Worth mentioning that I have just this evening walked back in the door after a fantastic (and all too brief) tour of Aberdeenshire, Angus and Northeast Scotland, where it seems that black grouse have very little to complain about. More to follow when I can. Continue reading

After raking to and fro over the Southern Uplands for the past month, I’ve seen a lot of black grouse. The lek season may just have passed its peak and there are still a great deal more leks to visit, but one rather striking theme throughout the entire South of Scotland is that the incredible Continue reading

I was delighted to be invited up to Cowal to help with a lek survey on a piece of ground near Tigh na Bruiach, and found myself wandering through the gloom of Argyllshire at five to five this morning amidst the combined throb of blackcock and the fantastic dry buzz of grasshopper warblers. I normally Continue reading

Regular readers of this blog will understand my wholesale antipathy to woodland and particularly sitka spruce trees when it comes to black grouse conservation. I have ranted and railed against trees for several years, blaming them (quite rightly) for the loss and fragmentation of large areas of heather moorland across the Southern Uplands. I still Continue reading

Although it is silly to be too precise on such an imprecise and controversial subject, I always feel that the number of greyhens visiting the leks tends to peak between the 16th and the 18th April – at least, that is always the general impression I get in Dumfries and Galloway. More generally, the third Continue reading

After a very mixed bag of early morning lek hunts, I had a thoroughly enjoyable morning this morning at the famous Langholm Moor. Pausing at Waterbeck to pick up my artist friend Colin Blanchard, we pulled up to the lek in the car shortly before sunrise. A bold blackcock eyeballed us furiously from the roadside, Continue reading

It was an early start again and over to Cairnsmore of Carsphairn to meet fellow blogger and Galloway stalker Brent Norbury above the Water of Ken, where a combination of decent management and his hard work on foxes and crows has meant that black grouse are very much alive and kicking. In the half light, Continue reading

It was a fine, clear morning yesterday on the Clints of Dromore as I headed up onto Cairnsmore NNR at a quarter to six in search of blackgame. A few birds have been seen over the past year, and when walking on the low ground a few weeks ago, I happened to find a greyhen’s Continue reading

Well worth posting this picture of a young blackcock which wandered into sight this morning after three hours of extensive searching through the rough ground of Cairnsmore of Fleet. More detail will follow about the morning’s walk, but there was a certain irony to the casual, gum-chewing attitude of this bird which wandered past the Continue reading