile lap, and I’ll walk it one hundred times in a normal year. The difference is only that in the middle of August, I leave my tools and associated kit at home. I’ll walk for the simple experience of walking, and if I come upon something that requires my attention, I’ll postpone it.

This time round with the heather in flower and the peat half cut, rumblings of thunder rose off the in the west. The grass comes up thready and spare at this time of year, and the last few weeks of dry weather have bolted the heads so the hill’s a heavy tan. Two coveys of red grouse ran ahead of me, turning their necks like periscopes in a waving sea. The nearest bird was only three quarters grown, from the same brood I’ve often seen on the hill road, dusting themselves and gathering grit. I might usually have scheduled something like shooting to bring a brace of these birds into the oven, and it’s right to think of that as harvest. But this year’s come closer to weariness, and I preferred to keep both hands free for trailing in the cobwebs. Then it was just as fun to watch the birds leaking away in twos and threes like black hatters towards the boiling cloud. There was a warm wind, and sweat to the very seams of that hill. Even the burn was sopped in it, and a damp cuff across my lips like a flannel.

There was standing room only in the sheep fields . Everything’s been gathered down so the lambs can be spained, and tags of wool hung in the thistleheads with a constant moan of lost stock. I walked further down around a mess of meadowsweet and loosestrife where there always used to be a greyhen humped with her youngsters. I could guaranteed you’d see them in there ten years ago, particularly when the rain came and the midges rose around the whole gang of those birds sitting up like chickens on the dyke to get dry. You don’t see them now. Nothing obvious has changed at the scale of this farm, but the birds have gone because they need entire glens to work together in unison. This damp little flush is like a solitary piece from a board game that someone’s thrown away.

When I read about “ecological grief”, it often seems to come from another world. Writers flinch and cower at the intractable loss of wildlife, wearing the weight of that hardship like a steel helmet. Most of their despair is levelled towards the failed familiar; it’s hard to lose common things like hedgehogs or butterflies, and even curlews ring a bell with a wide audience. But black grouse were born to be lost, even at their best. They’re awkward things to mourn.

I know people who would drive all night to watch a lek in April. That spectacle is something for the bucket list, but that kind of attraction is “a limited edition” and something easily excised. I’m unusual because for me, black grouse were almost normal once. So as we scrabble to preserve the remains of far more common things, I’m stunned that it’s come to this. And if modern conservation is preoccupied by recovering change from down the back of the sofa, it’s somehow inappropriate to say that I used to have a fifty pound note.

Picture: A brood of black grouse – the cock (on the right) is just colouring up with black feathers. Galloway, 15/08/2013