I’m originally from a little place called St Mary’s near Warrington, down in Lancashire. I was actually born in Salford at Hope Hospital in 1943, so it’s a while back, but then I worked as a gardener for about ten years and then I got what I thought was quite an exciting job as a professional falconer, which entailed keeping the runways clear of birds in case they got bird strikes on NATO jets.
I did that for a while and then I came up here for a holiday about 1970. The first time I’d ever been up the west coast of Scotland and I liked it a lot, very much indeed, and I had no plans at that time to move but then I started going out with the lady who is my present wife and we got married and moved up here round about ’72 I think it was. And then I got an interview with the Forestry Commission as a ranger, which suited me very much indeed; which kept me in the outdoors all the time and I was doing something I liked – deer management and deer control on young trees and this kind of thing.
I’ve been here ever since.
I enjoy the job. About four years ago I thought about early retirement, but then I was offered a job on a sort of conservation team with Jock Hunter, myself, and headed by Marina Smith, and that’s been really good – really exciting stuff. Rather than just retire and do a few home visits, something I thoroughly enjoy doing now. The hours are a bit more regular.
The deer management time, summer was three o’clock start, half past three in the morning, which was OK, it was nice – you were in a world of your own at that time in the summer, but then again, towards the end of the week you’re like a half-shut knife; really tired. That’s one thing I don’t miss is getting up at that time. And then working till midnight, sometimes with clients during May or June – and we used to do a lot of clients in the early days, but not so much now. These were people who were coming from Europe, mostly Denmark at that time, and then Germany and some regular clients. We used to do about six weeks of roe deer stalking in summer and then in the autumn I used to do about four weeks stalking for stags with various people. We used to get the odd sort of American coming, but mainly Danish hunters and German hunters.
That I quite enjoyed because you meet a lot of people. If you’re working on your own for the rest of the year it’s nice to have a bit of company sometimes and then show off what is basically your area, and I really never tired of showing people. Sometimes, some of the clients – you could strangle them! But other than that they were generally quite good. [Were they generally quite skilled before they went out with you? MK] One would hope so, but it doesn’t always follow. Mean, I’ve had guys show me various badges they’ve won for shooting but it’s a whole different ball game when you take them into a big stag in the autumn and he’s making all the noise in the world and roaring his head off and then you pop up and you’re only 50, 60, 70 metres away and this thing’s standing there and some people just go to pieces. They really do – not crack up completely, but you get a sense that you are going to get a wounded beast if you’re not careful. Because whatever they’ve told me, I tend to take it with a pinch of salt at first until I’ve seen the first shot. Once I can see a guy is either competent or incompetent, then we just work accordingly. There’s no point in getting on a guy’s case if he misses something through nerves, especially on the first morning of the first day, because during the week he’s going to get worse. He’s just going to get worse, you know, and then no-one wants a wounded stag around the hills, you know. They take a lot of catching up to sometimes. But these things happen. If you can get to know them when they’re going out first thing, or what I used to do if possible was meet the clients on the Sunday evening and maybe have a drink with them at the hotel, wherever they were, and you can get to know a guy’s temperament, whether he’s a little bit shy, a little bit nervous, but then again, if you’re a person – foreign is maybe not the right word, but if you get someone that’s coming over here that doesn’t speak a word of the language and then he’s taken out the following morning on his own, no translator or anything like this; and no-one to help him to communicate, he’s got to be nervous – bound to be. I try and put myself in the position if I was going to their homeland and couldn’t speak their language, you tend to struggle a little bit, so you’ve just got to try and keep everything a little bit as light as possible but serious enough to do what we’re here to do.
[What kind of area did you cover? MK] The whole area was about 10,000 acres of young trees, young plantations, and a little bit of hill ground, but there was a lot of deer then and we utilised the deer to the best. Obviously it’s all grown up in the last 30 years and I’m looking at places now where I used to shoot deer before the first crop grew up and now the second crop’s on. So it brings back a few memories when you go round these places and see these areas, you know. But it’s nice. It’s nice to see. I mean, we’re here to grow trees and that’s one thing we do. But the conservation’s coming more and more into it now and this is what I like.
