Grouse shooting season 'may be the best in many years'

UPPER dale gamekeepers are expecting a bumper shooting season thanks to a good winter and spring.

Still buoyant after an extremely good season last year, which saw some 4,500 brace taken from Raby Estates’s grouse moors, head gamekeeper Andrew Hyslop is expecting numbers to be up by yet another third.

The previous season was about 1,000 brace up on the ten year average.

Mr Hyslop said: “There are over 32,000 acres on the estate, on the whole we are 30 per cent up. Some bits are exceptional.

“If you turn the clocks back, we put the medicated grit out in good time. We had a whole winter with very little snow and we had a good trapping winter.”

He explained that heavy snow covers the traps allowing many of the grouse’s predators, mostly weasel and stout, to avoid them.

Spring was also kind with gamekeepers being able to get their heather burning done timely. Burning finished a week early after the first eggs were found.

If the expected 6,000 brace is achieved this season, it will be a first for Mr Hyslop who has been with Raby Estates for 12 years.

He said: “It would be a personal record. When Lyndsay (Wardell) was head keeper they took 5,000 in Middle End alone – that is a lot of grouse.”

Pheasants are also enjoying a good year, he said. The chicks are vulnerable to the wet and cold until they grow feathered, but they made it through to maturity.

Although there were a number of good grey partridge pairings in the spring, the first brood took a knock because of predation, Mr Hyslop said.

However, he added: “A lot of them had a successful second brooding. If it is not too late they will lay again.”

Already the estate has 53 days of shooting booked and Mr Hyslop hopes to match the 59 days of shooting that was achieved on the estate last season.

The season began on Saturday, August 12, better known to shooters as the Glorious Twelfth.

This year hunters on Raby Estates’s grouse moor will enjoy the use of four new rows of butts as well as new drives.

Mr Hyslop added: “I can’t wait to see what goes through the new butts.”

However, the sport has its critics with some conservationists calling for it to be banned.

Dr Mark Avery, former conservation director of the RSPB, said: “The Green party supports a ban of all bloodsports but Labour, a fundamentally urban party, hasn’t yet woken up to the fact that a policy of banning grouse-shooting is the right thing to do and is also an electoral asset.

“Intensive grouse shooting will cease in my lifetime. The industry has been nasty and intransigent and is dragging down the reputation of less disreputable country sports. The pressure on grouse shooting will not go away.”