The skylarks have started to display just 24 hours later than they did last year – I heard my first singing lark this morning, then managed to pick it out as it hung far up over a hillside striped with frozen snow and crispy, frosted grass. It was a beautiful sunlit morning, and perhaps that’s Continue reading

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve visited the syndicate land down by the Solway which, together with a group of friends, we are working on in the name of red grouse. After our big fire last year (upon which subject a commemorative article will soon be due), it has been amazing to watch the Continue reading

After a night spent sleeping on the M6 on the way to my brother’s wedding, it was with some trepidation that I set off from Macclesfield to King’s Lynn on a second long journey in only two days. Despite some fairly impressive snow lying behind the dykes over the Cat and Fiddle Pass through the Continue reading

There have been bullfinches in the same little glen just before Christmas for the past five years. I don’t know what they get from the place – it is just rank heather, weeds and bracken. Sometimes they eat seeds off the docks, and sometimes they just seem to lounge around on what remains of the Continue reading

This seems to be the time of year when hen harriers become quite conspicuous in unexpected places. I see most of them on the Chayne during January and February, but in late December each year I seem to come across one or two in what I would normally imagine would be far from harrier country. Continue reading

Many thanks to Mike Groves, who forwarded me this image of a merlin doing a number on a snipe. I’ve never seen merlin hunting snipe, but both species are relatively common on the Chayne. I suppose it must happen, and provided I get to see, I don’t have much of a problem with it. After Continue reading

A few successive mornings of good frost is always enough to set the juices going, and this morning I headed up the hill about half an hour before the sun was due to rise over the Solway. When God built the grey partridge, he intended it to be seen shortly before dawn on a frosty Continue reading

There has recently been some form of muted backlash to the ever growing population of red kites in Galloway, and the Scottish Gamekeepers Association appear to be looking into claims that they have taken pheasant poults. I really doubt that a kite would take pheasant poults beyond a few weeks old, but it will be Continue reading

Just worth mentioning that I saw a crow eating an adder yesterday morning. I made a point this spring of photographing a buzzard eating an adder to settle a score with a few select bodies who told me with some authority that I was a liar for daring to besmirch the reputation of buzzards by Continue reading

In my role as an indulgent and dependable boyfriend, I’m often called upon to do things that are, frankly, quite irritating. This evening, I was called to pick up my girlfriend from a party in the town – when you’ve spent a day filling the woodshed and killing sitka spruce trees (a favourite pastime of Continue reading