The Complete English Wing Shot

by George Teasdale Teasdale-Buckell

Where the grouse are best served by high altitudes is in the south-eastern border of their distribution. They are at home on the top of the Peak district of Derbyshire, and exist much lower down. Farther north and farther west their best moors are lower, and this goes on until in Caithness the best elevation for the grouse is only about 100 feet above sea-level, as it is also in Argyllshire. Over all the intermediate country, between parallel lines pointing north-east and south-west, the grouse are best served by an intermediate elevation of moorland decreasing towards the north-west. They exist in large numbers, but not the largest numbers, above and below this elevation. This is generally true, and although it would be easy to point to moors a few hundred feet out of the theoretical best elevation that are better than others exactly in it, there are then always local conditions that favour such moors, and these are not to be found on the moors in the better elevations on the same parallels. The moors of Dartmoor and the heaths of Norfolk are both on the same north-east to south-west parallels. Probably neither of them are for the most part high enough to suit grouse in that latitude and longitude. It must be remembered that if red grouse are, as is believed to be the case, the same bird as the willow grouse, or rype, they are of Arctic origin, and, like other organisms of that origin, survive out of the Arctic regions only at certain higher altitudes as latitude decreases. The lower Dartmoor is obviously too low for them, but possibly places could be discovered on the moor where they would do well. The lower moors there are smothered with the bell heather (erica), and this is not the food of the grouse. The real “ling” (calluna) of the grouse food grows on Dartmoor much more scarcely, and although there is plenty for old grouse, it is not easy to see how chicks could get about to find enough of their natural food amongst what, to them, would be forests of useless vegetation—namely, the bell heather. On the South Wales moors the grouse are not very plentiful; but the species is better served in North Wales, which is on the same north-east by south-west parallel line as Yorkshire.

It is a curious fact that these parallels also supply an index to the wildness or otherwise of the grouse, but not exactly. It would be more nearly correct to say that this is true except so far as it is modified by insular conditions. What is meant is that the parallel lines hold good except as regard the islands where the grouse lie better than their north-westwardness would suggest from the behaviour of the grouse in the same parallels on the mainland.

It has been said that the wet climate makes birds lie: this is obviously wrong, because they do so in Caithness, which is the driest county in Scotland by the statistics.

It has also lately been repeatedly said that the Gulf Stream makes them lie, but this also is surely wrong, because the one part most affected by the Gulf Stream is the Port Patrick promontory in Wigtonshire, where the author has found the grouse as wild as in Aberdeenshire. Yet in Arran and in Islay, but slightly to the north-west of this point, they lie like stones all the year. They do so also on the west coast of Argyllshire, on that of Ross-shire, and in the whole of Sutherland- and Caithness-shires, and also in the Lews and that group, in Skye and in the Orkneys.

Elevation makes no difference to their instinctive habits, which are clearly in-bred in the birds, and whether in the same districts grouse are found at 2000 or at 100 feet above sea-level their instinctive habits will be always those of the district, and are not varied by hill and strath.

What, then, is it that makes some birds lie for security all the season, and others fly for security as soon as they can use their wings? It has been said that if you drive birds one year you will always have to drive them, because it alters their characters. The author held to that faith for years, but has lived to see the error of his imaginings. It is very natural to suppose, if you teach the parents to fly for life, that the children will inherit the same habit also. But although the author would be far from asserting, as some naturalists do, that life-acquired habits are never transmitted, he knows that they are not often transmitted, and thinks that the growing, or rather grown, wildness of Yorkshire grouse can be amply explained on the Darwinian theory of the survival and breeding of the fittest.

Early in the nineteenth century the celebrated Colonel Hawker found the grouse so wild that he took himself back to Hampshire, voting grouse in August a fraud. He only shot a few that sat better than the rest, which implied that all those that sat worse than the rest were saved for breeding. This natural selection of the fittest went on for another fifty years, and then people took to driving grouse because they could get them in large quantities no other way. That seems simple enough; fifty or one hundred generations of selection of the wildest for breeding, and of the youngest for the pot, made the Yorkshire grouse breed earlier and breed wilder birds than before.

There is a natural and obvious apparent difficulty in accepting this theory, but it is only apparent and not real. It is this:—Why did not the grouse get wild in the same way and degree in the Highlands and the Islands and in Caithness-shire? The reason why they did not is probably that the Yorkshire grouse began by being strong enough and early enough to all rise in a brood by the 12th of August. Consequently, the early broods were saved. The Caithness-shire grouse and those of the Lews were later, and never were all ready to rise together in a brood by the 12th of August, and consequently the most backward were saved, since both barrels would be discharged at those first up, and the crouchers escaped while the shot was being rammed home in the muzzle-loaders.

If this is the true explanation of the difference of habit of the birds, its root cause can be seen at a glance every autumn on the heather—that is to say, its root cause, when the shot gun was first used to kill grouse upon the wing, was in the state of the heather. The bloom of this plant indicates the period when it started to shoot, and that is a fortnight earlier in Yorkshire than in Caithness and the Lews. It may be three weeks, or even more, but it is at least a fortnight.

The starting to bloom has no influence directly on the grouse nesting, but the starting of the plant to shoot has; and therefore if the survival of the fittest theory is accepted, all the wildness of the south-eastern grouse, and the hiding habit, or natural instinct, of the north-western grouse is explained by the state of forwardness of vegetation in the districts two hundred years ago, which in all probability was relatively what it is now.