It's been two months since the blogger last saw his favourite black grouse cock.

Despite the fact that reliable sources told me that I should expect him to vanish during his moult in July, I felt certain that he had been killed and eaten by some coarse and unwelcome predator.

Finding his feathers in early July provided evidence for both possibilities, but the pessimist in me was convinced that the fantastic gentleman in black had fallen at last to the enemy.

I was trying not to think about it.

On Tuesday, I nipped up to the farm to inspect a patch of larch trees I planted in March, and exchanging my aged car for a quad bike, I followed the path up to the trees.

A short way off the road, the black cock emerged from a patch of rushes like a typhoon, but what a changed spectacle!

When I last saw him, he was in his first year plumage; his wings were dusty brown and his tail fan was incomplete. Now, his wings are jet black and glossy blue and his tail has fallen off altogether.

His new tail will come in with stunning curls by October and he will be a mature cock by the lek next spring.

Most remarkable of all was the fact that his upper body has completely changed colour.

When I saw him on Tuesday, his head and neck were a rusty brown colour, with scruffy and overlapping feathers giving him an ugly appearance when compared to his immaculate black wings.

It is so, so exciting to see that he has made it through the dangerous days when his moult made him vulnerable to predators, and now I realise how important it is that I look after him and the others over the coming winter.

The views expressed on Patrick Laurie's blog are the author's and not the views of Shooting Gazette, ShootingUK, IPC Media or its employees. www.gallowayfarm.wordpress.com

The black grouse blogger got out a day late.

We didn't celebrate the Glorious Twelfth on my Galloway grouse moor this year, but it turns out that the Glorious Thirteenth suited just as well.

With showers and intermittent sunshine sending vast castles of cloud racing across the hillsides, I seized the moment to gather some friends and step boldly onto the bog.

Red grouse numbers are so low at the moment that they have been given a reprieve for the forseeable future, and we focused our attentions instead on an equally important bird with a timely open season.

I have been watching snipe flutter and dive all over the farm for the past five months, and on Friday they were put to work.

Or rather, they put us to work.

Adjusting the customary slog around the entire hillside usually employed to winkle out grouse, we formed a line and explored some of the mossy beds around the farm buildings and it wasn't long before we had struck gold.

Waist-high soaking vegetation soon had us dripping, but patches of shorter moss and mud proved to be extremely productive.

Single snipe lifted ahead like furious mosquitoes, buzzing away at about head height to slowly gain altitude and flicker back over us, high overhead.

I am not ashamed to say that my cartridge-to-kill ration was horrible, but I did manage to bring three or four little shapes down with a bump.

We finished on a long drive over open country for running rabbits, which I like to think are something of a speciality of mine.

Shots thumped in the warm afternoon, and although it was a shame that we weren't dealing with the popularly styled "king of game birds", we had more than enough sport to keep us distracted.

The views expressed on Patrick Laurie's blog are the author's and not the views of Shooting Gazette, ShootingUK, IPC Media or its employees. www.gallowayfarm.wordpress.com

The moorland is changing.

Day by day, tiny patches of colour are starting to emerge amongst the undergrowth, and it seems like every time I turn my back on the hillside, it becomes a shade more purple.

When I first started my project to regenerate a neglected grouse moor, I fenced off an experimental area of ling from the marauding attentions of the local livestock.

The acre of protected heath has taught me an amazing amount about the impact of grazing on grouse habitat, and within weeks of setting up the posts, real differences were visible.

Hare’s tail cotton grass emerged in terrific abundance, and I now know that grouse and sheep feed on the flowers of this plant in March and April.

Protecting the flowers meant that, by June, the enclosure was filled with bobbing white puffy fruits, while because the sheep had nibbled the flowers down outside, they were totally invisible.

Bog asphodel, ragged robin and blaeberry flowers lit up the space temporarily from the end of May to mid June, all taking advantage of the safety offered by the stock proof fence, but still the heather remained inscrutable.

It is only in the last few weeks that I have noticed the difference in the heather at all, and that is because it seems that livestock nibble off heather flowers before they turn purple.

Across the Galloway hills, the famous August blanket of purple heather is comparatively thin because of over grazing and neglect.

However, in my experimental corner it has been protected from grazing and now grows dense and beautiful.

A few years protection from grazing should give the heather a head start, providing future habitat for red and black grouse, and also teaching me a tremendous amount about moorland undergrowth.

The views expressed on Patrick Laurie's blog are the author's and not the views of Shooting Gazette, ShootingUK, IPC Media or its employees. www.gallowayfarm.wordpress.com