doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com The Glorious Twelfth

Maybe I can put some viewers up on the hill.
Apologies for wind noise.
Not really sure how to embed a video.

https://i.imgur.com/DIwDFUj.mp4

That is amazingly beautiful scenery. I've never been there, and find it hard to believe a place is empty at that and so beautiful.

Jim "The Shooting Party" is the film of the novel written by Isabel Colegate set at the time of an Edwardian country house shoot, just before the start of the "Great War. The film is worth looking at for the shoot scenes they got them close to being right. The Film is good though the novel is a book you cant put down until the last page if you have the time and inclination.

I'm sure that most people will know, but there are very good prints available of George Earl's "Going North" and "Coming South".
They make a very nice reminder of times past hanging in a gun room.

If you think about going grouse shooting you had better be quick about it. The Scottish Parliament are looking at the possibility of banning grouse shooting. If they succeed no doubt they will try it in England too if a left wing socialist Government gets in as it is their stated aim to do it also as they perceive it as a rich man's sport. English M.P.'s can't vote on Scottish issues but Scottish M.P.'s can and do vote on English issues. If the Scot's ban it then they will help to get the ban extended to England too. The vast majority of Scottish voters are city dwellers with no concept of grouse shooting and the Scottish National Party who hold the majority in the Scottish Parliament will no doubt force the ban. If they get their way and ban it the losers will be the grouse themselves. Remember what happened when just three people calling themselves Wild Justice got a ban on crow shooting for a period this spring. Two of those, Chris Packam and Mark Avery are rabidly anti grouse shooting. Grouse days may be numbered and then the rest of shooting sports. Currently Wild Justice are trying to get pheasant rearing banned as the say they are a non native species. They have been here since the Romans introduced them almost 2,000 years ago. The slippery slope. Lagopus�..

Lagopus, I feel your pain. I've never shot grouse, but I've shot driven in Scotland many times, and hope that the opportunity remains available.

Re pheasants: Back when I was teaching at university, I attended a meeting of the campus chapter of the Humane Society of the United States (an animal rights group, albeit less radical than some). Questions I posed during the meeting pretty much gave me away as a hunter. As a result, the group's faculty sponsor approached me after the meeting and asked what I hunted. "Birds, with pointing dogs," I replied. We were in Iowa, where the most common game bird is the pheasant. She reminded me that the pheasant was a non-native species, and that it had displaced our native prairie grouse.

My response: "While it's true that pheasants aren't native to Iowa, I think they've now been here long enough that they no longer need green cards. And it was intensive agriculture that displaced our native prairie grouse, which were replaced by pheasants--which have greater tolerance for agricultural lands. But I'd be very pleased if we still had native grouse that I could hunt." Pretty much ended the discussion.

Larry, what college in Iowa has a student chapter of the Humane society? Never heard of this going on 28 yrs now.

I live not far from a grouse moor in North Derbyshire. A friend from the same village from which I originated and someone I went to school with was the third generation Grouse Keeper on the moor. His son has now taken over making him the fourth generation. I wonder how much longer he will be there. I used to attend the shoots each year to work the dogs and help out with management in other ways. I have sort of retired from it when my friend retired. Un-keepered moors hold very few grouse due to predation and lack of heather management; heather being the staple diet of these hardy birds. They cannot be reared and bred like pheasants but only maintained in the wild. Un-keepered moors are poor in wildlife of any kind but a well managed grouse moor is alive with a diverse range of species be they birds, insects, plants or reptiles. If grouse shooting goes a huge amount of habitat management, currently at no cost to the tax payer, will be lost along with the species that thrive there. Lagopus�..

You are so correct,

The moor that I am familiar with that lost its lease from the government, is a wildlife desert now. No diversity in the age classes of Heather, a fraction of the wildlife resides there now than it did when it was keepered and for what?

A century of management erased by fiat.

In the end anti�s will say it was the grouse shooting community�s fault.