Part 24

To state the principle of grouse driving shortly is possibly difficult. It is based upon a series of incidents in the perceptions of the birds, which are influenced by sight alone, and not by hearing or smelling. They should first see a driver far off in the direction it is most wished they should avoid flying to. If they take wing at this first sight, then the act of rising should bring them into sight of a line of men covering every point that they are not desired to make for. Local conditions may alter all this, as it may be that grouse have a constant flight, and take it however they are flushed, but generally they have not. The means stated generally resolves itself into a quarter-circle of beaters on the most down-wind side of a cross-wind beat, attached to a straight line of beaters in the centre and upon the most up-wind side of the beat, so that the men farthest down wind are the most advanced. On the other hand, when the drive is direct to the guns with a full wind, the line of beaters will have two horns each well advanced on either side, unless local conditions make one side dangerous and the other not so. Generally they do. The desired flight may or may not be at first in the direction of the line of shooters. The first object may be concentration, either in the air or on the ground. In the first case, the grouse having been got to go towards a concentration point in their flight, are gradually turned to the guns by men who are set at danger points, and either show themselves to or are seen by the grouse at that exact proximity that the sight of the unexpected will have most effect in turning them. It is a curious fact that when flag-men are seen at a long distance ahead of them, the grouse may or may not swerve in their flight, but seen suddenly when so near as to leave just more than enough time for turning before the impetus has carried them over the head of the man with the flag, they turn off instead of merely swerving. Consequently, the men who are set to turn grouse are a law to themselves. They show themselves at the psychological moment, according to the speed of the grouse. Only a very little is required to turn a slow up-wind pack of grouse, whereas very much will sometimes not turn fast down-wind birds. This turning the birds from the point towards which they are driven is often necessary. Thus grouse may not be willing to drive in another direction, or to drive otherwise might be to lose the birds for the day, and to have the butts where the turn in the flight occurs might be to allow the majority to go straight on into some other moor, not to be seen again that day, if ever.

When birds are, or can be, collected or concentrated upon the ground, it is much more simple. It is difficult then to make everything go right, but it does not require quite the Napoleon of tactics that the other method does. Obviously the concentration of grouse upon the ground implies a larger beat than in the other case—one in which the natural flight of the grouse will induce them to settle before they get within sight of the butts. This concentration and settlement of the birds enables a new formation of drivers to be made, for the collection of the birds may have caused driving right away from the butts in the first instance, and in most cases not directly towards them. The object of all driving is not only to put as many grouse as possible within range of the guns, but the more important part is that of keeping on the moor all those grouse that go by the butts, to be used again and again the same day.

Another way of driving grouse is based upon the same principle, except that the driving is simple, because the beats are short and direct to the guns. In this case natural common sense is much more effective than in the other two, which must depend upon local knowledge almost entirely. But in all cases men to turn the grouse if they try to break out have to be employed, and they are of no use unless they perfectly understand what the grouse will do under every circumstance that may arise. Some of these men are so clever that when shooters in the butts are watching the operations and believe the big pack has broken out, they suddenly see it turn and head straight to them. Then the gunners recognise that the “pointsman,” if the simile is admissible, knows his business better than they know it; for it is clear from their anxiety that they in a similar situation would have shown themselves too soon, and that the flag-man has timed the occasion as accurately as a railway pointsman switches a train on to another line of metals. The short driving system may be exemplified by Lord Walsingham’s great performance, when he got 1070 grouse to his own gun in the day in 20 short drives on a 2200 acre moor. The long drive system may be exemplified by the first drive in the day at Mr. Rimington Wilson’s Broomhead moor, where 6 drives in the day is the outside limit.

There is a great deal of difference of opinion upon the best form of grouse butt, and some difference upon the best distances apart for them. But these are not abstract questions, although in conversation and books they are treated as if they were. Much depends upon the manner of driving. When the birds are brought from a distance and concentrated, it is clear that they cannot have got used to the sight of the butts on the ground to which they are forced. On the other hand, in short drives the birds are practically never off their own ground, and consequently get used to the butts, however conspicuous they are, and do not fear them. In this case nothing seems to be better than the horseshoe-shaped butt built up of turfs with heather growing on the top. Slight modifications of the horseshoe formation are best made when the butts are used alternately to shoot grouse driven from opposite directions. It is then well that the entrance should be an over-lap of one end.

