Part 33

RED GROUSE

GROUSE PRESERVING AND GROUSE BAGS AS AFFECTED BY THE METHODS OF SHOOTING, PRESENCE OF SHEEP, DRAINING OF MOORS, BURNING OF HEATHER, AND THE BREEDING BY HAND—

1. AS REGARDS ENGLAND 2. IN REFERENCE TO SCOTLAND 3. IN REGARD TO WALES

Theoretically the stock of grouse ought to depend upon the amount of food present on the moorlands on which they live. In practice it does nothing of the kind—at least, not if we consider heather to be the food of the grouse. A sheep will eat twenty times as much food as a grouse, and if only half the sheep diet is heather, which is giving them a larger proportion of grass than they can get on most moors, then in theory it ought to be that the clearing of one sheep off an acre upon which there was but one grouse should result in an addition of ten grouse to that acre. But in practice it is doubtful whether it results in one single added grouse, or even one additional to 100 acres. But this is not any proof that the removal of sheep is bad policy. There are so many other things that have to be taken into account. Whether the sheep do harm or good by themselves is not certain, but in any case the shepherding is very bad for grouse chicks that have just strength enough to go a long way down hill and none to get back again to the brooding parent birds. The latter cannot carry their young like a woodcock, nor can they, like a Parliamentary bird of fame, be in two places at once. The author has not been able to arrive at any very definite conclusion in regard to the negative or positive value of the presence of sheep themselves, the evidence is so very conflicting. On the Ruabon Hills there are 5000 sheep on the 7000 acres of the most productive grouse ground in Wales; moreover, there are 70 commoners who each have a few dogs, and the latter’s business is to keep the sheep off the cultivated fields, either in the presence of their masters or not, as convenience and occasion serves. Then, on Mr. Lloyd Price’s bigger moor of Rhiwlas, the sheep have been reduced to a minimum, and belong to the keeper. Yet here 1000 brace has been about the best of the bags, but they have been improving. Now, if these two moors grew heather of equal merit, and if they were at equal elevations, we could say at once that sheep are valuable to grouse. But these things are very different on those two moors, and we can say nothing, but merely record the facts. Again, in Yorkshire the fashion has been to decrease the sheep to disappearing point; but when Lord Walsingham made his great personal bag of 1070 grouse in the day on a 2200 acre moor, there were 1400 sheep upon it, and there were nearly 2000 grouse killed there in that season. Even now, in Yorkshire, Askrigg is about as productive, acre for acre, as any moor, and it is common land, and fairly swarms with sheep. On the other hand, this is not true of Broomhead, where a grouse and a half to the acre have been got before now, but it was true of practically all the moors where great bags were made in 1871 and 1872 and before. And as the general grouse stock has never again reached the level of those years, it may be that there is some value in sheep that has not been discovered, and to which we cannot give a name. Some people believe that the sheep help the grouse in winter, by uncovering the heather when it is snow-buried. Probably there is a good deal to be said for that, but more upon high ground than low moors, because of course the object is to keep the grouse at home, and prevent them from migrating down the straths in those large packs that may or may not return again. On the lowest moors in the district it is probable that there is less advantage in keeping the birds from seeking winter food elsewhere. They must needs go for it below the heather belt, and this ground will not keep them in the spring, as the lower moors undoubtedly keep a large number of those grouse that in hard weather visit them from higher moors. No doubt many half-starved grouse get killed when they visit lower grouse, and arable ground, but unless the snow disappears very early in the spring the lowest moors are always favoured by some visitors stopping to breed. For them this is a change of blood, which possibly the higher elevation birds never do get. Be this as it may, there is always some moor in a neighbourhood, just as there is a piece of ground on nearly every shooting, that will at all times have more grouse upon it than are bred there, except when birds are too young to travel far. It is difficult to put a limit on these winter movements, or to give any idea how far the birds may not go for “black ground.”

This seems to depend a good deal upon the way the snow comes and stops. It may be affirmed that no matter how far it may be off them, if grouse can see black ground when their own is under frozen snow they will go to it. This in turn may be covered up, and then they will again go downwards. The late Mr. Dunbar, who sublet most of Sir Tollemache Sinclair’s shootings in Caithness, told the author that he had known the Caithness grouse driven to the seashore in hard weather, when the heather was all covered with snow. It would be a most excellent arrangement of Nature that the grouse go for food wherever it is to be had, if it were left to Nature, but it is not. People on the cultivated farms regard the arrival of the grouse as a great day, in which Providence has sought them out for a blessing, just as the Israelites in the Wilderness thought about the quail, which were possibly merely seeking their own migratory ends, like the starving grouse. Those on the lower moors see increased numbers of grouse, and kill them, knowing that if they do not somebody else will. So that the general result of this migration is that the total stock of the whole county, or country, is kept much lower than any sportsmen or owners of moors wish, and instead of being 1200 pairs left to breed on 4500 acres, which is Mr. Rimington Wilson’s estimate for his crack moor near Sheffield, the spring stock the country over does not average, in the belief of the writer, more than 250 pairs on every 4500 acres, and in this estimate he does not include the grass hills, the floe ground, or the ptarmigan tops, or deer forests.

