By David Hudson
Covid & Summer Grouse Georgina and MayBelle produce a covey for Sandy and John.
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or a long time it looked as though our usual summer activities of grouse counts, Field Trials and grouse shooting would all fall victim to the Covid-19 outbreak. Between shielding, lock-down, travel bans and restrictions on social gatherings there was little to look forward to as June slid into July. But then, just in time for us to start grouse counting, the ban on travelling more than five miles from home was lifted and it became possible to reach the moors again. Not for Field Trials of course, the whole summer circuit was cancelled, but as long as we maintained social distancing and didn’t share drinks bottles or gather in the café afterwards there was no reason not to get on with our annual summer counts. Although Georgina and I considered ourselves fortunate to live in an isolated farmhouse with a big garden so that we were not stuck indoors with only daytime television for entertainment, it was still a tremendous rush to be back on the Pennine hills with the bell heather coming in to bloom, the burbling of curlew and the piping call of golden plover, the feel of rock and heather underfoot and above all, the sight of a dog on point and a covey of 82
grouse gliding across the moor. I had thought that the long, dry spring would have been good for the grouse, but once we started our counts it became clear that this wasn’t the case. Instead of the big broods that we were hoping to find there were too many small coveys, often with young birds that were well behind the stage at which they would normally be in mid-July. Whether this was due to a lack of water to drink or a shortage of insects
Lab Blotto retrieving a grouse.
Winter 2020 Irish Country Sports and Country Life
for the chicks to eat in the first few days after hatching we had no way of knowing – most likely it was a combination of the two factors – but the result was that the counts were generally disappointing. The moor where we were counting is largely dry anyway and the drought had left the peat cracked and parched in many places. As if to confirm the hypothesis, when we worked the dogs over some of the wetter beats there were
