neW roles for naTure^123wandered off on to a neighbour’s land. John Byng, visiting Blenheim in 1787,
noted ‘In various parts of the park... clusters of faggots around a coop,
where are hatched and reared such quantities of pheasants that I almost trod
upon them in the grass’.^42 And it was the pheasant, rather than the partridge,
which became the main quarry in lowland England. It occupied relatively
small territories, and could thus be raised in large numbers; it was ideally
suited to the new style of shooting. ‘Phasianus colchinus shot up over the
tree-tops like a rocket, its long tail flaunting, its cocketting cry an incitement
to the sportsmen below’.^43 But the pheasant is a woodland bird, and thus
major campaigns of planting were required to provide it with a suitable
habitat. It was, moreover, a bird of the woodland edge, seldom straying more
than twenty metres from the boundary with open ground, thus ensuring that
many of the new plantations took the form of clumps or long, narrow belts.^44
When first planted the dense stands of young trees provided excellent cover
but as they matured the bare ground beneath needed to be underplanted,
sometimes with indigenous box but often with aliens like snowberry and
Oregon grape from north America, Portugal laurel from the Mediterranean,
or rhododendron ponticum from south-west Asia, ‘the crowning plant for
game cover’.^45
In upland areas, and at a slightly later date, it was the shooting and
management of grouse which had the greatest impact, especially in the east
of the country – on the North York Moors and on the eastern flanks of
the Pennines – where the most extensive areas of heather moorland, the
principal habitat of the grouse, could be found. What was initially a casual
sport was again transformed by the spread of enclosure and developments
in firearms, as well as by the growing enthusiasm for the picturesque, and
an associated appreciation of upland scenery among the social elite.^46
The steady improvement in upland roads and the elaboration of the rail
network also served to make the remote moors more accessible. Here,
too, the sport developed in such a way that the birds were driven towards
the guns, concealed behind the new enclosure walls cutting up the moors,
or in specially constructed stone butts. Shooting in this manner was well
established by the 1830s and ubiquitous by the 1870s.^47
As in the lowlands, larger numbers of birds were required.^48 Grouse will
eat insects when young, and will sporadically consume bilberry and other
moorland plants, but its principal food is heather. Small areas of moorland
had sporadically been burned for centuries in order to encourage the growth
of succulent young shoots for the sheep flocks. This practice was adopted in
a more systematic form in the 1850s, spreading rapidly through the 1860s.^49
Long strips or ‘swales’ of vegetation were burned in rotation so that there
were always areas in different stages of regrowth in reasonable proximity.
The ecology of the moors was altered in other ways. Drains were often dug
into the wetter areas, in order to encourage the growth of heather at the
expense of purple moor-grass, cotton grass and bog-moss, something which
deprived birds such as snipe and redshank of suitable nesting areas.^50