The Red Notebook

Charles Darwin had his Sandwalk; I have my Moor Walk: a 3.4-mile circular walk from my house, up the hill, across the golf course, on to the moor, up to Trig Point S4643, through the heather, back down off the moor, down the farm tracks, past (!) the local pub, along the lane, down the bridleway, and back to my house.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been on my walk since August 2001 when we moved into what will almost certainly be, as Down House was for Charles and Emma Darwin, our permanent place of residence for the rest of our lives. The Moor Walk is my thinking walk, which takes up a couple of my hours most Saturdays.

The thing I like most about the Moor Walk is that it is the same walk. Apart from the occasional diversion, I walk almost exactly the same route every time, always in the same anti-clockwise direction, always pausing at exactly the same spots. I even have nicknames for some of the stopping places en route: the Pond Skater Puddle, the Rabbit Shed (deep in the heart of Rabbit Country), the Lucky Field (where I nearly always spot something interesting). Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it makes the Moor Walk very personal, and very special. The Moor Walk is my walk.

The South Pennine moorlands aren’t exactly rich in wildlife: the acid soil and the blanket cover of bog grass and heather see to that. But the wonderful thing about going on the same walk over and over again is that you always appreciate when you see something new, and you know what to expect to see at certain times of the year. Yesterday on my walk, for example, in addition to the usual red grouse, meadow pipits, lapwings, curlews, rabbits and pheasants, I saw my first wheatears and ladybird of the summer, and heard my first skylark. The swallows are late this year: I have seen them in the lowlands, but not above the moors. Not yet.

Nature dead in tooth and paw yesterday.

Wheatears, one of my favourite birds, are, like stonechats, only an occasional treat on the Moor Walk, which makes seeing them particularly special. But the most unusual thing I saw on my walk yesterday was on the muddy bridleway less than 100 yards from my house: a dead mole.

Doubtless, had Darwin chanced upon a dead mole during his Sandwalk perambulations, he would have popped its corpse into his pocket, taken it back to his study, boiled it, stripped away the meat and flesh, and closely examined its skeleton with the aim of writing a short paper on how Talpa europaea is wonderfully adapted for an underground life eating his beloved earthworms.

I, on the other hand, left the mole for the crows. There is a limit to how far one should attempt to emulate one’s heroes.

If my camera were a shotgun, I could have eaten grouse for dinner yesterday evening:

Red Grouse [Lagopus lagopus]

I’ve been trying to bag a decent shot of a red grouse for yonks. They’re so elusive, you see. Can’t say I blame them, what with the landed gentry having made so-called sport from blasting them out of the sky for the last couple of hundred years. Charles Darwin shot more than his fair share of game birds in his youth—mostly pheasants and partidges in his case—but he eventually grew out of it.

This time, I was prepared. I knew there was a grouse hiding, perfectly camouflaged in the heather ahead of me, as I had heard its distinctive go-back! go-back! call. So I had my camera held at eye-level, zoom set to maximum and already focused to about 20 yards, lens cap off, multi-shot mode and servo autofocus engaged, shutter speed set to 1/500th of a second, and finger on shutter. Even so, I was lucky to get this shot: the others were all very blurred.

The red grouse was once reckoned to be the UK’s only endemic bird species. This turned out to be false on two counts: (1) the Scottish crossbill is now recognised as an endemic species, and (2) the poor old red grouse is now regarded as a mere variety of the willow grouse, which is common throughout northern tundra regions in Europe and America (where it is known as the willow ptarmigan).

Nuts to that! When it comes to grouse, count me in with the splitters. Unlike all the other ‘varieties’ of willow grouse, the red grouse’s plumage does not turn white in winter. Forget about reproductive isolation and genetic variation and all that bumf; I reckon not turning white in winter should be enough to earn the red grouse a unique (and endemic) species label.

That was certainly what the majority of people seemed to think in Darwin’s Day. As the great man wrote in chapter 2 of ‘On the Origin of Species’:

Several most experienced ornithologists consider our British red grouse as only a strongly-marked race of a Norwegian species, whereas the greater number rank it as an undoubted species peculiar to Great Britain.

Yeah! That’s more like it! Willow grouse my peach-like arse! Bully for the famous red grouse!

A wary rabbit yesterday.

It was an unseasonably glorious day here in West Yorkshire yesterday, so I went for a traipse on the moors. Everywhere I looked, nature seemed to think spring was in the air: the moss was greener, a stonechat was staking out his territory on some fenceposts, and I even saw my first lamb of the year. That’s a lamb on February the Ninth. There’s climate change for you.

The rabbits were out as well. Dozens of them. Spring had definitely sprung as far as they were concerned: they were acting decidedly friskily.

All very idyllic, I thought. But then I came across something to remind me that, even on a glorious day like yesterday, with spring just around the corner, nature is forever red in tooth and claw:

A less wary rabbit yesterday.

See also: More of my photos from yesterday