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Forest Lek
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
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Galloway Wildfire
Having spent the past forty eight hours in the Galloway Forest, one of the most striking things has been the fantastic weather. Walking the Awful Hand yesterday (of which more to come), the bright sunlight stripped the skin off my nose and left my forearms glowing angrily. The sky was clear from Arran to the… Continue reading
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Fever Pitch
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
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A Wash-out
Well worth noting in brief that the burning season finished on Tuesday. Having kept a close eye on the ground on the Chayne and on the syndicate ground in Galloway since Christmas, I must report than in four and a half months of legal burning time, it would only have been possible to have a… Continue reading
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Lekking at Langholm
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
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The Rig of Clenrie
Another early start was called for this morning in order to catch the dawn on the Rhinns of Kells, almost where the hills run down to Glenlee and Dalry. My main goal was to sift through the Rig of Clenrie and use that high point as a means of surveying the adjacent flat top of… Continue reading
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Billy Goat Odours
While wandering through the hills earlier this week as part of a lek survey, I happened to find an object that I have long coveted; a set of billy goat horns. Undaunted by the fact that the horns were still connected to a dessicated skeleton, I wrestled the skull off the spine and brought it… Continue reading
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Close-up Merlin
For all the years that I have known that merlins were around and about the Chayne, I have never succeeded in taking a decent photograph of one. They are usually so quick and well camouflaged that the best I have ever been able to manage was a distant, obscure speck in the middle distance which… Continue reading
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Carsphairn Blackcock
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
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Cairnsmore Morning
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
About
“Shout on, Morgan. You’ll be nothing tomorrow”
Swn y galon fach yn torri, 1952
Also at: https://andtheyellowale.substack.com
Bog Myrtle & Peat 