November 2009

DESPITE all our planning and enthusiasm to burn heather, the reality is that October has been a wash out.

We have only managed half a day and a couple of over optimistic attempts trying to burn heather that hasn’t dried out enough, which has been most frustrating, particularly as we have so big an area to burn. It is also in stark contrast to this time last year when we had several good spells of weather that allowed us to get a good start with the autumn heather-burning season.

Although the weather is mild – even warm some days – the moor is so saturated that it doesn’t dry even after two days without rain, which is all we seem to be able to manage at the moment. When I have looked at the barometer on several occasions recently, the needle has dropped off the scale because the pressure reading is so low.
However, there are a couple of species on the moor who are more delighted with these warm, wet conditions than I am: the strongyle worm and the heather beetle are literally jumping with joy.

On a couple of days this month, I have noticed swarms of heather beetle out on the beetled areas of heather; as soon as I approached them, though, many dropped to the ground and disappeared into the moss. At present, they seem to be hanging around the areas where they presumably hatched and will no doubt overwinter in those places, emerging in spring to wreak more havoc on our precious heather.

Thanks to the perfect conditions provided by the unseasonal warm and wet weather, the strongyle worm can complete its life cycle in two weeks. This must surely account for the massive increase in worm eggs counted in the caecal pat samples taken from the grouse we recently caught and kept overnight.

Despite the relatively low (albeit increasing) numbers of grouse here at Langholm, the worm count has risen to worrying levels in some areas, even though the birds have access to plenty of medicated grit. We know that the uptake of grit has not been good and we are making more grit available on upturned turfs within the existing grid system.
The fact that our grouse seem to be feeding on concentrated areas of the moor could be down to the fact there is still a lot of rank heather in addition to the massive area that was killed by heather beetle, therefore increasing the density of birds targeting the good heather.
Due to this, and the lack of burning we have been able to do, we have started to cut the heather, just as we did last year. Although cutting the heather is not as effective as burning, it does at least kick start the regeneration process. In fact, the new growth emerging on the previously cut areas is becoming obvious from both root stock and seed.

We are still accounting for foxes, mustelids and crows, but our rate of capture has really slowed down in spite of the fact that the scientific monitoring earlier this year showed that mustelid numbers were up.
Many of my tunnel traps are waterlogged, so I am moving several of them to new locations.

We also appear to be witnessing an increase in the amount of birds killed by raptors. All of the keepers have witnessed a prey switch, with raptors targeting more grouse, as well as redwings and fieldfares that have begun arriving en masse.

We know that buzzards are particularly active at the moment, but we’ve also seen a female hen harrier about for some time now, along with goshawks and peregrines, so it would be good to know – for sure – the scale as to which each of these birds of prey is killing the grouse.