Country Diary

A close, and somewhat surreal, encounter with a ptarmigan has led to a fascination with these enigmatic game birds that has never waned

Ten years have passed since my first day shooting ptarmigan. I’ve had several chances since then, but there was something very special about that day.

We were after stags near Cape Wrath and the party was divided up between several stalkers on a number of beats. A few of us had shot our stags and were keen for another challenge on the penultimate day of the trip when one of the gillies suggested a day at the ptarmigan. I had never seen a ptarmigan, despite being an avid red grouse fan. I knew them only from old Archibald Thorburn prints, but I was aware that this was a rare and exciting opportunity.

We set off from sea level, walking-up red grouse on the way to the tops. Three hours later, I started to wonder if it was going to be worth the trek. We had a couple of grouse in the bag, but with the first wisps of cloud beginning to gather over the distant Ben Hope, I began to steel myself to the possibility that this trip was going to be a non-starter. Cloud can turn any ptarmigan shooting trip into a damp squib.

Strange shapes

Half an hour later, we climbed into a new world of rock and lichen. The terrain suddenly changed and we found ourselves walking in a ragged line across boulders that were the size and weight of Land Rovers. A strange bowl in the hillside meant that my fellow Guns were temporarily invisible. I spotted a collection of strange shapes on the stubbly crowberry ahead.

They were like grey wine bottles, standing bolt upright and watching me with fixed expectation. My eyes registered the neat and detailed figures of ptarmigan almost precisely halfway between autumn and winter plumage. Their bellies were pure white, while their heads and backs were a delicate, almost translucent smoky grey.

In total silence, the six birds took to the air. The world slowed down. I brought up the gun and, in an apparently unrelated incident, one fell. I was so stunned that the second barrel remained unfired. I gathered the ptarmigan as if it were made of gold. My feet didn’t touch the rocks for the next two miles as we followed the contours of a vast and featureless mountain top. As time went by, the cloud built up and formed ragged windows through which a sour coin of sunlight occasionally dribbled.

Ahead, a wooden croak sounded from a concealed bank of stone. Ptarmigan calls are bizarrely mechanical and the noise rattled stiffly in the cloud. More birds had spotted us and we fell into a tight line and headed towards the sound. When they broke, it was almost poetic. It was as if a grey and white bomb had suddenly exploded, spraying shards and fragments into the gathering mist. I raised my gun to fire and found that I had missed, then saw my uncle prick a bird with his second barrel. Rather than let it fly on and choose another, I gave the stricken bird my second barrel and brought it to book.

These two incidents combined lasted less than 15 seconds from start to finish. I will remember them for the rest of my life. There are plenty of loud-mouthed commentators who love to trash shooting as a force of destructive machismo and toffee-nosed arrogance, but I would say that at its purest and most fundamental level, shooting is an entirely logical form of interacting with wildlife.

When I killed my ptarmigan, the first thing I did was explore its feathers and feel its toes. It was my bird and I felt entitled to inspect its long nails and fan out the white wing feathers. Perhaps it sounds whimsical, but the dead bird and I had shared a moment and, even though I have seen and shot many more ptarmigan since, none has made me feel the same way.

I am utterly fascinated and since that day I feel a great personal connection to them. Whether I have a gun or a camera in my hands, I’ll always love to spend time around ptarmigan. The expression has all but died out these days, but I understood what it means to be a “hunter-naturalist”.

“The ptarmigan were bolt upright like wine bottles, watching me with fixed expectation”

Patrick Laurie is a project manager at the Heather Trust.

He has a particular focus on blackgrouse conservation and farms Galloway cattle in south-west Scotland.

The ptarmigan Patrick spotted were almost precisely halfway between autumn and winter plumage