▲ A GOOD HARE DAY,
Upper Donside’s mountain hare population is thriving, thanks to the work of grouse keepers like Alex Jenkins
We’ve always had a lot of mountain hares. It’s a success story for us,” said Alex Jenkins, headkeeper on the 15,000-acre Edinglassie estate in Upper Donside, Aberdeenshire. Jenkins attributes the flourishing population to two main factors: good habitat and the predator control carried out as part of his grouse management. This tallies with the wider picture in North East Scotland, where in spite of their range shrinking nationally, mountain hare numbers are 35 times higher on driven grouse moors compared to unmanaged areas.
In particular, hares benefit from the new heather growth after managed burning. Muirburn plays a vital role in the management of Edinglassie, which is a mix of dry heath and wetter moor at altitudes of up to 2,500ft. Controlled burning is an essential tool to rejuvenate heather moorland, huge swathes of which were lost after World War Two through commercial forestry and over-grazing. In Donside, entire moors were covered in non-native commercial plantations, which support little wildlife. The current trend in the National Park is for planting native woodland and Jenkins is concerned that it might lead to the loss of more heather – and mountain hares with it. “It’s important to remember that the majority of heather cover in the world is found in the UK,” he said. “These moors were designated Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) because of the habitat and wildlife preserved by grouse shooting, so the traditional management needs to be maintained to keep them in good condition.”
As well as afforestation, moorland suffered from being drained for agriculture in the post-war drive for food production. A common misconception is that this was done for grouse. In fact, the reverse is true and like most grouse moors Edinglassie has been filling in its ditches, creating 150 dams last year alone.
Regulating the intensity of sheep grazing is another essential element in restoring the heather and other moorland plants on which hares, grouse and other rare wildlife depends. Jenkins said, “Historically the sheep roamed where they liked and plants got hammered, particularly along the hill fringe and around the gates. Now the estate is farmed virtually all in hand, the number of breeding sheep has been reduced to about 2,500 on 12,000 acres and they are kept off the hill in the winter.” The improvement to habitat has been spectacular with rare plants returning to what were previously grassland monocultures and the parts of Edinglassie within SSSIS are overall in “favourable maintained condition”. One of the SSSIS, the
Green Hill of Strathdon, features rare serpentine rock and supports native grasses such as black spleenwort, common scurvygrass and mossy saxifrage. Ninety percent of the farming at Edinglassie is on heather moorland and it is supported by other agricultural businesses run by its owner Charles Pearson. “Charles’s mindset and mine are similar in that everything we do here has to be for the benefit of wildlife,” said Jenkins. “We are fortunate that there are more profitable farming enterprises in other parts of Aberdeenshire that underpin the work done at Edinglassie.”
The interdependence of the sheep farming and grouse management is key to delivering the conservation goal and the system provides vital employment in what is a Least Favourable Area (LFA) for agriculture. “A lot of people who live in Upper Donside are directly or indirectly connected to the estates,” Jenkins added. “My wife works at the local shop and we have two kids at the village school. At one point there were only 21 pupils, a large proportion of which were children of keepers or shepherds.”
In addition to benefitting mountain hares and red grouse, habitat improvement has provided ideal nesting ground for redlisted wading bird species. Jenkins said, “In this part of the world we are bucking trends on waders. Lapwing, redshank and oystercatcher are stable or increasing and there are probably more curlew in Upper Donside than in the entire country south of Birmingham. The Cairngorms National Park Authority acknowledges the work grouse managers do for waders and we are part of the RSPB Grampian Wader & Wetland Initiative. However, there is a tendency to think habitat can solve everything. It is essential to create the right environment but there’s no point if all the chicks get eaten.”
Mountain hares, like ground-nesting birds, benefit hugely from the predator control carried out on grouse moors. One study showed that foxes account for up to 90% of hare predation. On Edinglassie and neighbouring estates, stoats, weasels, crows and foxes are kept to a level where other vulnerable species, including curlew, lapwing and black grouse, have a chance of survival. Jenkins explained that being able to carry out this control means protected predators, such as birds of prey, do not threaten the viability of the grouse moor or its wader population. However, an explosion in raven numbers is causing problems.
