The Heart of the Wild: Nature Studies from Near and Far

by S. L. Bensusan

On one occasion in his mad flight from the moor, he would have been killed against the telegraph wires of the Highland Railway, had not the singing of the “protectors” warned him just in time to dive below the wires. He felt little pain and inconvenience from his wounds and soon learned to go on short allowance of toes, but his fear increased until the least sound sent him into flight. Long after the moor had ceased to echo with the sound of guns, he trembled at every noise. The stags roared in the forest, and he fled in fear; a bird of prey screamed in the air—he dashed off again.

RED GROUSE [Photo by C. Reid]

“Have no more fear,” said the royal stag one day in later October, “the guns have gone for the year, the shooting season is over and I go about the forest as I like. Until my horns have fallen and grown again they will not return.”

This assurance comforted the grouse and he changed his clothes for a black and buff combination that yielded in a little while to the splendid chestnut with white tipped lower feathers that he remembered his father wearing. He still travelled with the pack, but they ate less heather than they had eaten before, and depended more upon late autumn berries, grass and corn left on unploughed fields. He grew strong and indifferent to the storms that swept the moors and made the forest bare.

No sportsman came near, and at the end of December the pack separated, and our friend was left so near to his own moor that he lighted on it, and there he met a young lady grouse in her charming winter gown with its bars of red and buff and spots at the tips of the feathers. He asked her if she would fly with him, explaining that he had, he feared, lost his family and friends. She feared that hers was a similar plight and said she would be glad of a protector. So they went out together and found the scattered remains of their friends, and for two or three months enjoyed a pleasant courtship.

Then when the stale winter heather was about to yield to a new crop, one bird brought news of a district where all the old growth had been burnt by the proprietors of the land a few years earlier and the new shoots were plentiful and sweet. The grouse and his lady flew to that spot, and found a little unoccupied hollow under a heather tuft. He helped her to line it with grass and moss, and she filled it with ten eggs. It was now the end of March, and during the first part of April he stood on sentry duty a little way from the nest, and uttered his war cry in Gaelic as his father had done before him. Happily the weather was fine once more and ten little babies were his before April turned to May. He was a proud grouse on the day when the last bird had come from its shell.

Other birds had been carelessly content to nest in the old uneatable heather, or on parts of the moorland where the ground was damp and undrained; the mortality among them had been very great, for they caught pneumonia and other troubles which are peculiar to the grouse. But this grouse flourished, and so did his wife and family, and by rare good luck no birds of prey secured the little ones; the food supply did not fail, and the weather was never cold enough to kill the children in days when their down had not changed to feathers.

By this time all remembrance of the autumn had passed from the grouse and his wife. It was no more to them than a dream. They thought of nothing but love and domesticity. Spring, which had restored all its beauty to the Highland country, had effaced recollection of autumn and winter and all the woes they bore. Summer deepened the remembrance of the spring and the joy of life; as Mrs. Grouse remarked to her husband, there was not a pair on the moors that led a finer covey of little ones.

June passed in days that seemed to be twenty hours long, there was no night—only a prolonged twilight; July was so fine that the burns dwindled down to little threads, and the farmers on the lowlands were crying for the water of which in nine years out of ten they had too much. August found the heather full of fragrance and the grouse forward, and strong on the wing. “They are exactly like you, my dear,” said Father Grouse to his wife, who had put on her summer dress with the irregular black bars across buff feathers, as they skimmed over the heather side by side. The parent birds were like her, very fat and very lazy, for the heather-tops had been young and plentiful in their part and they had rather overeaten themselves.