March 31st 2014

Last Wednesday I attended a one day training event which was run by St. David’s Game Bird Services at Easter Bush Veterinary Centre. The course was very well attended with a large turnout of keepers on the day.

The course was designed to fit in with the new government welfare visits that many game farms and shoots will be having over the coming years.

The speakers consisted of

Tom Pennycott- A view from the Post Mortem Table
Barry Thorpe- Health Solutions 2014
Jan Dixon- Post Mortem Room Visit
Anne McKay- Animal Health Visits - What you need to know
Ian Mackinson- Premier Nutrition- How to make most of your game feed
Stephanie Mathewson- Scottish Agricultural College- Gamebird Rearing Management.

The day was a great success and the organizers hope to make it a fixture in the calendar each spring. Many thanks to Anne and Gillie for helping to pull the event together.

Last week I was asked by Dr Jayne Glass to speak to a class of Masters Students at the University of Edinburgh about wild land as a concept and policy issue in Scotland.

The students had been asked to analyse the different stakeholders’ views on wild land (what it is, where it is, what challenges/ opportunities the concept presents, how to protect it and manage it, etc ), as well as consider recent attempts to assess impacts on wild land through the mapping of core areas and recent debates about hill tracks.

As with all these things, the students are nobody’s fool and they quickly recognize when somebody is trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Wild land in Scotland is a misconception. SNH, for example, would have gained respect if they had called their consultation “managed wild land” as every where is managed by man, to some degree or another.

We touched on hill tracks and how, with an expert digger driver and a wee bit more expenditure, you would never know a new road had been put in.

We spoke of how important private money was in keeping our rural economy turning; keeping local schools open and sustaining lifeline community shops. The only jobs up these remote glens can often be for either stalkers or shepherds.

In my view, a landowner could come from Mars as long as he invested his private money into the local economy and managed his estate to best practice and with his neighbours’ interests at heart as well as his own.

This is a win-win situation for everybody concerned and even more so when it comes to stopping large tracts of land from becoming fragmented and our precious wildlife suffering because of it.

In the talk, we touched upon the sheer number of people accessing our Scottish hills and making it very difficult for the thing they were coming to experience- the wildlife- to co-exist. Should some of our mountains be closed down, periodically, to allow some recovery? Some leading ecologists believe so. Should some glens be restricted to organized vehicular access only to give our wildlife peace, as happens in South Africa?

On another subject, I don’t live far from where the latest Lambing Live was filmed for the BBC. It was interesting that, in the same week civil offences for not paying TV licences were being mooted, the broadcaster was flexing its financial muscle. How many BBC employees were needed to run some cables round a lambing shed? A dozen maybe? Twenty max? Eighty people were used and did they check in to the local B&B? No. They stayed in some very exclusive country club. It must be tough being the Beeb.

February 19th 2014

Can I just say a huge thank you to everybody that responded to the tail docking petition on our website.

There was a massive response from everyone, with a total of 4158 in favour of docking versus 175 against. Since the ban on hunting with dogs, never in my life have I come across such deep anger and frustration in the countryside. This is yet another example of government not listening to the people on the ground.

When will they wake up in Edinburgh? Maybe when we hand our petition over to the politicians something might register that things are badly wrong when it comes to our working dogs.

The terrible pain that has been endured by some of our dogs, not to mention the loss of our many important breeding lines, has, for the past 6 years, been a Scottish national disgrace.

Many of you will have been following the deer row which erupted, first, in the press after SNP MSP Rob Gibson took an interest in the Assynt John Muir Trust land where they have repeatedly refused to fence off some birch regeneration. This led to the RACCE committee asking us to give evidence in parliament, which was trying given that we had just spent 2 years of our life on the Wildlife and Natural Environment bill. This needs time to bed in and become useful. One thing that has become apparent from the evidence sessions is that the deer management groups need help from the stalkers when it comes to discussing the practicalities of the plan.

We will be pushing hard, along with the deer management groups, to have our practical and knowledgable voice heard. Some of our stalkers need the freedom to speak their minds and inform the debate, even when the factors and lairds are present at these gatherings.

Our AGM is at Inverness this year on Friday the 7th of March and the SGA team is looking forward to meeting you all at Caledonian Stadium, Kingsmill Suite. This will be the second year our annual meeting has been held up north.

The last time heralded a great turnout and was hugely successful and we are looking forward to repeating this over again. Our Environment Minister will be there to speak and answer questions you might have for him. We also have some fascinating speakers and it will be great to catch up with some old faces from the last time.

