Fastest grouse going

Our biggest gamebird is facing extinction for a second time but not so long ago it was considered a fine sporting quarry

- Patrick Laurie

It’s hard to think of capercaillie — a large woodland grouse — in a sporting context now. The birds have declined so rapidly over the past 30 years that they could soon be extinct, but it was not so long ago that capercaillie were considered to be a worthy sporting adversary from Loch Lomond to the Black Isle.

Capercaillie numbers have been declining for many years. A steady drop was recorded after World War I, though there were some encouraging short-term signs of recovery in the 1960s. Their story is one of gradual habitat fragmentation, predation and human disturbance, and the birds have endured a perfect storm of problems since the 1980s. It sometimes seems that capercaillie are simply unsuited to life in modern Scotland and the prospect of any recovery now looks remote.

The latest surveys revealed fewer than 1,000 individual birds in the entirety of Scotland, but this data is old and the real population is probably much smaller. Confined to a few patchy enclaves on Deeside and Speyside, capercaillie now stand on the brink of final collapse. Despite millions of pounds invested in their conservation, it’s likely that they are already too far gone to rebound without an impossibly dramatic overhaul of land management and conservation policy.