But where grouse are brought off their own ground, and are not used to the sight of peat cutters and their temporary stacking of the peat, it seems that sunk butts are of the most value. The latter are much the more costly to make, because they require draining at a depth of 3 or 4 feet below the surface. The manner of making these sunk butts is not to excavate to the full height of a shooter’s gun arm, but to use the turf taken out of a partial excavation for making a gradual slope up bank close to the pit, a foot or two above the surrounding surface—the object being that the bank thus made should look like a natural heather bank, and not present a black surface of peats to the sight of approaching grouse. The biggest bags ever made have been obtained with the upright peat butts; but The Mackintosh, who has had the largest day’s bag in Scotland, prefers sunk butts.

The latter gentleman also puts his butts nearer together than anyone else. The nearest are about 15 yards apart. This would not suit most people. Possibly, though, this too greatly depends upon the nature of the driving. Twenty yards apart may be far enough for very high pheasants, and may prevent two guns shooting at one bird. If grouse happened to be equally high, as some ground might easily make them, the danger of shooting other’s birds would be lessened, and butts could with advantage be nearer together than where the grouse flew low. In the beginning of driving, butts were built 80 yards apart, now they are usually made at 50 yards intervals. Low flying grouse, going half-way between butts 80 yards apart, cannot be dealt with; their nearest point to a gun is 40 yards, but at the moment when they are between the butts they cannot be safely shot at, and before they get there they are out of range.

No doubt most missing of driven grouse is caused by shooting at them too far away. This is the greatest fault of the novice. The next most productive source of missing is shooting under coming birds and over those that have passed the butts. After this, failure to allow enough ahead of fast birds, to compensate for their movement while the shot is going up, is the next most productive of missing, and shooting too much in front of slow up-wind birds runs it hard.

Beating for grouse with dogs is usually done by going to the leeward end of the day’s beat and then walking at right angles with the wind, and turning into it at every march to the shooting, or boundary to the beat. This, however, is a rule that has to be honoured by its breach, in the hill districts particularly. Thus, when beating across the wind means that one has to rise and sink at an angle of 45 degrees every time, such a method has to give way. It also often happens when a fair breeze is blowing that to start beating up wind near a boundary march means that every bird will circle round and be carried by the wind out of bounds. Then the rule again breaks down. The object is to drive the birds that are not shot into ground to be beaten in the afternoon. This is best done by an up-wind beat of the zigzag order when the wind is light, and by a down-wind beat, starting from the windward march, when the wind is fairly high, but not so high as to carry the game over the leeward march. It usually happens that wind sinks about four o’clock in the afternoon, or before. If this happens, it is a good plan to draw off and go round to begin again at the leeward side of the ground into which the morning birds have been driven. The majority of the Welsh moors are so flat that they can be beaten in any direction, like those of Caithness, but the Highland moors are as steep as the Welsh hills are before you reach the heather ground. After you are once up in Wales, the walking is easy in all directions. The Highland hills are very like those of Wales, but with this great difference, the rises from the Scotch valleys are clothed with heather and are the best grouse ground. In Wales this rise is grass and fern-clad sheep farms, and often takes half a day’s work, counting work as human energy, to surmount before shooting begins. For this reason Providence created the Welsh pony.

The grouse have a very curious habit in the wet weather of affecting the wettest and wildest parts of the moorland. Then, and only at that time, you may find them mostly on the flat floe ground, where every foot of peat is a miniature island, and where there is no shelter whatever from the storm. This is probably because the grouse do not mind rain upon them, but do very much mind brushing the wet heather with their feathers. At such times grouse are generally wild, for they will not “squat” and hide, but run very much. Then they usually have very good scent, the dogs find and point them a long way, and then draw on and on after them as the grouse run ahead. It is nevertheless just possible to get good shooting by two guns going well ahead, very wide of the dogs, and coming back to meet the point. It is the sun, not the wind or the wet, that makes grouse hide in the heather, and probably the reason is that they were originally an Arctic species, and can stand cold better than very hot sun. In support of this view it may be said that grouse disease seems to disappear in very cold weather, and moreover the red grouse are, in everything but feather colouring and the white moult of winter, the same as the willow grouse—an obviously Arctic race.

Amongst the methods of killing grouse that have almost died out are first “becking,” second “kiting,” third “carting,” fourth shooting them upon the stooks, and a variety of other devices for which the gun was not used, such as snaring and netting.

Some of these methods of shooting had a great deal to recommend them. First of all, “becking” is the art of hiding and the skill of calling the grouse in the early morning, when this proud bird, exulting in his superabundance of energy, rises into the air and crows defiance. He is quite ready for battle, although it may not be the breeding season; for they “beck” in August, as the author has often seen and heard through an open window as he lay in bed waiting for the first breakfast-bell. The loss of “becking” is the loss of an automatic destruction of the most unfit, namely the old cocks, which are the only birds that will accept the autumnal challenge, and come to make things hot for an unseen rival, whose unrecognised voice sounds as if he had no right there.

