The toughest grouse
It’s a much debated point: are Scottish grouse tougher than their English
cousins? And, if so, are there distinct subspecies of our favourite gamebird?
WRITTEN BY SIR JOHNNY SCOTT
acquire the mystique and social status that
draws sportsmen from all over the world; be
responsible for a landscape rich in colour,
wildlife and biodiversity; or provide a vital
revenue to some of the poorest and most
under-populated areas in the country. If
redgrouse were to disappear, the economic
impact would be incalculable.
Hardly surprising, therefore, that such
a remarkable bird should be the source of
considerable differences of opinion as to its
relative merits north or south of the Border,
tothe extent that there is even a body of
opinion that insists that one Scots grouse is
worth four Sassenachs. This is far too broad
a generalisation to be taken seriously but
nevertheless there is an assumption among
some people that Scottish birds are harder
toshoot than English. When one takes into
account the distance and variation in climate
between a grouse moor in Inverness and one
400 miles farther south in Derbyshire, this
hypothesis seems to justify further scrutiny.
I asked the opinion of Robert Rattray, the
senior partner of Galbraith Sporting Letsin Perth, with his extensive knowledge of
grouse moors throughout Scotland, whether
Scottish birds were a hardier breed than those
south of the Border: “It all depends where you
are, of course,” he told me. “Perhaps on the
more extreme areas of the north-east, where
the ground is higher and steeper, the grouse
could be said to be tougher and fl y harder,
simply because everything is that much
harsher: the terrain, the peaks and troughs
of weather, severity of the winter, shorter
growing season and a higher mortality rate
leads to the survival of the fi ttest.” These are
the heart-stoppers that come corkscrewing
round the side of a 3,000ft hill when one
is in a butt halfway up a near-vertical slope
on somewhere like Invercauld, Edinglassie,
Candacraig or Dorback near Tomintoul.
Does weather and location make Scot-
tish grouse a harder fl ying bird compared to
English? Jonathan Kennedy of CKD Property
Advisors and one of the fi nest grouse shots of
the age, tells me that with a couple of excep-
tions, grouse on moors in the North Pennines- such as Gunnerside, Holwick, Wemmergill
T
he uplands of northern
England and Scotland
have their brief moment
of glory in August, as Brit-
ain’s 11 million acres of
heather moorland – 75%
of the world’s remaining resource – burst
into honey-scented fl ower. There is no fi ner
or more magnifi cent sight than the great
swathes of purple-clad hillsides, broken
here and there by the black mosaic patterns
of this spring’s managed burning, where, in
the words of Robert Burns: “the moorcock
springs on whirring wings”. An extraordi-
nary little creature, the red grouse. Endemic
to Britain, it is the fi nest driven gamebird in
the world, hardy, unpredictable and bliss-
fully unaware of the astonishing amount
of attention it attracts. No other animal on
earth can receive the same degree of annual
press coverage – both positive and negative
- or have such a volume of learned literature
devoted to it. None can cause such swings of
elation or despair, ecstasy and anguish; have
such anxiety expended over its wellbeing;