Attracting Game Until The Cows Come Home

Patrick Laurie explains how a personal project to encourage more wildlife on to his land is drawing snipe and woodcock as well

- P. Laurie

Fifty years ago the foundations of game keeping were based on farming. Farmers worked the land and ran profitable businesses and the countryside they created was superb for wild game. Tales of informal walked-up days from the 1960s and 1970s are studded with guest appearances from hares, grey partridges, blackgrouse and snipe, but many of these encounters have now faded into history.

When farming began to change and intensify, we lost a huge amount of our native wild game. Unable to stop the wheels of progress, shooting diversified — we began to rely increasingly on rearing and releasing our game and we started to take small pieces of land out of agricultural production to become game crops.

Edwardian sportsmen would probably be bemused by most modern game cover, since they were used to working with “real” agricultural crops. There would have been little need for carefully planned cover strips in an old-fashioned landscape of fodder crops, cereal stubbles and scruffy, boggy corners.

Changes in farming have had far-reaching effects on all aspects of the countryside. I became interested in the link between farming and shooting almost 10 years ago, and I have spent a good deal of time studying wildlife on my family’s hill farm near Dumfries. We have a few red grouse, but most of my work is based on blackgrouse and hill partridges on 1,600 acres of wild Galloway hillside.