“We have zero tolerance of wildlife crime on this estate and are proud of the many species of birds of prey we have at Edinglassie. However, some protected species are having such an impact on everything that it’s difficult to watch. With ravens it’s not the breeding pairs, it’s the juvenile flocks of 50 to 60 birds that appear in spring. They work a hill face together and you can lose a large number of eggs and chicks in one day. The irony is that we have been granted licences to control ravens to protect sheep, but when one is granted to help an endangered species like curlew, SNH is subjected to intimidating abuse and ultimately withdraws it. What’s the point in having a licence if it is unobtainable?”
“In particular, hares benefit from the new growth after managed heather burning”
The challenges of conserving grouse and other moorland birds does not end with predation. Sheep still play an important role in mopping up and killing ticks, but Jenkins is sure that the parasites remain the biggest limiting factor in grouse production. “Tick is going to become a big issue for wildlife conservation as I’ve seen grouse and curlew chicks completely covered in them. It seems no-one but grouse-moor managers are trying to tackle it; we need to get the message to a wider audience.” Mountain hares also suffer from tick infestation and so can spread LIV indirectly. To reduce the transmission of the virus, a certain number are culled each year, all of which go to local game dealers.
Looking ahead, along with other estates in Upper Donside, Jenkins has begun to count mountain hares at night using the new system developed by the GWCT and the James Hutton Institute (see panel on page 54). The counts and locations are meticulously recorded and will prove an invaluable tool for ensuring a healthy population of mountain hares in the long term. Edinglassie will see a wide range of additional conservation projects taking shape in the coming years and Jenkins hopes the current proposals for licensing grouse moors don’t threaten this great conservation success story. “I’d like to reach a middle ground where we have a system of self-accreditation rather than licensing.
The problem with the latter is that it could lead to innocent land managers being wrongly accused of wildlife crime, grouse shooting ending and keepers losing their jobs and homes.
We recognise there are areas that need to improve but all sides of the debate should be looking for common ground and recognising the positives. The new generation of keepers understand that their role is no longer simply to manage grouse. They see themselves as working conservationists.”
MOUNTAIN HARE HISTORY
Sometimes called the blue hare because of the blue tinge to its summer coat, Lepus timidus scoticus is one of the few UK species to turn white in winter to match the snow and the best time to spot them is after the thaw. Native to Britain, they were once present across the UK but were pushed into upland areas by brown hares, which were introduced by the Romans. Reintroductions in the 19th century saw them return to the Borders and North Wales, but these days they are confined to the Scottish Highlands with isolated populations in the Peak District and the Isle of Man.
An important food source for golden eagles, mountain hares rely on camouflage rather than speed to evade their talons and will only run uphill when pursued. If their population grows too large they can overgraze the heather, so traditionally gamekeepers and hill farmers organised shoots to control their numbers.
Shoots often saw large numbers killed but were not normally attended by the laird or his guests and are not recorded in gamebooks. Record Bags and Shooting Records by Hugh S Gladstone, written in 1922, states: “This species on some of the deer forests and grouse moors in the Highlands constitutes a perfect nuisance and organised battues take place occasionally to reduce the numbers. 1,289 blue hares were killed at Logiealmond (Perthshire) in one day’s hare-driving in November 1889. At Glen Dye (Kincardineshire) 1,204 were killed in the season.”
In his book The Leaping Hare, George Ewart Evans writes of mountain hares: “Some English sportsmen of the 19th century, in spite of Queen Victoria’s love of Balmoral, despised them in a patriotic way which now seems funny, saying they cannot run fast and they look like starved cats, scraggy, ungainly and mean. But no-one who has watched her sitting hunched but alert in the snow or leaping and running at a sign of danger can pretend not to love her composure in stillness and her grace in movement.”
Today, there is a close season in Scotland from 1 March to 31 July and there is increasing interest in hare shoots from Continental guns who rate mountain hare as highly desirable quarry, potentially providing another source of income for estates, that sustainably manage their
populations.
“The blue hare is one of the few UK species to turn white in winter”