Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Going wild for grouse
David Tomlinson believes that picking-up on the tricky terrain of a grouse moor presents the greatest gamebird challenge for a gundog
A GROUSE WAS THE very first gamebird I ever shot, which is somewhat surprising in that I grew up in Kent, about as far from the nearest grouse moor as you can get in Britain. I was 17 when a pal and I spent three weeks in the Western Isles, staying on a family friend’s 5,000-acre farm. The ground included an extensive area of unkeepered heather moorland with a small population of grouse. Being young and fit, I was quite prepared to walk for miles in the hope of getting a shot, which was what I did.
If I recall, I’d walked for about three hours, flushing nothing but meadow pipits, when a single grouse — a barren hen — took off in front of me. She dropped instantly to my single shot. I was shooting with my Brno sidelock side-by-side (which
I still have) and I recall that I was using Sellier & Bellot cartridges.
What I didn’t have was a dog, so what followed was a long and increasingly frantic search to find my prize. I thought I had marked the fall, but heather moorland is remarkably featureless, as anyone who has picked-up grouse will confirm.
I did eventually find the bird, which was dead, but it took what seemed an age to do so. Grouse shooting without a dog isn’t to be recommended and I have never done so again. Of all our gamebirds, I regard the red grouse as the most challenging to pick-up.
Partridges or pheasants in sugar beet can be almost as difficult, but the plumage of a grouse merges perfectly with the heather and you need a dog with a good nose to find one. If scenting conditions are poor, as sometimes seems to be the case, even the best dogs can struggle.
I once watched a retriever field trial on grouse when a shot bird fell not far from the line, offering what looked like a simple retrieve. None of the competing dogs could find it and nor could the judges, who poked around hopefully with their sticks. Those with more knowledge than me reckoned that, although it looked as if it had fallen dead, it had probably picked itself up and run.
Seasoned campaigners
“The grouse merges with the heather and you need a dog with a good nose to find one”
The trial moved on and the picker-up was asked to look for the lost bird. One of his dogs found it almost instantly, making one wonder why the top trialling dogs had failed. It might have been a matter of luck, but the picker-up’s dogs were seasoned campaigners on grouse, so knew what they were looking for.
In contrast, the trialling dogs, as good as they were, had all come from what the locals called ‘down south’, so lacked the experience of working with grouse. There will be many who argue that a top dog will be just as effective whatever it is asked to retrieve, but
I’m sure experience helps.
My own experience of picking-up grouse is limited, but I have been out with top handlers on both Scottish and English moors, so I have seen how it should be done. My first surprise when I went picking-up grouse on a driven day was how few birds were actually retrieved by dogs belonging to the pickers-up.
The majority of birds shot on a driven day fall around the butts. The best grouse Shots take birds well out in front of the butts, so these birds naturally fall around the butts. It’s
mostly the long shots, taken behind, that the pickers-up have to find.
At the end of a drive, the Guns’ dogs, along with those of the keepers and the beaters, generally find most of the birds. The pickers-up will be hunting the heather, often several hundred yards behind the butts, retrieving relatively few birds, though each find is a minor triumph.
On a pheasant or partridge day, many of the birds retrieved by the pickers-up will have been marked as they fell, but that’s not so often the case on a moor. There are relatively few targeted retrieves and it’s often a case of using as many dogs as you can to sweep through.
There’s another reason for fewer marked retrieves. On a grouse moor, shooting low behind the butts is accepted practice, in contrast with lowland shooting, where you would be sent home for such behaviour. This means picking-up teams have to keep their heads down and can’t watch the shooting, which is a surprise to many working with grouse for the first time.
Heart-attack hills
Picking-up grouse in August can be a delight. The heather is in bloom, the bees are buzzing and there’s still warmth in the sun, but it’s usually a long day involving plenty of hard exercise. It’s amazing how many moors have ‘heart-attack hills’. As the season progresses, the grouse get wilder, the shooting becomes more difficult and the weather starts to remind you winter is coming.
A friend who picked-up virtually every day of the grouse season told me it was a great relief when he moved away from the moors and had to give up. I’m not sure, though, whether his dogs agreed with him.