By the habits of the grouse the owners of moors are compelled, therefore, more or less to pool their breeding stocks. Nothing seems likely to overcome the difficulty except a system of winter feeding in snow-time, and this is much more easily discussed than accomplished. Even if oat stacks with the corn in the straw, and more oats added to it to avoid unnecessary carting of straw, were erected, and protected in the early autumn, in various parts of a moor, these to be of any use would require to be visited in the very worst of the snow, in order that the protection might be removed and the grouse might start to scratch about for food. But there are many parts of many moors where an expedition at such a time would be a work of danger, for many a life has been lost in the snowstorms of the Highlands.

This digression into winter feeding of grouse arose out of the question of sheep or no sheep. Difficult as this is in Yorkshire, Wales, and the Lowlands of Scotland, it is very much more complicated in the Highlands, where sheep have to be considered not alone as an addition to grouse moors, but also as a protection to the deer forests. It is necessary to the forest owners that they should not lose their rentals by the movements of deer to grouse ground in the stalking season.

Where one forest adjoins another, exchange is no robbery; but where they adjoin sheep ground the only two possible ways of preventing a loss of deer are wire deer fences and the presence of sheep and shepherds. The former is out of favour, and will probably never come in again. It converts forests into parks, and park deer have no sporting value. Consequently, only the sheep and the shepherds are left. To remove them anywhere in the neighbourhood of forests is automatically to stock the ground with deer. This may be a wise or an unwise policy as circumstances arise, but it is very bad for the established forests to lose their best beasts, which take years to grow. Then to have deer forests interspersed through the more cultivated districts of the Highlands would probably lead to a revolution, or at least to the unauthorised destruction of the deer when they attacked the farmers’ crops.

The burning of the heather is rarely done half well enough. It is very expensive in districts far removed from considerable population. There is so much delay caused by waiting for the weather. The ideal conditions are wet ground and dry air and heather, in order that the tops of the plant shall be thoroughly burned and the roots and the heather seed in the ground not much heated. But to wait for such ideal conditions would be rarely to burn at all, and consequently risks are taken, but even as it is, not nearly enough heather is burned. On some moors the author has visited he could say there were 1000 acres of heather and that one match would destroy it all. Where such enormous beds of old heather do exist, it might be bolder than wise to apply that match and leave the rest to chance. But it always runs this risk even when grouse are sitting on their eggs. There are not many nests in such ground, nevertheless it is a pity to destroy it all, for this old heather is the most valuable when snow is on the moor, but the mere fact of burning strips through it greatly increases this value as well as every other. It assists the snow to drift, which in covering some parts deeply leaves the other bare. Shelter and food is what the grouse most want in the storm, and the very long heather supplies both to a very great extent. But a very little of it will go a long way for this purpose. The grouse never eat it at other times, so that it is all left for winter feeding. These long old heather patches may also have a value in collecting grouse on driving days, but they have none for dog work; for grouse will not resort to them unless forced to, and dogs cannot work to advantage in them.

Some people prefer burning in small patches to burning in strips, and theoretically the former can be defended as enabling more birds to feed when out of sight of their brethren and enemies. Nevertheless, the grouse stocks in both England and Scotland reached their apex when most of, if not all, the burning was done in strips.

A too heavy stock of breeding ewes, in contrast to as heavy a stock of feeding or fat sheep, is said to destroy heather, and cause grass to supplant it. Although the author has several times had cause to believe this to be quite true, he has never actually seen these results.

Another cause of heather destruction has come under his personal observation, and is very serious indeed when it occurs. It comes in the form of a small beetle which some ten years ago (then, it is believed, unnamed by science) attacked thousands of acres of the heather (calluna), but would not touch the bell heather (erica). It destroyed and bit through the roots of the plants, half starved the sheep in consequence, and caused the grouse to entirely leave some of the moors in the neighbourhood of Castle Douglas. The only stay to it was fire, and square miles of heather were consequently burnt. On going over the ground ten years afterwards, it was observed by the author that only a very occasional root of heather had re-started, so that most of the roots must have been killed, and there was evidently no seed in the ground. But all the bell heather plants re-started to grow after the cremation of heather and beetles together. Judging by the destruction wrought, here is a pest that, under favourable circumstances to itself, might destroy all the heather in the country, and incidentally grouse shooting as well. The name of this beetle is Lochmæa suturalis.

