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:—