Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Upland keeper
A tiny beetle that can quickly multiply to an army of millions and wreaks havoc on moorland heather has been found again this year
Many a moor has already had some superb bags and, given the numbers, the season has some way to run. I have a feeling there will be some exceptional end-of-season shooting to be had this year for those who wait for such things. However, given the interest in taking days it might pay not to wait too long before getting your name on the list.
Despite the excellent bags already in the book for this season, some moors have had to modify their drives, and indeed days, because of yet one more of Mother Nature’s little friends. Heather beetle has devastated sizeable areas of some moors, large enough to encompass whole drives. In some cases more than one drive has been affected.
To appreciate just how big an impact “beetle”, as it is commonly referred to, has on an area of moorland you really need to see it at first-hand.
No food value
Instead of the expected blaze of purple bloom, whole hillsides are covered in grey, dead vegetation. The first indication that all is not well often comes in July or August when the heather, instead of starting to bloom, begins to turn red or ginger. Within a few short weeks it is dead, with no food value left. This means that whatever was living in that area on that heather simply has to move on in order to survive, and that includes sheep, deer or grouse.
It is surprising perhaps that in this century, more than 100 years since the first comprehensive book on grouse moor management, The Grouse in Health and in Disease — edited by A.S. Leslie and otherwise known as the Lovat Report — we still do not understand the forces that drive Lochmaea suturalis, or the heather beetle.
In those long-distant days there was scepticism among the keepering profession that a tiny beetle could cause such widespread damage which was known as “frosting of the heather”; it was thought early-season frosts had killed the plant. Bit by bit, though, it was concluded that vast numbers of the grub of the beetle were devouring the plant and causing large-scale death of the heather.
Scientists are still trying to figure out what conditions enable the beetle to go from small-scale numbers and damage
“Instead of a blaze of purple, whole hillsides are covered in grey, dead vegetation”
seen on many moors at regular intervals, to plagues numbering millions. Even in the days of the Lovat Report, they concluded, from soil samples taken, that there were in the region of 1.5million potential beetles per acre on some moors.
That number, multiplied over thousands of acres, comes to an awful lot of beetles — enough to carpet the streets of some cities. What is certain for the moors affected is that the grouse that bred on those areas will have had to seek pastures new, and if it is close to a boundary, your grouse may not now be living on your moor.
Movements like this are not a new phenomenon, but they do cause problems to keepers relying on certain drives to run some specific days. The only use the land has for a season or two is as an area to fill with driven birds, then return them home. Even that is not straightforward as the grouse are aware the land has little cover for them and are reluctant to go on to it.
Life at times is neither fair nor straightforward and the only real recourse the keeper has is to burn the affected area to encourage regrowth. This is because the heather may well regrow straight from the root stock of the affected plant, and therefore there could be millions of little grubs waiting to emerge later in the spring looking for a meal.
So it is wise to wait for one year to allow the biblical plague to come out into a land with nothing to eat. They will then die and as the beetles are poor fliers, a year later when the moor is burned and heather returns, the little pest has run its course. For the time being.