Draining is receiving a great deal of attention, and well is the subject worth it. The worst kind of land on any moor is what is called “floe” ground. For the grouse it is useless, and nothing and nobody seems able to make any use of it. It is not good for fish in the winter when it forms a lake, nor for grouse in the summer when its islets of stunted heather become dry hillocks surrounded by death-traps for little grouse, not only because of their inability to get from one tussock to another without swimming, but probably also because of the millions of insects they breed. The midge flies swarm when these places are wet, and possibly carry grouse disease in their bites from diseased grouse to the healthy, which thereby become diseased. Probably few grouse chicks are drowned in such places, because the old birds instinctively avoid them for nesting. But neither they nor their chicks can avoid the midges, and, as the author pointed out some years ago, in an article in the Fortnightly Review, if Dr. Klein’s investigation of the disease did really result in the discovery of the true cause of it, namely the bacilli he cultivated from diseased grouse, then everything else he did pointed to the conclusion that only by direct injection under the skin could grouse disease be given from one creature to another, except in close confinement, as when birds healthy and diseased were confined together under one cloth and in a room. Since the writing of that article the Grouse Committee has been appointed, and Mr. Rimington Wilson, who is upon it, has been good enough to inform the author that one of the points being investigated is the midge theory.

A great many people think that the Committee will do no good, but surely in the present state of science it is only a question of money. Probably critics mean that if the bacilli of the disease is discovered, or re-discovered, we shall be no more forward, as the way to exterminate them or their possible hosts will still have to be inquired into. But if it should be discovered that the midges can convey the disease, and that is an extremely easy thing to test, then we need not bother about the life history of the interesting bacilli, but start and drain the breeding-places of their intermediate hosts—the midge flies. This would have one advantage outside all consideration of disease, for it would add possibly one-third to the productive area of the average Highland moor. Probably Mr. Rimington Wilson’s Broomhead moor is the most free of any from disease, and it is generally considered also about the driest moor in Yorkshire. All moors are quite well enough stocked with midges, but occasionally in hot wet weather they come in clouds. It was so in the autumn of 1873, and it was so again in the autumn before the last outbreak of grouse disease in the Highlands. It has been said that grouse disease is always present, and breaks out when the grouse are weakly and food is scarce. These may be contributory circumstances, but that is doubtful. In the hard winter of 1895—or was it 1896?—thousands of grouse died from starvation, but none from disease.

