The black grouse blog has a new ally.

Although they have very little to do with black grouse, my new ferrets look set to make a real impact on the moor.

A tremendous amount of conflicting information is available on the subject of keeping and working ferrets, and within a few days of buying the little critters I was being bombarded with contradictory advice and information from a variety of well-meaning sources.

Some passionately believed that rearing ferrets on a diet of milk and bread would prevent them from developing a blood lust which would ultimately result in them killing rabbits and “lying up” asleep underground for several hours afterwards.

Others poured scorn on that idea, explaining that when the little blighters grew up, they would need to be able to recognise rabbits as an exciting prey species and have some incentive to fight and bolt them from their warrens.

As with so many things on this project, I was restricted by budget.

Not wanting to forgo bread and milk from my table, I decided that rabbit is much cheaper and easier to come by, particularly since I have access to more than a thousand acres of prime lowland farmland and a steady trickle of .410 cartridges.

Over the past three months, the ferrets have filled out incredibly well on a diet of fresh game, and when the time came to introduce them to their first warren last week, they appeared to know precisely what was expected of them.

Harnessed and restricted by a four foot piece of string, they busily set about the holes with tremendous enthusiasm. Their tails bushed and they began to grunt and chatter with excitement.

They may only be four months old, but it looks like they are already keen to become a real spanner in the works for the rabbits of Dumfries and Galloway.

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 finds an army in the woodock strip.

One of the best things about roe stalking is that it really brings you eye to eye with nature, and while crawling face-first through a patch of brambles with the rifle last week, I noticed a tiny red ball sprouting just centimetres from the undergrowth.

Once the stalk was over, I noticed that the single toadstool was actually one of many, thrusting aside fallen sitka needles and dead grass to stand defiantly in the open space.

At first, I took them to be fly agaric, the classic red and white spotted toadstool that everyone knows is deadly.

However, as the caps began to fan open and no white spots emerged, I started to have doubts.

With dazzling white stalks and undersides, slugs set about chewing away sections of the red upper coating to reveal a soft and misleadingly inviting white interiors.

It was only when I consulted an obsessive mushroom collector that I had any idea what I was dealing with.

Many poisonous toadstools have unnecessarily threatening names like "death cap" and "destroying angel", and what I had found was no different.

Russula emetica is popularly known as "the sickener", belonging to a fairly toxic family of fungi with a widespread distribution across much of the northern hemisphere.

As the name would suggest, people who eat raw "sickeners" quickly suffer from intense stomach cramps, diarrhoea and vomiting.

Apparently, red squirrels have been found to gather "sickeners" to store and eat them at a later date when the toxins have declined and the toadstools are safer, making those little devils unexpectedly wise and forward thinking.

I was beginning to think that they are rather foolish, given that I have seen half a dozen squashed on the roads over the past few weeks.

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 blog is a month into the season.

Although they have emerged after two months of mysterious skulking in the deep undergrowth, the black cock still have brown necks and stubby tails and the grey hens look even worse.

They are like raffia mats that have been fed through a lawn mower.

Despite the fact that this year’s poults are now up on the wing, they will only reach a form of adulthood at the same time as pheasants, and most still look decidedly weak and straggly, flying short distances only under the most extreme provocation.

In truth, black cock shouldn’t really be shot until they have all reached maturity, and a tremendous amount of journalistic wrangling has gone on over the past two hundred years to decide precisely when the season should open.

On one hand, many moorland guns argued that an adult black cock breaking from cover in late October presents a fine and testing target for any gun.

They recommended that the season should be changed to prevent the birds being shot before they reached their stunning best.

Other, more traditionalist opinions viewed black grouse as total vermin, and fought to keep the early start so that they could really make a killing on young poults before they could start causing trouble.

It was (and still is in some areas), incorrectly held that black grouse attack and disrupt red grouse, which, in addition to their destructive powers on the harvest fields made them lower than crows in some circles.

What we have now is the same season established by the 1831 game laws; August 20 to December 10.

It is something of an irrelevance considering the tiny numbers of black grouse which will be shot this year, but when we get the birds back to the stage when they can be shot properly again, it is sure to become a bone of contention again.

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