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Scrub Transplants
Having spent a couple of days gathering bags of foot-long willow cuttings from across the county, I soaked them in a bucketful of water overnight last night and took them up to the Chayne this morning. Overlooked by the blackcock as he perched near the top of a chestnut tree, I crisscrossed the bog, jamming… Continue reading
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In-Flight Meal
Although I had read it in books and online, I was never entirely sure what weasels actually ate. It wasn’t until a weasel carried his dinner directly into one of my spring traps that I knew for certain. Checking my pitifully small arrangement of traps this afternoon, I peered into the recesses of the tunnel… Continue reading
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Illustrating a Point
For the last six months, I have been working on a series of black grouse/moorland related paintings to accompany a project which should come together next year (2012). As I am beginning to draw the illustrations to a close, I thought it might be worth featuring one on the blog, after an experiment to scan… Continue reading
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A Year of Surveying
Although I should have marked a formal date for the start of my bird survey in March last year, I think that seeing the 56th bird species on the Chayne this morning marks a full year. Winding down the window in the partial darkness shortly before seven o’clock this morning, I saw a crossbill drinking… Continue reading
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Bolder by the Day
As the spring progresses and the black grouse leks become noisier and more focussed, the blackcock who lives beside the farm buildings is losing some of his characteristic caution. In January, the sound of a car three hundred yards away would flush him in a panic, but he let me take this photograph of him… Continue reading
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Croaking It
Frogs have become incredibly conspicuous over the past few days, and it seems like every ditch and burn is filled with wriggling bodies. American cartoons gave us an exaggerated idea of what a croaking frog sounds like, and while it may be true on the other side of the Atlantic, it does not really apply… Continue reading
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White on Target
My spring traps have been ticking over for the past few months, and although I am regularly catching weasels, stoats are proving rather harder to tackle. A collapse in the rabbit cycle over the past two years has meant that there is little to eat for the larger predators, and the few of them moving… Continue reading
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Baptism of Fire
For someone who pretends to be a grouse keeper, I really do know an embarrassingly small amount about the classic areas of that profession. I had actually never seen heather being burned until Monday afternoon, when I was invited to attend a workshop of muirburn by the Heather Trust on the Candacraig estate near Braemar… Continue reading
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Letterbox Traps
One of the main features of Langholm was the abundance of letterbox traps. It sometimes seemed like there were traps on every hill, and watching one through a pair of binoculars, I saw three crows poised sulkily on the top beam as a call bird flickered and fluttered around inside. Nearby, a blackcock wandered through… Continue reading
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A Trip to Langholm Moor
Langholm has to be the most famous grouse moor in Scotland. Sadly, it is not really famous for the right reasons. Controversy surrounding the issue of raptors saw the moor being used for demonstration purposes in the 1990s which caused a horrible crash in grouse numbers. The project was designed to advance the argument between… 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 