The different methods of killing grouse one year are supposed to have a great deal of influence on the breeding success of their collateral relations the next. Apparently this is as if one said that an honest tradesman was successful and had a large family because his brother the highwayman was hanged instead of being beheaded. But this is only the superficial side of the question, which is one of the survival of the fittest. It is said with a good deal of truth that to drive the grouse is an automatic selection of the old birds for the poulterer, and of the young ones for breeding. This is no doubt quite true, but at the same time grouse driving has only been followed by enormous increases of stock in England, and not in the Highlands of Scotland. The apex of grouse stock in both countries was reached in 1872, and the question arises why it was brought about by driving in the South Country, and, on the contrary, practically before driving had made any headway in Scotland. The difference of effect of what was the same system in both can probably be accounted for partly in several different ways. Both “becking” and “kiting” are also automatic selections not only of the old birds, but particularly of the old cocks. This is easy enough to understand in regard to “becking,” but is only to be discovered by experience in “kiting.” It appears that the hens are not often shot under a kite, and the reason is supposed to be that they are the more timid, and make off before the kite gets near. Both these systems were practised in the Highlands before driving was introduced, but so they were also in Yorkshire. In the Highlands the grouse were not so wild but that the shooter could select the old cock of a brood and kill him over the dogs. In Yorkshire this could not be done; it was difficult to get near the youngest broods, to say nothing of the old cocks, and it had been difficult for half a century, as is pointed out in the chapter headed “Grouse that lie and Grouse that fly.” Then, when these old cocks became widowers and joined others similarly afflicted, nothing could sufficiently reduce their numbers, and it was not reduction but extermination that was wanted. Driving in Yorkshire accomplished this, for there are no rocky “tops” there which defy the drivers. In Scotland, on the other hand, the wilder the old cocks grow the more certainly they get upon these “tops,” and the safer they become from the gun. When driving is put off until the 1st of September or thereabouts, as it mostly is in Scotland, the driving is not an automatic selection of a large proportion of the old birds; on the contrary, they soon get up on the “tops” when disturbance often occurs below, and they leave the hens and the broods to “face the music” in the strath. Thus, on the rolling moors of Yorkshire the wilder the old cocks become the more certainly they get driven to the guns, whereas in Scotland the more certainly they find security on the tops that never yet have been successfully driven. Before peregrines were mostly destroyed, the old cocks dare not venture on those covertless tops. From these facts it can be gathered that it is not the driving that makes all the difference, but merely the killing of barren and old birds, and that it does not matter how this is accomplished so that it is done thoroughly. The assumption is that it was done thoroughly in Scotland before driving began, and that it was impossible to do it in England, where the birds were a fortnight earlier and out of all comparison wilder. At any rate, we cannot deny that before grouse butts were seen on one moor in fifty in Scotland, the grouse stock had arrived at its highest point; that between 10,000 and 11,000 grouse had fallen before dogs at Glenbuchat in the season of 1872; that over 7000 had been killed in a month at Delnadamph, in Aberdeenshire; and also that 220 brace had been killed to one gun over dogs at Grandtully, in Perthshire, in a single day, as had a similar bag a couple of decades before by Colonel Campbell of Monzie. Only once since has as large a bag been made by one gun in the day, and that was twenty years ago. Now Scotch moors do not equal the season’s bags recorded above, nor do men make as big single gun-bags over dogs. Only once in 1905, and again in 1906, have a pair of guns shooting together equalled 100 brace in the day.

Another question arises here naturally. It is: Are the birds wilder than they were thirty-five years ago, and does driving at the end of the season make them wilder for the next season? No doubt it makes the old cocks wilder, but the grouse hen is only just as wild as her brood always. Even in Yorkshire, before the brood can fly the grouse hen lies to be trodden up; she grows wild exactly in proportion to the wildness of her chicks, and if we are to believe the biologists, acquired character is not transmitted to offspring. The author believes that the principal necessity in all grouse preservation is to kill a large proportion of the old cocks whether they have had broods or not, and consequently where wildness makes them secure they should not be made wild by end of the season driving, either with or without a preliminary of dog work. Had the author the planning and management of Highland moors now as he had years ago, he would get rid of these already-made-wild old cocks by driving each beat the day before dogging it, but with drivers just so far apart as appeared to be necessary to make sure of moving the old cocks but not the broods, which in any case will not drive well as early as the first week of shooting. The clearance of the objectionable brigade, which if left alone the first bad weather will send to the “tops,” is as necessary for a driving moor as for a dog moor, and as it is for one which has previously been both. The greater market value of the dog moors in the Highlands over the driving moors in England (grouse for grouse) makes it necessary to find a way to negative the damage done by making the old cocks wild. But the writer is not sure that the manner of going up to dogs is not responsible for half the apparent wildness of the old cocks. It is well known that nothing makes any birds fly so quickly as the thought that they are seen. Walking straight to a dog’s point, the handler in the middle and a gun on each side of him, convinces any self-respecting old cock that he is seen, and off he goes. On the other hand, if the handler advances in the tracks of one of the shooters, and these walk up 40 yards wide of the dog on either side, they may then safely pass the point a considerable distance, and if it is necessary, they can, with the handler, go back to the dog. If birds have allowed them to pass thus, they will also allow them to close in on them, for they will feel themselves surrounded. The old cock meantime has assuredly run forward, and nine times out of ten also turned to right or left, and the chances are great that one of the shooters will by these tactics just head him off, and get a possible shot at a bird that would otherwise have stood no chance of being killed.

The walking wide, in first driving, is practised on the Ruabon moors by Mr. Wynne Corrie in order to secure a greater proportion of old cocks and let off more young birds than would otherwise be the case. Mr. Corrie has given the author some very valuable information upon his management of the Ruabon Hills, but clearly if such tactics are necessary on a moor where the old birds cannot by wildness take to the “tops” and save themselves, they are ten times more necessary where this can be and is always done. In Caithness-shire the old cocks can be killed at any time of the season; they run there; and a dog that rodes well and fast is a necessity. Mr. W. Arkwright, of pointer celebrity, makes a practice of hunting down these old birds until he makes his grouse moor similar to that paradise regained as a sign of which seven women were to cling to one man. In practice it is only two hens that cling to one cock, and this upset of the natural order has also been observed on the Ruabon Hills, particularly in 1905; and the keeper there tells the writer that when it occurs he always notices that it is followed by a good season. Here are two opposite methods accomplishing the same end, and the author knows enough of the subject, besides, to be able to say, Make your grouse polygamous by force of circumstances, and each hen will be contented with half the ground she otherwise would have considered hers by right of masculine strife.

