Shooting Times & Country – 21 August 2019

(C. Jardin) #1

Grouse shooting


SHOOTING TIMES & COUNTRY MAGAZINE • 17


be a problem in other parts of the
country where arable crops are easily
harmed, but here the damage is so
sporadic to get too upset about it.
Pigs might come to dig for a night
or two but then they will be off and
might not return for six months. And
they seem to love eating bracken
roots. Invasive bracken is a long-term
problem on this marginal ground.
Having boar to do some of the
management work is a case in their
favour, particularly when you see how
grasses and wildfl owers fi ll in the gaps
once the pigs have withdrawn.


Swirling sky

We headed up to shoot this rough,
remote piece of hill country on
the Glorious Twelfth; a team of six
stalwart enthusiasts beneath a veil
of gathering rain. The forecast looked
bleaked at dawn, but somehow the
clouds held off until we had gained
suffi cient height to look out across the
sea to the Isle of Man. Then the sky
began to swirl and darken across the
shore, and rumbles of thunder dinned
across the open ground.
This has been a bad year for
heather beetle in many places.
When the weather is right during
the spring and summer, the tiny
insects occasionally bloom into
huge numbers and wreak havoc
on moorlands across the country.
As grubs, heather beetles eat the
growing stems of heather plants and
strip away all the goodness from
the fl owering tips. The results can
be devastating; one moor I worked
with in Sutherland lost 8,000 acres
of heather to beetle in a single year.


It was only with careful management
and steering that the damage was
restored, but it took almost a decade
and cost thousands of pounds.

Beetle damage

In a normal year, heather beetle
damage is confi ned to a few patches
here and there. It often seems like
a bigger problem on English moors,
which are usually smaller and can’t
aff ord to lose big pieces of ground.
A thousand acres of damage can feel
like water off a duck’s back on a big
estate in Aberdeenshire, but that may
be half the moor in the Peak District.
The best response on our ground
will probably be to run some fi res
into the bigger damaged areas to
introduce some variety and diversity.
Most of these plants will survive and
recover, but beetle damage is usually

most devastating when it happens on
large areas of even-aged vegetation.
By burning pieces of the damaged
heather, the regeneration should
result in a mix of plants at diff erent
ages and stages. This should make
it more resilient to future outbreaks,
but many a well-laid plan has been
confounded by heather beetles.
Either way, the best results usually
come from burning in the autumn,
before the damaged plants lose their
leaves. Dead heather that stands all
winter and begins to crumble into
pieces can be very diffi cult to burn
smoothly because the fi re struggles
to build up momentum and move
through the canopy. Whatever the
answer, these are all problems to
ponder for the autumn.
As soon as we reached the heather
line, we parked our kit and stretched

“Blackgrouse were dealt as a kind of illicit


currency between farms and pubs”


Patrick Laurie stands above the Solway Firth,
a Mecca for wildfowlers down the decades
Free download pdf