Spring on the Grouse Moor

One spring I walked about a hundred kilometres in bird survey transects across a driven grouse moor on the eastern fringes of the Cairngorms National Park. Towards the end of June on a bright morning, a "zip, zip-zip" call came up from the riverine meadow below: a Quail skulking through the dry, straw coloured grasses with three tiny young scrambling to keep up behind. It's late in the season to have small young, but this bird may have already raised a brood in March or April in North Africa or Southern Europe before heading up here to North-East Scotland for a second attempt. The female looks after the young - the male will have left the area soon after mating, and may have travelled many more miles in search of further females that summer. The attenuated courtship, rapid breeding cycle, absence of the male during the incubation period, cryptic plumage and dense nesting habitat mean Quail breeding attempts often go undetected - indeed this female had nested right under my nose before her attempts to marshal her brood had revealed herself.

The river is fed by many narrow burns carved into the hillsides. Ring Ouzel hold long, winding territories along the Juniper bushes and Rowans that follow the narrow gullies. Common Sandpipers, Dippers, Linnets, Redpolls and Willow Warblers were frequent too along the scrub. Head up across the drier slopes across the patchwork of burnt heather and it's just Meadow Pipit and grumbling Red Grouse for company, the odd Wheatear too. Higher up still and Brown Cow Hill doesn't bother itself much with the corries and cliffs you get on the more glamorous peaks of the Cairngorms, but the rounded summits covered in crunchy lichens and Cloudberry are very much to the tastes of Golden Plover and Dunlin; as the spring turns to summer, they grow more alert and their calls harsher as broods appear. One pair of plover marched a brood all the way down the hill to the brassica plots.

A hundred yards from the gamekeeper's house an Icterine Warbler set up a territory in a patch of young deciduous woodland, belting out its inauspicious song, something like a cross between a Song Thrush and a Sedge Warbler. No more than a handful are found in the breeding season in Scotland each year, when they are pushed too far west on their migration from Sub-Saharan Africa back to breeding areas across Europe, Siberia and Fenno-Scandia. It stayed for a week or so, but unsurprisingly didn't attract a female.

At the end of the track is the Fèith: the headwaters of the River Don, a vast wet expanse that quakes and ripples when you walk over it. Here, the Don is just too deep and wide to cross, but just narrow and shallow enough that you don't realise until too late. This place belongs to the Black Grouse: they lek in the middle of the day, so seldom are they put from their business here. The bog was also saturated with Curlew - around half the Curlew pairs on the estate nested on blanket bog or wet grassland, and the other half on the lower fringes of the heather in recently burnt patches. A Pine Marten took two Curlew nests and a Sheep chewed up another one, but most pairs got young away.

The Fèith, the peatlands where the River Don rises.

Some of my readers might be spoiling for a fight by now: this isn't exactly what ecologists are supposed to say about grouse moors. But birds have little interest in respecting populist narratives, nor care much for our sense of morality or outrage - that Icterine Warbler is unlikely to be a keen follower of our land management discourses. Irrespective of your position on grouse shooting, anyone holding a genuine interest in upland land management policy must want their position to be informed by as much evidence as possible and hear from a wide spectrum of perspectives - this means people need to work together  collaboratively and positively on the ground to build trust, gather data and produce evidence.

And anyway, maybe it isn't quite as necessary as we think for ecologists or naturalists to hold quite such antagonistic views. For what it's worth, I like the way the Black Grouse lek at the horse pasture at Creagg Meaggaidh; I like the way Glen Ey doglegs round to that orderly floodplain beneath steepling cliffs where sandpipers reel; I like the upper reaches of Carrifran where Whinchat hop from the top of one sapling to another; I like to peer north from the summit of Duechary Hill across tops of the Larches down at Loch Ordie and beyond to the Lochans Oisinneach where a Hen Harrier might pick through the regenerating Birch and Pines to hunt; I like driving slowly through the massive Sitka Spruces on the Raiders Road from Loch Clatteringshaws down to the Big Water of Fleet Viaduct wondering if a Honey Buzzard might pass overhead; I like the old pines in Glen Quoich before the ascent to Beinn a' Bhuird begins; I like the bare west coast of Hoy with the hares and the cliffs and the bracing view across the beach at Rackwick to the Caithness cliffs. And I like it here too. I like the restrained sweep of the Fèith fringed by heather slopes and the snow-speckled summit of Ben Avon beyond; I like telling gamekeepers about Icterine Warblers; and I like to watch the Curlew float down from their nests on the heather slopes towards the river meadows, a guileful Quail hidden on a nest beneath fluttering wings.

Breeding Bird and Mountain Hare Survey Data from a Scottish Driven Grouse Moor was recently published in the Winter 2023 edition of Scottish Birds. Join the SOC and subscribe to Scottish Birds to read or feel free to contact me at jarrett.ecology@gmail.com for a copy.