December 23rd, 2013

Most keepers will be kept busy over the festive season with Boxing Day shoots and feeding pheasants. Let’s hope they get some quality time with their families, too, when the big day arrives. If you haven’t signed our online petition regarding the tail docking please take the time to do so. It is very important for us to have as many signatures as we can possibly get. We are now hopefully nearing the end of this sorry saga and one last push might make our politicians remove some of the cotton wool from their ears. I would just like to take this opportunity, personally, and from everyone at the SGA, to wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

December 4th, 2013

On Thursday I managed to travel up to Badanloch Estate in Sutherland to meet up with Brian Lyall and his team. I was spending the day on the hill with Brian and was hoping to shoot a hind or two and help him with his hind cull. When we arrived at the bothy we were warmly greeted by the young stalkers and ghillie who were full of enthusiasm and pride for their estate which is right in the heart of the flow country. 
After a day on the hill with Brian we covered many of the species of flora and fauna that occur in this part of the country. For many years now, through Brian’s enthusiasm and hard work, the estate has been carrying out habitat assessment plans and impact assessments. The environmental designations on this estate are many and need to be managed accordingly.
 Some of the hinds we shot that day were used for gathering more data. We collected blood, faeces and rumen samples. This would help the scientists in their quest to gather more information and maybe inform the future management of the deer. Some of this work was picking up early signs of the deer lacking in certain trace elements. 
Modern stalkers continue to show they have the knowledge to manage their estates with passion and a broad interest in the many species of animals and plants, as opposed to the way they have been painted recently in some quarters. Driving down the glen that evening I couldn’t but help wonder if this would be the case if Rob Gibson was to succeed in his quest of bringing deer management groups in Scotland into a statutory regime. I began to think of a scary futuristic vision where papers had to be checked and a government weapon issued on arrival as no weapons would be owned by the public in Scotland by this time.
 Thankfully the vision didn’t last and my attention was alerted elsewhere and to the road home. What it did make me realise was how mad it is that we constantly have the environmental movement, assisted by influential figures, attacking estates but it is these estates, in many cases, which have a far more diverse ecology, species range and habitat. Maybe the time has come to compare the ground that we manage seven days of the week with the likes of the ground that the Environmental Link group manages collectively. When some of the conservation bodies acquired land some years ago, the SGA requested that some inventory should be done at the time to allow some form of base-line as to whether their management was benefiting wildlife in general and not some single species. As far as we are aware, no base-lines were ever established and the work was never done. One of the features on BBC’s Out of Doors last week was a discussion on mountain hares and why estates were reducing the numbers.
There was the usual desperation to lay the blame at the gamekeepers’ door. Grouse moors cull hares to control tick but this is done each year in a way that still maintains sustainable populations.
 In their rush to blame the keeper it was never mentioned that unless the poor hares have a strong programme of predator control to guard them, they would now be extinct. Indeed, you would struggle to find any at all on ground with no keepers.
 You just have to drive from Glasgow to Campbeltown through hundreds of miles of sitka spruce and not one hare in sight. Or visit Creag Meagaidh, one of Scotland’s National Nature Reserves, and ask to be shown a mountain hare!!   *Please accept apologies for the block of text. There is an ongoing issue with the SGA website which we hope to rectify before the festive break as we port the existing content over to a new content management system.

November 6th, 2013

Last week we attended our latest first aid course which is done every three years to keep us up to speed with developments in the first aid world. We made a special request to our female trainer, who was in the local mountain rescue service, to build in some practical demonstrations which could be of help, given that we work alone, sometimes in very remote locations. The day started off with general first aid and we progressed to dealing with different emergency scenarios which gamekeepers may encounter during their working week. Saving a fisherman who has nearly drowned in a loch, for example; a fisherman whose life could be saved through the quick actions of a gamekeeper with the necessary training in first aid. We then moved onto some of the incidents we had heard of involving vehicles, in particular quad bikes being crashed or turned over. We discussed the many different accidents that could arise involving the use of chainsaws, knives, fishing hooks and firearms. Everybody had a tale to tell but this was exactly what our instructor was keen to discover. Each incident was gone over with a fine tooth comb and it was made clear to us the vital importance of first aid in those critical first few minutes and hours. The last part of the course covered the use of a defibrillator; a machine which can help keep alive someone who has suffered a heart attack, until medical assistance arrives. Many public places now have these. As the price comes down each year, more and more shoots (especially the large commercial ones) would probably find that these invaluable life-saving devices are a worthwhile investment, especially when there are more senior guns out in the field. The great thing about these pieces of apparatus is that they can be operated by anyone. When the gadget is removed from the wall and opened up, the instructions are spoken in a similar way as a sat-nav machine talks to you in your car. Modern technology is amazing and, if it saves only one life, it is well worth the money. Everybody on the course found it  very useful and it was well worth the time and money to attend. When the course organizer recognized the fact we all spent the biggest part of our time in the hills and mountains, it dawned on us that maybe the mountain rescue service and the Scottish Gamekeepers Association should meet up and exchange ideas and information. The SGA certainly has a massive range of members who have the local knowledge when it comes to finding missing persons. They also have access to many types of specialized equipment, especially all terrain vehicles. Even helping the local rescue teams with land, or maybe a building in which to meet, could be very useful on their training days. Our first shoot is coming up this week so I am praying for some hard frosts to remove the last of the leaves from the hardwood trees so we can get a good view of the pheasants. The pheasant season is now in full swing. Speaking to the beaters and pickers up, who largely stay in an urban environment, they tell me it’s a bit like the rugby, football or Shinty; a pastime which keeps them fit and healthy while giving them something to look forward to each weekend!

