Bog Myrtle & Peat

With forty eight hours of much anticipated high pressure and a bone-crushingly cold North wind, foxes suddenly came out of the woodwork at the weekend. I saw two lying up in the long, rustling grass as I headed up the hill for a stalk yesterday afternoon, and one was almost within range as he ambled through… Continue reading

After an excellent frost and the first real snow of the winter, it was a good moment to head for the hills in the low sun this afternoon. Geese were on the move down in the bay, and it was thrilling to find a field of winter wheat so chock-full of birds that it was… Continue reading

There was time for a very quick trip up the hill this afternoon, but as it turned out, the day was made before I had even reached the top of the glen. A pigeon flared out of the spruces on the roadside with a goshawk in hot pursuit, and the two tumbled together in the sleet… Continue reading

Interesting to read a new study carried out at the RSPB’s Lake Vyrnwy reserve on the subject of curlew habitat. Quite apart from the enormous elephant in the room surrounding the issue of predation and ground-nesting waders, this study comes at an interesting moment for me. I’ve just started to think about breeding habitat for curlews on… Continue reading

  Just a very quick note to mention a grand day’s shooting yesterday in Aberdeenshire in a fiercely cold wind. I shot miserably, and after many years of white-hot anticipation, perhaps it was inevitable that I abjectly failed in my first “toe-to-toe” sporting engagement with a blackcock. Much more on this momentous, stomach-churning moment to come,… Continue reading

The past week has been sluiced away amidst gurgling pools of rain and wild wind, and my time on the hill has been curtailed as much by college studies as early darkness and the gunshot spatter of hail on my office window. It really has been a crashing descent into winter, and the burns foam and roar beneath the black, naked alders.… Continue reading

Interesting to watch the increasingly panicked press releases about the parlous condition of the breeding curlew in Britain. Sadly, the majority of visible progress made in the effort to conserve these birds over the past few years seems to have amounted to a few studies and reviews into the importance of “doing something” and “acting fast”,… Continue reading

Grey partridges are very complicated birds. They have a finely tuned social mechanism which allows them to form lasting bonds within their coveys, and as young chicks they learn to connect with other members of their broods so that the group becomes immediately cohesive. Nobody really understands precisely how this works, but the system is totally thrown into… Continue reading

All kinds of gloomy press releases have coincided with the first fall of woodcock, and the GWCT now recommend that no shooting should take place until the Scandinavian birds have arrived in a bid to protect native British birds, which have been in steep decline for the past few years. At this, some of my shooting pals… Continue reading

I have had my thunder stolen by the first major Fall of woodcock. It was an extreme delight to stand out on a regular flightline this evening and find it suddenly filled with flitting, bat-brown commuters as the tawnies skirled and a peachy smear of light was rinsed away from the West. Idly scrawling out some notes on… Continue reading