BACK PAGES:THE "GLORIOUS Twelfth" (the August one) is the date on which the grouse shooting season opens each year. George Burrows, who kept a close eye on rural pursuits, offered readers a potted history of grouse in Ireland in today's paper in 1977, writes JOE JOYCE
There were many more gundogs than grouse in Ireland yesterday, when the shooting season opened until September 30th. The reasons are historic and ecological. Estate owners 100 years ago paid keepers to expand grouse numbers on the moors in the interest of exclusive sport, and many of them were indeed successful. The people of the land, what little they owned of it, were indifferent, since they had not the money, or guns, or permits to shoot, but there was, of course, the poaching – at a price of imprisonment.
The rising tide of nationalism did not help the grouse numbers. Keepers were threatened and some shot, and, in the slow-spreading decline in the power and influence of the landed “gentry”, the moors were neglected. Land division and the departure of many privileged sportsmen, though some have remained, ended grouse days that never were great, as they are in Scotland, where a different social and sporting system remains. Today it is also under threat there, in the new oil-based socialism now expanding.
Ireland has failed, and is not likely to succeed by any scale of effort, to bring back grouse in numbers to the moors. The Agricultural Institute, with Government funds, spent over 10 years in a research programme at Glenamoy, in Co Mayo. One conclusion, among others, was that deliberate fertilising of small wired-off areas of bogland, could raise the number of birds to the 100-square acre, but clearly that was not economic, or perhaps possible, in the longer term. So the research project petered out, and, for other reasons, Glenamoy closed.
There are some grouse remaining in the west, but few. The moors behind Tourmakeedy have some. So has the area around Croagh Patrick, and Ballycroy offers a few. The men who go after them are optimistic and persistent. They will have been on the moor at dawn yesterday, walking over difficult ground until 6pm with perhaps little to show for such display of energy. It is recorded that Lord Malmesbury in Scotland in 40 seasons walked 36,000 miles. Squire Osbaldeston, on August 12th, 1828, walked from 3.30am to 6pm and shot 22 brace (44 birds).
Lord Washington, on August 30th, 1888, shot a truly remarkable number – 1,070 grouse! It has never been equalled. He fired only 1,540 cartridges that day.
The grouse in Ireland is a fugitive and scarce. Northern Ireland pursues a minor management programme in Co Tyrone. The story is told that some of the hand-reared grouse in one scheme became so aggressive and such great pets with the handlers that they pecked the noses of the gundogs sent to lift them out of cover!
In Co Wicklow, a band of enthusiasts have been running a 10-year recovery project. It is hard to assess results in the apparent absence of scientific calculations, but in a field trial on a Wicklow location last Friday and Saturday about 70 brace of birds were put up. One participant said that was good.
Diners in Dublin last night, striving to sample the relish of a rare bite as a mark of social elevation in a pedestrian world, did so at great cost. It would be a social mistake of great magnitude to inquire about the age of the bird or its origin, seeing that the Wildlife Act sits in on every dinner party as an unsighted guest.
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