Bog Myrtle & Peat

It’s been a little unnerving to see some of the extraordinarily negative feedback to the Understanding Predation report which was released to the world at the beginning of last week. For those who haven’t followed the progress of this fairly major piece of work, it has essentially tried to compare what is happening in the countryside against what… Continue reading

  Having been tied up to a desk for the past fortnight, a day’s hind stalking in the Grampians came as an extremely welcome relief. It was a bright, crisp morning after a night of rain, and a skin of ice lay on the puddles as we drove uphill with the ringing endorsement of song thrushes… Continue reading

Subscribing to the philosophy of “better late than never”, it is worth taking a half hour’s break from a morning’s review of heather cutting techniques to look back on a really useful meeting I had in December with Dick Bartlett of British Moorlands, who indulgently came down to Galloway to see some of the moors and… Continue reading

The past few days have seen all hands to the pump tidying up windblown trees and clearing them out of the way before replanting this spring. To be perfectly honest, I did have a hand in seeing that some of these trees fell when the storms came, and I have learnt how to clip around the… Continue reading

Having toyed with the idea of taxidermy over the past few years, I have enjoyed the occasional surprising success. I did a pretty good job on a greyhen which now lives on a shelf in my office, and I am very pleased with the immaculate preservation of a barn owl’s wing which lies on a… Continue reading

Having found the first few snowdrops last week, I was encouraged to hear a song thrush singing in the birches above the house this morning during a momentary lull in the rain. And then it was trebly cheering to note the arrival of two skylarks on the Chayne at lunchtime – they are the first I have… Continue reading

With all the attention given to the woodcock’s declining conservation status at the beginning of the season, it has been interesting to see how shoots have reacted over the last few months. Many have banned the shooting of woodcock altogether, while others have waited until they could be sure that Scandinavian and Russian birds were “in” before shooting… Continue reading

It is often helpful to be challenged, and if nothing else this blog provides a useful means of subjecting my own views to public scrutiny. Having written recently about Conservation Grazing, I received some diverse and fascinating feedback from readers of this blog, and while limited time precludes a detailed response to every thread of some nuanced arguments, it is… Continue reading

When I was thirteen years old, my father showed me how to put in a straining post for a fence. He explained that you dig a narrow hole vertically down into the ground as far as you can until you can’t dig any further. That’s when you lie down and reach in with your arm, scooping out… Continue reading

The frost was like concrete the following morning. I stood on the doorstep and sipped my coffee, enjoying the warmth of the house on my back. It was six thirty, and stars unravelled in the East where the heather hill had become a two dimensional silhouette against the first glow of daylight. The dog had woken to… Continue reading