“Kiting” has little to recommend it, except that it too is an automatic preservation of the hens. They for the most part will not lie under the kite, but make off at its first appearance upon the horizon. The stronger and bolder cocks seem to delay matters until the thing gets right above them, and then they too become scared, but dare not rise. Thus they get kicked up and shot when the dogs can find them, which is not always. When they are up, they twist under the kite like a snipe, and are then more difficult to kill than by any other sporting method; for they not only have a snipe’s twist, but about double their own usual pace, exhibiting what the falcon will show any day of the week—that when we think birds in a drive are doing their level best they are in reality taking things easy. The writer has shot at driven grouse with a falcon in actual chase. The grouse was seen to be approaching some distance, perhaps 50 yards, before it crossed. There was no time to shoot in front, and upon turning round it was seen that both grouse and falcon were already out of range, but there was a high wind blowing at the time this happened on the “tops” at Farr, in Inverness-shire.

“Carting” grouse is a poaching trick, based upon the knowledge that the birds take very little notice of a cart, even when they will rise a quarter of a mile away from a man on foot. The shooting is done from the cart.

Shooting grouse on the stooks has only this in its favour: it pleases the farmers. It is a butchery of those killed and a waste of many wounded. But to hide up and shoot grouse as they come into the oat-fields, whether uncut or in stook, is good sport. The birds do not usually travel as fast as in grouse driving, but they are quite as difficult, because they come so unexpectedly and silently. To make the best work, it does not do to trust to hiding behind a wall, or on the other side of a stook, because the grouse are as likely to come from one direction as the other. The best plan is to build a grouse butt with the oat stooks, in order that the shooter may straighten his back; for nobody is so expert as to be able to shoot well from a crouching position, although kneeling is just possible, and most uncomfortable.

Another form of grouse shooting used to be called “gruffing” in Yorkshire. It was common everywhere, although it may not have a name elsewhere. The method was for a single gun to approach hillocks on the shady side and walk round them to the sunny side, when grouse that had long become too wild to approach openly would often lie and afford good easy marks by this method. This is only workable on nice sunny days, and only practicable as late as October and November between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

There is a wet-day method by which the author has killed a good many grouse. It is with a retriever to walk the roads that traverse the moors, or, better still, to ride a shooting pony along them. The wildest grouse will sometimes take no notice of a passenger along the well recognised roads, and they must be very unreasonable indeed if they mind a mounted man. Your retriever will find all the grouse on the windward side of the roads, and they will generally rise within shot. Why they should affect the roadsides in wet weather is not so easily explained, but probably it is that they prefer to sit on the roads themselves, where their feathers are not in contact with wet heather. If so, they just move off in time not to be seen by the coming traveller.

It has been said that grouse lie better to a black-and-tan and to a red setter than to parti-coloured dogs in which white prevails. There is no truth in this in a general way. After white dogs have been used until grouse will no longer lie, they will often lie to either a black-and-tan or a red dog, but only for a day, and only a few of them for that short addition to the length of the dogging season.

Possibly they take the black-and-tan for a collie, and the red dog for a fox. On one occasion the author saw grouse treat a red dog in a way extraordinary anywhere, except in the west and north of Scotland and in Ireland; but this was in the Lowlands of Scotland, where the grouse were wild by instinct. The birds were seen to be standing up in front of the pointing Irishman and flicking their tails in his face, and even when the dog drew on they merely just kept their distance, still flicking their tails. There was not the slightest attempt at hiding. Probably this is the method they have when approached by a fox; it differs greatly from the behaviour of the average grouse before the man and the ordinary dog. Then crouching and creeping are characteristics of the race, unless they are of the wild sort, when standing up to look for an enemy is habitual, and flying upon sight is characteristic.

[Since writing the foregoing remarks, Mr. Charles Christie, of Strathdon Estate Office, has very kindly, with the assent of Sir Charles Forbes, made a search for the oft misquoted records of the Delnadamph bag of 1872. The bag was 7000 birds, not brace, and 1314 brace of these were killed over dogs in five days by four guns, whose best effort resulted in 435 brace. The guns were Lord Dunmore, Lord Newport (now Lord Bradford), Mr. George Forbes, and the late Sir Charles John Forbes.

Sir Charles Forbes’ Edinglassie moor yielded 8081 birds in 1900.