September 17th, 2013

Left the house last Thursday morning at 4am, drove to Edinburgh airport, parked the car and caught a flight to Manchester. Met up with Allan Hodgson our SGA Firearms Officer who had arrived on a flight from Inverness. We then picked a hire car up and drove south for an hour and a half to our destination which was the JCB World Headquarters in Rochester, Staffordsire. The JCB building was really spectacular. The conference room and dining room had all the state- of- the- art facilities. We were attending a National One-Day Conference: Best Practice in Licensing Firearms for Live Quarry Shooting. The conference was organised by our sister organisation, the National Gamekeepers Organisation, to promote best practice in firearms licensing countrywide. Chief Constable Andy Marsh chaired the conference for the day and each presentation was brief and to the point.   To summarise the day, the main thrust was to —  "Always ensure public safety" leading through to Good Reason, Suitability, Land checks, Conditions, Mentoring, Fees, Medical Fitness, Using eCommerce and Cutting Waiting Lists. The day was most interesting and useful and we were assured to hear that the shooting organisations would be engaged in any future dialogue. JCB are one of the NGO's main sponsors. Blaser Sporting UK sponsored the lunch and Edgar Brothers sponsored the presentation pack. To have access to such a fantastic venue is very impressive and it was an enjoyable day made more so by meeting up with many old friends and acquaintances. We left the conference at 4:30pm to make our way back, arriving home at 11pm. A long day but well worth the effort.   The badger cull is now well under way down south and I wish them every success in their operation, although I feel this would have been achieved more thoroughly by re-licensing the use of gas. The gamekeepers have been warning for decades of the imbalance in nature especially when it comes to our top predators. What the cull has done is opened up the bigger debate of managing species. If the likes of BBC Springwatch had tackled this issue twenty years ago many of the young adults of today would have a far deeper understanding of nature! Even the latest episode of Countryfile avoided any confrontation when talking of water voles. They subtly implied the voles were coping better when they lived in a protected area. Mink were mentioned but not in the same sentence. It is so sad to see the huge urban population being fed fairyland tales when there is a golden opportunity to show land management- its necessities and benefits- at the sharp end.

August 19th, 2013

Just back from two days at Galloway Country Fair at Drumlanrig where it was good to catch up with some old faces. The majority of the keepers and syndicate members who spoke to me were very worried at the sheer numbers of badgers and buzzards in the countryside  and the affects they feel they are having. Like everyone else with a view on this subject, those spending their daily lives working or operating in the countryside deserve to be listened to by policymakers, as their concerns are very real, both for livestock and wider nature. I was approached by a farmer who informed me that it was now impossible to have lambs outside younger than a week old and that foolproof fences were a thing of the past as the badgers were destroying them constantly. Everybody I spoke with were asking how long the tail docking fiasco was going to continue.  Many people are now buying their pups from south of the border or Ireland- what a sad state of affairs for our industry in Scotland. Please keep up the pressure and email your MSP on this important issue. On Friday, I attended the Police Scotland headquarters in Pitt Street, Glasgow, along with Allan Hodgson, the firearms representative on the committee, to discuss different issues with the firearms team. We had a very useful meeting regarding all sorts of issues and we came away feeling very positive. It gave us peace of mind that we will have direct connection with the police in the future concerning any problems that may arise with our members. I hope this is a start of a two way process whereby we can help each other. Last week saw me back out on the Glorious 12th, loading at the grouse for two days. What a joy it was to meet up with many keepers I have not seen for months. The purple heather was in full bloom and stretched as far as the eye could see. These large areas of heather moorland (which to me are special places of conservation) were teeming with insects and plants. Our heather is now more endangered than the rain forest and I felt very proud to be out on the hill this week. We must take every opportunity to enlighten people, who have not seen or experienced our special moorlands, as to the fantastic job the keepers do in conserving such a rich resource. There will be few reserves run by conservation charities this year that will boast as many wading birds. Over my two days of loading I had some interesting discussions with my gun ( who was, incidentally, a builder). What we both emphatically agreed upon was the fact that, as worldwide experiences  go, grouse shooting, whether it be driven or walked up, was very high in the order of things and could not be replicated anywhere else in the world. He also agreed that millions and millions of pounds are raised privately and invested straight into our rural economy, which keeps our rural communities breathing. For our government to ignore this vital statistic would be extreme folly indeed!