Little glorious for shooting season

THE guns will be muted on the Glorious 12th of August - the start of the grouse shooting season - as the game bird’s breeding rates have plummeted in the past year, according to figures released by the Game Conservancy Trust in Scotland this week.

The trust, which monitors grouse breeding on 25 one-square-kilometre plots on the Scottish moors, predicts a dramatic reduction in the availability of shoots as landowners act to preserve existing bird stock.

According to the trust, each pair of breeding grouse has produced an average of only one chick this year - a drop from last year’s average of 1.6 and well below the 1.5 chicks per pair needed to ensure the species can successfully maintain its population.

Adam Smith, the trust’s head of upland research, said: "Practically everything that can go wrong for the grouse in terms of favourable breeding conditions has happened. They have been plagued with disease, worms and predators.

"We are surmising that global warming is also having an effect. Insects that the chicks normally feed on are coming into season a month too early."

Grouse shooting is run in Scotland through 450 private estates, and is estimated to generate 630 jobs and to add 17 million to the economy.

Mr Smith said: "There will be a dramatic and drastic cut back in this year’s shooting programmes. At least eight out of ten shoots are now unviable if sufficient numbers of birds are to be left to breed next year."

Dalhousie - a 55,000 acre estate in the Angus glens - is to cut its grouse shooting down from a five-week period to just a few days.

The estate factor, Richard Cooke, said: "My impression is that, except in a few pockets of land, prospects for grouse shooting throughout Scotland are very poor this year.

"In Dalhousie, jobs will not be lost, in the short term at least. Grouse moors have received a substantial private subsidy as we continue to manage them, but this cannot go on indefinitely," Mr Cooke warned.

Falls in breeding levels have been a problem in the past and, in the long term, the future for the industry was bleak, he suggested

"Grouse shooting goes through cycles of boom and bust. But the booms have got shorter and there are longer periods of low productivity.

"The negative impact of terrorism on the foreign market was also affecting demand while the political climate is now less sympathetic to countryside sports - all of which adds to the feeling that the writing is on the wall," he added.

Dalhousie is one estate at least which was now diversifying into the "people industry" with a garden and equestrian centre. It also runs a farm.

But if estate owners pull out of grouse moor management the game birds’ habitat will become increasingly under threat.

Already grouse have received an amber warning alert as an endangered species by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.