June 2010

LOOKING out over the moor, you could be forgiven for thinking there had been a fresh snowstorm as it is littered with drifts of cotton grass. The lack of battering rain has allowed the white, fluffy heads of the grass to puff out and wave about spectacularly.All flowers have benefited from the dry, warm weather. The lush green of blaeberry is striking with fruit set and the anticipation of a good fruit year. While the delicate pink bog rosemary and cranberry are a welcome, colourful decoration to the moor.

We have been devoting a lot of time to finding foxes and their earths lately. This is very slow arduous work, involving a lot of walking up and down, checking every nook and cranny. Often, we find evidence of where they have been rather than where they are: the canny vixen is usually a few steps ahead of us when it comes to safeguarding her young. During these searches, I have been surprised to find flowers such as wood sorrel and anemone on some of our highest ground.
Once a fox earth is located, it often requires the keepers to spend the night out on the hill to account for its inhabitants. It’s important to take lots of different layers of clothing, as it is very cold at 3am in the morning and the weather can change in minutes. One night, when we had shot the vixen and I was planning to stay out for the dog, low cloud suddenly came in and that was that due to lack of visibility. If it hadn’t been for the quad track and then finding a fence to follow, I might have ended up going round and round in circles.

The first grouse chicks were seen on 14 May and, since then, we have seen quite a few broods. The cock and the hen are good parents, always communicating with the brood, alert to danger and ushering their offspring towards the best food.

Corvids have raided the nests of four of our radio-tracked hens. There aren’t many crows about, but we have witnessed ravens hunting in the area. It may be that last year’s heather beetle attack decreased the cover so much that nests are now more susceptible to aerial predation.

Sheep ticks carry the louping ill virus, which, if it infects them, is lethal to grouse. In order to establish the tick burden here at Langholm, we have caught some of our radio-tracked hens’ chicks. Dr David Baines, director of Upland Research for the Game Wildlife and Conservation Trust (GWCT), brought his pointer to the moor to ‘point’ the chicks. Once the adult birds were located and flushed, the pointer got to work indicating where the small chicks had buried themselves in the vegetation. Once in the hand, David, and the Project’s chief scientist, Damian Bubb, weighed the chicks, measured their wing length and then carefully examined around their eyes and beaks for larval and nymph stages of tick, which were then counted and recorded. If the tick burden is too high, these parasites can debilitate the chick, making it more prone to predation, or even kill it. Ticks have to have a blood-feed to complete their lifecycle; they will take it from any animal—they’re not fussy.

The first pair of harriers has hatched six young and the adult birds are taking the diversionary food well. There were further developments recently when, much to the delight of the first cock but the disgust of hen, a second female returned. The cock soon started his aerial tomfoolery. The new hen was in moult, which suggests that she may have made a nesting attempt elsewhere. She has now settled and has begun nest-building behaviour. Just as the excitement of a second harrier nest began to fade, another pair has arrived! They too have performed all their courting rituals and seemed to have settled further down the valley. This third partnership will be pre-hatch fed with diversionary food, which I am pleased about, because there are a few bite-size grouse in the vicinity.

We are seeing more larks and pipits, as their first hatches have fledged. The first wader chicks are also appearing. I have seen some oystercatcher chicks and witnessed a change in the behaviour of curlews, indicating that they have young.

Bracken started to appear at the beginning of May, lending another shade of green to the landscape. We used a helicopter to spray over 200 hectares last year with Asulox and are continuing to monitor the success of these efforts. So far, the results look mixed and we might need to do some back-up spraying to ensure a good kill.