In considering and comparing present-day bags with those of earlier years, it is necessary to avoid comparing now well managed moors with themselves at a time when they were badly managed. There are all degrees of bad management, and what we have to do is to go to the moors that yielded the best at the various dates and consider what was the management that brought this about. Some of the best moors in Scotland seem to have been very poorly managed in the great year of 1872. There is Menzies Castle moor, for instance, which lies only half a dozen miles or so from the record-breaking Grandtully moor, and yet in 1872, when the latter surprised all grouse shooters, the former was said to be very badly off for grouse, and the birds killed over dogs were nearly all old ones. Nevertheless, be it noted that the bags of old birds made were then far above the average of present-day shootings, which not only shows what was expected by sportsmen in those times, but also how the old birds sat to dogs. There were some peregrines to keep them in the long heather.

All the old records of English moors point to the capacity of the ground for carrying grouse, but to their scarcity nevertheless. The Scotch moors, on the contrary, seem to have had as many birds in the first years of the nineteenth century as they had at any time. Colonel Thornton, in his description of his Highland tour, spoke of big packs of 3000 birds as common in the winter, and in October he found the grouse lie too well in the Duke of Gordon’s country, whereas shortly afterwards on a 12th of August the celebrated Colonel Hawker could do nothing with the wild Yorkshire grouse, where the birds were also particularly scarce. There is no doubt that this scarcity was brought about by Act of Parliament, which fixed the opening season that suited Scotland, and by a fortnight’s earlier breeding just made it impossible to kill the old cocks in Yorkshire. They, in turn, would not breed themselves or let others do so, so that the practice in Yorkshire became almost precisely what it is now in those deer forests where they desire to exterminate the grouse, and do it by leaving them entirely alone.

In 1849 there was driving in Yorkshire; for in that year, on Sir Spencer Stanhope’s moor, Durnford Bridge, there were 448 grouse killed in one day.

The following bags will show what happened in Yorkshire at a glance, but nothing of this sort of rapid increase, as a consequence of driving the birds, will be found as applying to Scotland:—

GROUSE KILLED ON BLUBBERHOUSES MOOR—2200 ACRES

┌──────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┐ │ Year. │ Total bags in braces. │ ├──────────────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────────────┤ │ 1829 │60 │ │ 1830 │77 │ │ 1831 │14½ │ │ 1832 │31 │ │ 1833 │82 │ │ 1834 │69½ │ │ 1835 │90 │ │ 1836 │12 │ │ 1837 │25 │ │ 1838 │42½ │ │ 1839 │26½ │ │ 1840 │26 │ │ 1841 │35½ │ │ 1842 │21 │ │ 1843 │91 │ └──────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────┘

GROUSE KILLED ON BLUBBERHOUSES AND DALLOWGILL MOORS IN SEASONS FOLLOWING THE ABOVE

(About 1862 a little driving began)

┌─────┬───────────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────────┐ │Year.│ Year’s bag at Dallowgill. │ Year’s bag at Blubberhouses. │ │ │ Braces. │ Braces. │ ├─────┼───────────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────────┤ │1865 │ │239 │ │1866 │ │691 │ │1870 │ │478 │ │1871 │2149 │ │ │1872 │2417 │807½ │ │1873 │208½ │disease. │ │1874 │177½ │disease. │ │1875 │508 │no record. │ │1876 │1576 │725 │ │1877 │1345½ │781 │ │1878 │1892 │704 │ │1879 │781 │241 │ │1880 │1015½ │no record. │ │1881 │945 │388½ │ │1882 │1551 │770 │ │1883 │2948½ │346½ │ │1884 │2519 │622 │ │1885 │1620½ │277 │ │1886 │1312½ │646 │ │1887 │2125½ │no record. │ │1888 │2501½ │919 │ └─────┴───────────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────────┘

The last figure was given to the author by Lord Walsingham about the time the bag of 1070 grouse made in the day by his gun was discussed, and might possibly have been added to later in the season.

Two points are likely to arise in an examination of the bags. First, was it that the birds were not upon the Yorkshire moors, or only that they could not be killed, that made the season’s bags so poor prior to driving?