Am Bratach No. 200
Nature’s call I was feeling a bit sore this morning. I blame the grouse. You see I was the victim of a vicious assault yesterday. It was a totally brutal and unprovoked attack. I was minding my own business, just casually walking over the hills when I was set upon. It just saw red. Literally. I suppose I had red bits on my fleece collar and sleeve. My face was red too (it was a steep hill). “Go back, go back”, it shouted as it lunged at my head. You can still see the occasional red grouse in these parts but I have never had one fly at my face before. Why was it so angry? And then I read that, although rare, this behavior has indeed been recorded many times. In fact there is a particularly famous bird that kept attacking the postman at Tomintoul who cut through the bird’s territory. The hapless postman was daily thrown from his bicycle until the Post Office bought him a van for protection. It seems the red grouse directs its aggression particularly at individuals wearing red. This is maybe because the male has scarlet combs above their eyes that feature prominently in territorial displays. And grouse are highly territorial. They use features in the landscape as lookouts to display at neighbouring males and intruders, especially early in the morning. Blown up like balloons ready to burst, cock birds will swell up their throats and vibrate as they bursts out their staccato gurgle of fury. As in most bird species direct conflict is usually avoided but if two birds are evenly matched they can work themselves up into a lather and the display may escalate into a brief scuffle. If a passerby happens to be wearing red — even just a sock or part of a fleece — they may well get “groused”. Known as the King of Game Birds, the obsession in this country with this bird or rather our obsession with the shooting of this bird has led to extinction of many other bird species. A desire to maximize the grouse bags led to extermination of everything else considered to be a threat. “Vermin” control included much of the bird and mammal fauna for which the Highlands are now celebrated. On the Highland property of Glen Garry, for example, in three years between 1837 and 1840 the estate keepers killed eleven foxes, 198 wildcats, 352 pine martens, sixty-seven badgers, forty-eight otters, ninety-eight peregrines, seventy-eight merlins, 462 kestrels, 475 ravens, 285 buzzards, three honey buzzards, fifteen golden eagles, twenty-seven sea eagles, eighteen ospreys, sixty-three goshawks, 275 red kites, sixty-eight hen harriers and 109 owls. On the estates of the Duchess of Sutherland the pattern was the same and between 1831 and 1834 an extraordinary 1,055 birds of prey were killed. Replicated over most of the Scottish sporting estates, this led to the extinction of several species, including red kite, osprey and sea eagle and a severe reduction of everything else. Hopefully those days are gone, though sadly not everywhere. We now know that grouse numbers are determined more by their parasite load rather than by the number of birds of prey in the sky above. Of course this extermination of predators is not the fault of the bird itself. Surely a healthy ecosystem has all elements in a natural balance. For me, it is always a great excitement to see red grouse in our part of the world. It is a thrill to see them explode out of the heather in front of you even if it makes you choke on your platypus. Red grouse are perfectly adapted to their own environment. Throughout the year the diet is dominated by heather, Calluna Vulgaris, making red grouse extremely reluctant to leave the heather moorland, and will even burrow under snow to reach it. They are remarkably hardy birds, their feathered feet being an adaptation to the freezing conditions of the northern uplands. They routinely breed at an altitude of 2,000feet (600m). In the west the geology determines that we will never get the high numbers of grouse synonymous with North East Scotland. The geology influences the soil fertility and the nutrient quality of the heather itself. Moors overlying Lewisian gneiss and Moine schist or a thick layer of peat don’t usually have very high quality heather. And the wetter climate over here means less heather and more sphagnum and mollina grassland. But as global warming takes hold you never know — next time you are out on hill and wearing a pair of red socks, beware. Andy is a senior Highland
Council ranger, based in Lochinver. |