Later that century, J. H. Gurney, not to be outdone, reared three hen harrier nestlings taken from a marsh near Ranworth decoy in Norfolk. When fully fledged, they all displayed the rich chocolate colour of their immature plumage. On moulting, two out of the three proved to be males. They survived for five years and one is now preserved in the Castle Museum in Norwich.
I was recently allowed to study four skins of female and male hen harriers and Montagu’s harriers on loan from the Castle Museum. The female hen harrier was enormous, measuring 28 inches from beak to tip of tail. Maybe it was a Scandinavian bird, which are bigger. The skin of the male Montagu’s harrier demonstrated perfectly one of the key identifying features – the primaries projected beyond the tip of the tail.
It is time now to examine the fully adult bird in more detail. The female hen harrier and the immature male are rather dull compared with the adult male. The female’s head and nape are light brown with dark streaks and the back is dark brown. The secondaries are barred and the primaries are dark. The rump is white and the tail feathers have three narrow transverse dark bars and a much broader bar at the tip. The underside is pale brown with longitudinal dark brown streaking. The female is considerably larger than the male.
By comparison the male is a spectacularly handsome bird. The beak is black and the cere yellow, bristles cover the area between the cere and the eyes, which are a clear yellow, and there is a distinct owl-like, facial ruff edged with short, very distinct feathers. The head, nape, upper back and upper wing coverts of a fully adult, five-year-old bird are silver-grey. The rump is white, contrasting with the tail feathers, which are light grey with dark transverse bars and have white tips, apart from the two central tail feathers, which are plain grey and unmarked. The first five outer primaries are black, the underside is grey, becoming lighter towards the vent, and the legs are yellow and long.
The male hen harrier, on his way back to Bowland, had overnighted in that part of the Peak District known as the Dark Peat. As he took off from his roost where he’d been safe under cover, hidden from sight by a few stunted trees and warm in the comfort of the sphagnum bog, he noticed the almost complete absence of other birds of prey – no harriers, peregrines or goshawks, just the occasional merlin or kestrel. It was not a good place to be a bird of prey. Like all hen harriers he had a distrust of man. The sight of a line of men managing a heather burn made him jink to one side to avoid the billowing flames and smoke.
Much of the heather moorland is managed for the benefit of those who shoot red grouse. The birds are driven towards the ‘guns’ waiting in a line of butts set up across the moor during the grouse-shooting season, which starts on 12 August and ends on 10 December. There are four main grouse moors in Bowland – United Utilities (formerly North West Water Authority), Abbeystead, Bleasdale and Clapham estates. There are other smaller moors, all of which are important players in their own way.
The United Utilities estate is not a true moor, nor is it managed to the extent of the others. There is some driven grouse shooting but the majority of the grouse killed are shot by a single gun walking the moor with setter and pointer dogs ranging ahead. If they find grouse, the pointer holds its point on the crouching birds. The gun moves up and the setter flushes the grouse, allowing the gun two shots at the grouse as they fly off. It is good exercise, and was the method used when grouse shooting started in the north of England and Scotland at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In 1831 the Game Act was passed to protect the interests of all those preserving game for shooting, setting dates in the calendar between which it was permitted to shoot different species of bird. It also gave gamekeepers the power to carry weapons and to arrest poachers. This set in motion a chain of events that ensured that the goshawk had disappeared by 1889, the marsh harrier by 1898, the osprey by 1908, the honey buzzard by 1911 and the white-tailed eagle by 1916.
It was a prosperous time in England and rich sportsmen lusted after shooting increasing numbers of grouse, just as they shot driven pheasants flying out of a covert. This passion for driven grouse was aided midway through the nineteenth century by two factors: Queen Victoria’s love affair with Scotland – and Balmoral in particular – and the expansion of the railways.
So how does driven grouse shooting work? The moor is divided up into a number of beats, and towards the end of each beat a line of six to eight butts – breast-high embrasures, behind which stand the guns – are positioned. A line of beaters, starting from the far end of the beat, walks slowly forward through the heather towards the butts. The red grouse, which tend to congregate in packs at the end of the breeding season, are flushed and fly very fast at shoulder height towards the guns. Good shots kill two birds in front, take their second gun from their loader, who is standing behind them to their right, and shoot another two birds as they fly away. It is the kind of shooting that sorts the veterans out from the rookies.
Over time the grouse shooters demanded grouse in ever-increasing numbers. This led to overstocking, with more grouse left in the winter than the moor could sustain. Two diseases – strongylosis (caused by a worm in the gut) and looping-ill (a tick-borne disease of sheep) – found ready purchase in the weak birds and were to bedevil grouse-moor management for many years to come. Grouse disease was such a problem that the government stepped in and commissioned a two-volume monograph, The Grouse in Health and Disease, published in 1910. Dr Edward Wilson, one of the heroes of Scott’s ill-fated attempt on the South Pole, was among the team that compiled the report.
They concentrated on strongylosis and succeeded in plotting out the disease’s life cycle. Sometimes the disease can develop very rapidly, completing its cycle in fifteen days. The larvae hatch out in the droppings of the grouse and then climb up to the green shoots on the heather. The grouse eat the green shoots and larvae, then the larvae grow to their adult stage in the grouse’s gut and reproduce, laying eggs. They pass out in the grouse’s droppings for the cycle to be repeated. All red grouse carry strongylosis and late spring – April to May – is when the disease peaks. Allowing too large a stock of birds for the moor will lead to a periodic epidemic.
It is an interesting sidenote that in 1908 a protozoan parasite was discovered, Cryptosporidium baileyi, that affects poultry. A hundred years later it would cause what is known as ‘bulgy eye syndrome’ in grouse, and had a devastating effect on driven grouse shooting when the moor was left overstocked at the end of the season.
Not long after the discovery of Cryptosporidium baileyi, driven grouse shooting and the number of grouse shot were reaching their apogee. I consulted Record Bags and Shooting Records by Hugh S. Gladstone for information on numbers of grouse shot, and discovered that on 12 August 1915 at the Little Abbeystead beat in the Forest of Bowland eight guns shot 2,929 red grouse in six drives, a record that stands to this day.
For several days the female hen harrier, number 22, tried to return to her birth place but was put off by the heather burning on the moorland below the ridge. Now, as she wheeled high above, she could see that the men had gone and all that was left was a mosaic pattern of blackened, burnt areas. Cautiously she drifted lower and then made several passes along the ridge until she was satisfied that it was safe. She dropped down and landed by the bilberry patch she remembered so well. The sky darkened as a ragged shower of rain swept across the moor, dousing those newly burnt heather patches, which were still smouldering.
Heather burning is part of the history of driven grouse shooting, a sport that started in about the middle of the nineteenth century. Beforehand moor owners had derived income from farmers wishing to graze their sheep, and the farmers burnt