Bog Myrtle & Peat

The rain which fell towards the end of May was a dark disappointment to those of us who are interested in grouse. In normal years, the hatch for red grouse in Galloway comes around the 27^th of that month – and the day itself was lost in a blur of black and heavy cloud. Grouse chicks are hardy creatures, but they can’t withstand the chill of soaking for long. Given that poor weather can easily kill more chicks in a year than foxes, crows and buzzards put together, the signs looked ominous.

Knowing that young grouse are killed by the cold, it’s also fair to say that the opposite is true for chicks I’ve sometimes kept in captivity. Finding young birds which seemed to be dead in their pen, I have put their stiffening, motionless bodies in a baking tray and shoved them in the bottom oven for ten minutes. When the door has been opened, they’ve come leaping out in every state of giddy excitement and enthusiasm.

In the same way, chicks reared under a heat lamp are markedly more active and excitable in the immediate vicinity of the bulb – and then in concentric rings away from that heat source, they become more sluggish and inanimate. In the absence of an oven or a heat lamp on the open hill, chicks which fall beneath a certain point could easily be recovered – but simply wither and vanish into the moss.

Those heavy veils of rain which blew across the hills during the end of May will have killed many fresh young chicks outright within an hour or two. The impact of longer-term chilling is more pernicious, because young grouse which have to be brooded and warmed up by their mothers are not actively foraging or looking for insects to eat. All chicks are brooded by their parents, but chicks which need to be kept dry or dried out every ten or fifteen minutes quickly fall behind – and like all kinds of wildlife or wild-growing things, life depends upon momentum. Lose pace or slow down and other problems start to weigh in. 

Human beings use the word stress to denote a very specific kind of pressurised anxiety, but “stress” is a useful concept for wild birds too. It’s not expressed in the gnawing of fingernails or insomnia – it’s not measurable and it may not even be visible to the naked eye… but birds which aren’t getting what they need become stressed – and while stress needs to be quite extreme to become fatal in its own right, it’s the seedbed from which fatality grows. Illnesses creep into stressed birds; panic and flightiness reign – it’s been shown that ticks are far more likely to feed on birds which are already stressed – and while every tick poses an additional risk of disease to young birds, a sufficient number of clean ticks will kill a bird on their own. This all to say that young birds like warm, humid weather full of sunshine and insects – and that instead, we’ve had warm weather interspersed with strangely chilling winds and sudden bouts of shocking rain.

But it hasn’t all been bad news. Despite some gloomy pronouncements in other parts of the country, I’d say there have been many far worse years when we might have wished for the weather we’ve had in 2025. There are plenty of broods of young grouse on the ground as we rush towards July; perhaps not in the biggest numbers, but having travelled around parts of Northumberland, Cumbria and the Southern Uplands over the last few weeks, it hasn’t been unusual to see coveys of five or six young birds to a pair of adults. That’s not great… but it’s not a disaster either. Black grouse chicks should be hatching this week, so it’s still too soon to say how they’ll fare.

If they have lost their eggs before they hatched, many adult red grouse will have laid again and will still be sitting on their nests. If we carry on like this, the consequence will be lots of grouse at various ages and stages, staggered from fully grown youngsters to tiny chicks well into September. That’s a complication for bigger driven shoots, but it’s not such a bad thing for grouse more generally. Really late chicks might struggle with an early autumn, but the difference between growing a stock and maintaining a population of grouse affords a pretty wide margin for error. During years in which grouse really boom, the surplus is invariably lost to predation over the winter anyway. Without active management, there’s rarely an upsurge in grouse numbers when the birds establish their territories again in March, so super-productive seasons are neither here nor there. The problem is more when no chicks survive at all – and against numerous pressures of habitat loss and predation, local populations simply collapse and vanish in no time at all. 

Most of our grouse in Galloway are fragmented into pockets here and there, but we’re lucky that enough of these islands are loosely connected in ways which permit bloodlines to come and go – birds which are lost from certain hills during bad years are soon recolonised by overspill from other places when the balance shifts. It’s likely that the grouse on Screel are topped up by those from Criffel – and grouse from Criffel certainly overlap with birds from Corsock and Shawhead – a distance of seven or eight miles. The connectivities work, but they do seem fragile in the face of constant gnawing change and habitat loss. We lose more moorland in Galloway every year – the time will certainly come when connections break and birds vanish forever.

Much of my work revolves around grouse for shooting and fieldsports, but there’s a strong conservation angle here too. Not only are grouse of interest and value in their own right, but their prosperity also underpins a wealth of predators and predatory birds which depend upon grouse for prey. Frustratingly, the spectre of “grouse shooting” (in all its goofy inverted commas) means that many ecologists are inclined to disparage grouse and ignore them as a conservation issue altogether. The birds are sneered at and ignored as a “rich man’s plaything”, but it’s certainly true that away from grouse moors, these birds are declining. They deserve to be taken more seriously – but in the rush to attack grouse shooting, few people seem to speak out for grouse themselves. They’re just “tragic”, “stupid” little pawns, caught in a storm which has run out of control.