As the lekking season draws nearer, Mark Hamblin talks about his long-term love affair with black grouse.
I have a love-hate relationship with black grouse. Mostly, I love them. The hate bit comes in when the alarm goes off in the middle of the night and the last thing I want to do is get out of bed and drive for an hour and stomp across a wet moorland in the dark to sit in a cold hide. Continue reading “Worth grousing about”
Oh god it’s going to be misty again. Here we go. Know what you want…know what you want…Ok, Ok, I’ve perhaps over-played this a wee bit, I’ll move on. But I can’t because it was misty again this morning – not in the place where I wanted it, but elsewhere. I say mist, it wasn’t really mist, more of a fog and there’s a thin line between the two. Mist dictates a high viewpoint overlooking a big landscape, fog beckons you towards a more intimate perspective. So what to do? Where to go? Too much mist basically means fog. And too much fog means no pictures.
For crying out loud Cairns, stop rattling on. An hour in, the sun is up and OK it’s not perfect(!!!) but Loch Garten is flat-calm, the rasping song of the goldeneye reverberates through the forest and the distant bubbling of black grouse makes it, well, bloody perfect actually. What am I getting so wound up about? Really?
