I travelled to Ireland for a wedding on Friday evening, but within seconds of arriving at Dublin airport I had been distracted by one of the most unusual and unexpected animals I have ever seen.

Explaining my experience to friends and family when I returned to Scotland, they uniformly attributed my surprise and confusion to the quick pint (or four) of Guinness I had had in the airport bar with a few old friends.

But now I’ve been researching online, I can cast off those slanderous remarks because it was not only amazing, but it is 100 per cent true.

As I drove out of the airport, I noticed a rabbit feeding in the grass.

When the car moved along the road, the rabbit sat up.

I have spent so long watching rabbits and hares that I instantly knew that something was wrong with this one.

It was a uniform biscuit brown with a large puffy white tail.

Short ears and a roly-poly face were like a rabbit’s, but there were no fine markings around the eyes; no black eyebrow or angular cheek.

As it stood up, it revealed long legs like a tiny muntjac deer and it occurred to me that I was looking at a hare, but the ears were short and round and only tipped with black at the extreme ends.

It walked and I was convinced that I was looking at a hare, but then it stopped and it became a rabbit again.

Something was seriously wrong.

It was only when I got home that I learned that Irish hares are a different species to brown hares, which were introduced to the British mainland by the Romans and Normans.

Lepus timidus hibernicus is a species unique to Ireland, related more to blue (or mountain hares) than anything else.

I had no idea whatsoever, but I feel very lucky that this one thrust itself into my line of sight.

It may have nothing at all to do with black grouse, but I thought it was fascinating.

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

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