FIELD SPORTS
that decision when that year’s rip-roaring season yielded 5,000 brace, a figure that was beginning to approach the moor’s 1930s peak. And make no mistake, these are moors that
once threw up huge days. There is a chart in the lodge at Invermark, Lord Dalhousie’s storied stalking and shooting estate, which tells the story more eloquently than I possibly can. On the wall is a chart detailing the annual bags of grouse; 9,600 brace at Millden, 5,000 brace at Huntill, 4,000 brace at Gannochy. Further to the south, Lord Airlie’s moors at Glen Clova and Glen Moy had a day of over 400 brace in the 1960s. That the bags in Angus are getting back
towards those figures is remarkable to anyone with even a passing acquaintance of how the numbers collapsed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the investment fell away and so did the birds. The phenomenal increases in bags in Angus, which now outstrip those in Inverness-shire and the Lammermuirs, have not come without a price tag, however.
Deer out, sheep in By far the most dramatic increases have come in the estates that have employed English grouse expert Mark Osborne, a man with a well-de- served reputation for rescuing struggling grouse moors. Having been employed by John Dodd, a wealthy banker who bought Glenogil estate in 2003 for £4.5m – the estate produced 1,000 brace in the 1970s but the bag had collapsed to single figures due to underinvestment and under-keepering – Osborne was provided with the means and the latitude to do whatever he needed to restore the moor, and fulfilled his brief admirably. Using the same model he used to turn around Lord Lansdowne’s Tullybeagles Estate near Perth, he electric-fenced in the estate and removed the thousands of deer, which were lousy with ticks and which would eat all of the heather on which the grouse depended for cover from raptors. Instead, 3,000 sheep were put onto the moor
to act as tick-mops, and were then constantly dipped throughout the year so the ticks would die when they came into contact with them. The number of keepers was expanded by 500 per cent and the men started hitting the popu- lation of predators (such as foxes, rats, crows and egg-eaters like stoats and weasels), as well as the tick-carrying hares, burning prodigious amounts of heather and carving paths into the hillside to make easier access to the butts and moor. It certainly worked, with the bag rising to
4,000 within six years from a standing start, a remarkable feat. Several neighbours followed Dodd down the Osborne route, and the overall Angus totals began to rise. But at what cost? Many question whether the cost is worth it.
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Dodd, who invested heavily before he sold up last year, is reputed to have made a profit from the sale to understated German aristocrat Baron Ferdinand von Baumbach. But what did he leave behind? As one contributor to a debate on the subject
said: ‘The Osborne method is no great secret – kill every predator, burn more heather (as cover from predators is unnecessary), put out medi- cated grit, cut all the birch, rowan up the linns and sit back and watch the grouse flourish in this desert monoculture. Is this really the manage- ment we want for our precious uplands?’ This moorland specialisation needs sacrifices,
and even the elimination of tick has two sides. Walkers might rejoice in exercise on the heather without fear of a tick bite containing potentially crippling Lyme’s disease, true, but on inten- sively-managed moors devoid of deer, hare and other mammals they were the only predators. Fencing deer out of grouse moors has been
controversial. The ‘dun tenants of the waste’ lose their open range. Homing hinds want their calves born where they were born, and cannot get there. Deer, some say, are increasingly having to negotiate a maze of wire tunnels. Biologists might argue that stags’ ability to spread their genes by performing fifty mile route-marches to unrelated hinds, as ‘travellers’ can do in the rut, is compromised, leading to in-breeding. Visually, wire-lines riding ridges replace wild
moorland. We get human moorland rather than the God-given happenstance of beautiful country. The Mountaineering Council of Scot- land representing hill walkers recognises the need to reach remote land to manage it, but would like hill-tracks within a planning frame- work and fence-lines located sensitively. Yet there is also no doubt that even estates
that have not fenced deer out have learnt a great deal from Osborne’s methods, which explains the across-the-board increase in Angus bags. Tick control has tightened thanks to a greater under- standing of how ‘white maggots’ – as sheep were rudely referred to by those with impaired ecolog- ical comprehension in the 1980s – can clear a moor of the sinister, black, blood-sucking para- sites, leaving the grouse to fight another day. Peter Fraser, former head gamekeeper on Inver- cauld Estate, for instance, vividly recalls moors where grouse numbers tumbled the year after the sheep were despatched. The second advance brought about partly by
Osborne is medicated grit. Grit helps grouse grind and digest rough heather, their primary food, in their gut. By putting out piles of grit medicated to kill strongyle worms in grouse intestines, moors can eliminate the worm burden that exposed populations to extreme cycles. Hugo Straker of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust believes
‘The rise in Scottish grouse bags undoubtedly has other social benefits too’
KIRSTEN SCHEUERL / ALAMY
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