Probably the record bag over dogs was the 10,600 grouse killed at Glenbuchat in 1872, where Mr. James W. Barclay (the owner) very kindly informs the author that driving was not started until after that year, whereas the greater number were killed by that plan at Delnadamph in 1872.]

THE LATEST METHODS OF PRESERVATION OF PARTRIDGES

At the present time there are in operation many more ways of preserving partridges than ever before. Indeed, the history of preserving these birds up to about 1860 could hardly be written for lack of material. For some strange reason, at the period when stubbles were cut long (and the author has shot in them a foot high as lately as 1870), and when partridges sat so close to the points of dogs that to all appearances they could have been easily exterminated, they nevertheless seemed to require no artificial assistance, and even no designed limitation of the reduction to the breeding stock. Perhaps it was that the close crouching of the birds in good covert was the natural method of assuring safety, and it may be that birds that could escape detection by the dogs could also escape it by the foxes and the vermin.

The wilder the game is, and the more it runs, the more scent it gives out to denote its presence to dogs; and with guns ahead, the birds that flush wild do not escape in driving, so that increase of wildness is not all in favour of the game even upon shooting days, and for the other 360 days of the year may possibly be against them, and in favour of the vermin that hunts by smell.

Whether this protection by the wits assists birds on their nests at all, and if so, as much as the loss of scent does, is too wide a question to enter upon here. It is only necessary to remark upon that subject that partridge preservation is to be divided, broadly speaking, into two systems: first, that which protects birds against foxes; second, that which is not called upon to add this heavy duty to the keeper’s ordinary business.

Roughly generalising, it is only in Norfolk and Suffolk where the keepers are not troubled with the fox question, and consequently it is only there that partridges can be safely left alone to find their own salvation. But this system can go too far even in those favoured counties, and naturally we find energetic shooters who try all round, declaring that Norfolk and Suffolk are “played out.” As a matter of fact, the very ease of preservation in those counties has done them a great deal of comparative injury, because, while they have been going back, or at least standing still, other counties have been going ahead in a wonderful manner. Probably the progress made in Nottinghamshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Cambridgeshire is far greater than anything done in the Eastern Counties, compared with what the respective stocks were in those districts twenty-five years ago.

The first phenomenal partridge preservation and the first break away from the system of letting birds preserve themselves occurred at Elvedon in the sixties of last century. Then large numbers of partridges were reared by hand on that estate, and at the same time, or a little later, a great many people began to rear partridges by hand. One of these was Lord Ducie, in Oxfordshire. The plan adopted there was to exchange pheasants’ eggs for those of partridges with anyone who would bring the latter; consequently, it may be said that Lord Ducie was one of the first men to prefer partridge shooting to covert shooting. Now, on the contrary, a very great many people set the partridge up as the first game bird, and his popularity is growing.

But to return to the hand rearing of partridges: the difficulty of this business is twofold. First, it is generally believed that the birds must be fed with ants’ eggs to make a success. Second, it is asserted that tame bred partridges “pack,” and that without old birds to lead them these packs are likely to travel for miles and be lost to those to whom they belong.

The first charge against hand rearing is not exactly true, because Lord Ducie’s keeper succeeded in rearing large quantities of partridges without the use of ants’ eggs. The author as a boy and in an amateurish way reared birds about the same period, but by the use of ants’ eggs, and consequently that experience does not go for much, because there is no difficulty in the task where plenty of these insects are to be found to feed the birds entirely for the first six weeks.

The trouble arises when there are some ants’ eggs but not enough to go round, for this food has the effect of setting the young birds against everything else. Lord Ducie’s partridges were mainly fed upon meal of some kind, although the writer forgets what it was. Another precaution that was taken was to distribute the coops very widely along the sides of corn-fields, and there is no doubt that this plan obliged the birds to hunt for insect food at a much earlier age than if they had been kept upon ants’ eggs. Unfortunately, the chicks will not eat the ants themselves; otherwise the getting of ant-hills to cart to the birds would go three times as far as it does, for there are generally twice as many wingless ants as there are eggs to every nest.

The second charge against these tame birds is that they grow too wild in packs and fly right away, and this is a fact beyond all dispute. However, it has been said that cock partridges will sometimes take to young birds reared by hens, if the bachelor partridges are themselves penned in the neighbourhood when the little chicks are first carried from the sitting boxes to the coops. There appears here to be a possible future for hand rearing without its old disadvantage of packing. Probably most people will think that the cock partridge is better occupied in assisting his own proper mate to raise the very big coveys that are now manufactured by the joint efforts of birds and keepers.