The uphill struggle for Ireland's red grouse

The cackling of the ‘heather hen’ has become a rare sound on Irish moors, but people are battling for its survival, says Barry Stoffell

- Barry Stoffell

Of all the sounds guaranteed to raise the hairs on the back of your neck, the cackling ‘go back’ of the grouse is surely one of the most stirring. And while this refrain resounded across moors in Britain last month, on this side of the Irish Sea things were sadly much quieter.

Though we do have a grouse season here in Ireland — which opens on 1 September and runs for that month only — the ‘heather hen’ has become a rare sight indeed in the Irish bogs and uplands that once held healthy numbers.

The start of the bird’s decline on these shores can be traced back to the loss of the traditional ‘keepered’ estates in the 1920s. As land ownership changed and the grouse could no longer rely on human intervention to control its numerous predators, numbers began to tumble.

This downward trajectory steepened alarmingly in the past four decades, driven primarily by habitat loss. Raised bogs, those glorious, squelchy bastions of biodiversity, were drained for peat extraction; barely a quarter of Ireland’s peatlands, many of them havens for grouse since time immemorial, remain intact.

In trouble

Upland habitat was similarly assaulted, overgrazed and planted with conifer monocultures. In the late 1990s, the grouse was finally added to the red list of birds of conservation concern, and it was official — Ireland’s only native gamebird was in big trouble.

Recognising the catastrophic decline in grouse numbers, the national Red Grouse Survey — a collaborative effort involving government, academia and gun clubs across the country — ran from 2006 to 2008, concluding that the population of grouse in the Republic of Ireland was just over 4,200 birds.