GROUSE AGAIN

I was delighted to see the Purdey conservation award returning once again to Northern Ireland, this time for my favourite game bird, the Irish Red Grouse.

My great grandfather built a shooting lodge at the foot of the Mourne Mountains circa 1890 when grouse, snipe and hares were plentiful. It was built entirely of Canadian pitch pine and the roof was the prototype for what became known as the ‘Belfast truss roof’, which was used widely for warehousing in the port towns in Scotland and the North of England. The lodge known as the Hut is for that reason a listed building. My wife and I are now the proud owners but, alas, there is now nothing to shoot. The Mournes are a wildlife wilderness save for ravens .

In the 1950s, my father and friends still shot grouse there, the best bag being 7½ brace, and as my father’s birthday fell on the 13th my mother cooked all the birds on an old solid fuel range. My father also has an OS map six inches to the mile and on it marked by a red X were numerous boggy patches in

fields. Father and friends would stop at them and, sure enough, there would be a few snipe at each. Then, like headage payments, drainage grants were given so the boggy bits disappeared – as did the snipe. Now you get grants to create wetlands, hey ho!

On 12 August 1968, myself and five other guns walked the moor at Lough Bradan in County Tyrone, and while my shooting was dreadful we managed a bag of 18 brace. But, sadly, at the end of the day we realised that the moor, like many others in the province, was doomed. Why? Because we had spent the day surrounded by the nonindigenous Sitka spruce, which of course turned into cold, lifeless forests, home to nothing but foxes and hooded crows that thrived on the local sheep.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s I also shot grouse on a moor near Glenwherry but, as the article states, headage payments arrived with the moors being covered in suckler cows and sheep that brought about the demise of the grouse and decimated the population of Irish brown hare, which has gone from having to be culled to a protected species.

Congratulations to all involved, in the hope it will be replicated elsewhere on this island. Ian Murray Lisburn, Co Down