Hard work high on the grouse moor

"Every grouse moor is different, and perhaps I'm biased in saying that I like this above all others, but they are, as environments, unique in the world,"says Steve Mawle. He is the owner of the Coverhead estate which spreads out across 4,500 acres of some of the most bleak and beautiful moors in North Yorkshire and he's describing the scene as we stride across North Moor.

"It's classified as blanket bog, we're on peat. It's quite wet and it's heather sward which is interspersed with other species such as sphagnum moss and cotton grass which is very good for grouse production."

Coverhead was bought by the Mawle family in 1983, and is unusual in that the owners control all of the rights associated with the land, grazing and shooting are all managed in hand.

Unlike pheasant shoots, the birds here breed entirely naturally. The human intervention is the management of the landscape in which they live.

Although heather burning is the most visible sign, there is far more going on. At the heart of this pre-season work is predator control, getting to the small animals which attack the nesting birds.

The journey onto the moors at Coverhead is by Argocat, a six-wheeled All Terrain Vehicle, which effortlessly, but noisily tackles the rough and wet ground. It is driven by Stuart Dent the under-keeper who works with the head keeper, his father Andrew. "The shooting days which occur here are eight to 10 a year," says Steve Mawle.

"The keepers are working here 350-odd days the year round, so there is obviously an awful lot of time to spend doing anything else that's required."

We arrive at a stream which runs off the moor. From here there are plenty of grouse to be seen, as well as several mallard ducks. Across a gap in the wall, allowing the water through, is a narrow pine pole, cut from the woods on the estate, for small mammals to cross the fast-flowing water. "Here is an ideal place to put what we call a 'bridge trap'. It has a metal guard to prevent the ingress of any non-target species, and it's aimed at catching stoats, weasels, rats and even the odd escaped ferret that breeds wild."

There are about 200 traps like this across the estate. They act in a similar way to a giant mousetrap. "It's a spring loaded plate trap called a Fenn trap which is licensed by the government to catch certain animals."

Although these traps are designed to kill the animals caught in them, Coverhead has a policy of checking them once in every 36-hour period to check that any animals are actually dead.

Steve Mawle argues that predator control is vital to the whole of the landscape. "We have the environmental improvements that we make in terms of heather regeneration and peat management, but all of that effort without the predator control would be negated.

"The predator control is there to make sure we can harvest a sustainable surplus of grouse. Without it you would have a very low breeding success, which means that you wouldn't be able to take a surplus, which means the grouse moor per se would cease to function.

"Without the grouse moor functioning with predator control, the other environmental benefits we offer in terms of bio-diversity, particularly with the waders, such as curlew, lapwing and golden plover, their breeding success would be severely reduced."

This is backed up by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, formerly the Game Conservancy Trust. A nine-year study, Waders on the Fringe, looked at four grouse moors around Otterburn in Northumberland. Sites were given varying levels of predator control. The conclusion was that: "The breeding success of curlew, golden plover and lapwing was significantly improved by controlling the numbers of some of their predators."

For the staff, like under-keeper Stuart Dent (who has since moved on), this means the days out of season can be long and hard.

"It's early mornings at first light, four or five o'clock through to breakfast and then on and evening, after teatime through till dark. This is when your predators are most active." Stuart's father is the head-keeper on the estate, his grandfather was a keeper too, so it runs in the family. "In the shooting season there's work organising, but that's the enjoyable time of the year.

"Having the shoot days is what you strive for through the rest of the year."

The work can be very demanding physically. "When you're tracking foxes in the snow you can do up to 25 miles on foot, and it's not like walking up and down on a road."

For Steve Mawle, it is the unremitting off- season work which makes the three months of shooting possible. "I'd say that 70 per cent of the effort goes in outside the shooting season. Come the shooting season, apart from the actual shoot days themselves, we will leave the moor alone. We won't be on it because we don't want to disturb the birds that are there. They need quiet periods in between shoot days to get back to their normal routine.

"So probably the shooting season itself is probably the time of least effort on a grouse moor."

CW 8/5/10