The reason I moved up here was because the job sounded good plus the bird life, the wild life especially was tremendous. I’ve always been interested in raptors, birds of prey and this area is a fantastic area for them. I’ve see one or two things that – when people tell me that they’ve seen something or they’ve seen something doing such a thing, then you cannot dismiss it because many a time you’ll look around and think ‘I never thought they would ever do that.’ But they do it. Sightings – people say, ‘Oh, we don’t have those in this area’, but anything’s possible. Anything’s possible in this country when it comes to the wildlife. I mean, the only predictable thing about them is that they are unpredictable. That’s the thing about them, and it changes all the time. The landscape changes, the weather changes, of course, and different things do different things in all kinds of weather.
The attitude from the Forestry Commission’s changed drastically over the years. At one time, every little square inch was planted with trees. But now, we’re clearing areas for wild life, especially in this part of the world, the black grouse projects, which is something I’m involved in and which I thoroughly enjoy. I’ve seen numbers dwindle so much. It’s difficult to know what the cause is. I think it’s a combination of various things. Of course, we put trees where they live, which ruined the habitat but we try and make other places where the trees aren’t doing so well and take the trees out and try and adapt that for the black grouse and this kind of thing which I find it really interesting. It’s fascinating stuff.
I’ve seen numbers dwindle of various bird species over the past 30 years. This glen, for instance – there are no crops grown in the glen now so there’s no bird life because there’s no food. They used to grow – Gilbert Black [Torbhlaren Farm], I was talking to him one day and he had fields full of potatoes and obviously getting a good price for them because he said ‘I’d fill the whole farm with potatoes if I could’. Colin across here [Colin Ferguson, Leckuary Farm] used to grow turnips for winter feeding and oats. He used to cut with the binder and stook it. Gilbert had fields full of barley which used to bring two or three hundred mallard – ducks – in of an evening and this kind of thing but now there’s nothing. And wild geese in the glen, but they just don’t come any more. The feed’s not there. If there’s no food, you won’t get them to come.
But it’s a lovely glen, this [Kilmichael], a really nice glen. The oak woods which used to be part of my beat have been bought by Ross and Diana Appleyard and the oak woods are a tremendous place for bird life in the spring time and during the summer for nesting. They hold all sorts of insects and wild life, you know. It’s a nice place – a wonderful place, this glen. I’ve worked between here, Lochgilphead – the whole of Kilmichael Forest was around 120,000 acres and I had about half of it, which used to go from Blarbuie. The main forest road was through the forest and for safety’s sake with me and the other ranger, I had the left hand side sort of thing and he had the right hand side and that was the boundary, but if we needed to shoot on either side for deer management then we did so but we never sort of went out too far.
We used to go through Carron Valley up to Carron House which is above Minard there, and it was solid trees one time but now Peter Quelch did the redesign of it in the early eighties and now when you look at it from the high point you’ve got various stages of tree growth now which makes more a lot more diversity for the wild life especially and sizes of trees. A lot of machinery now - they could probably cut the forest down in a week or two whereas when I started it was all winch and guys on chain saws. You got a team, two or three guys together and they used to work very hard but they could never compete with the machinery out there now. Kilmichael – when I came here I was on Kilmichael Forest, it wasn’t Loch Awe District then, it was Kilmichael Forest and I think they had a squad in Kilmichael village of about six guys. Our main office was over near Lochgair, there, just before Lochgair games, and Ian Garrioch was the chief forester, John Young was the head forester and they had two B foresters and a lady Sheila – I forget her last name – she was the office girl, basically. We all used to work out of that little wooden office. The deer larder we had was just a barn at the side with a soil floor and everything. You just couldn’t do it nowadays, health and safety, but in those days it was just done. We had nothing else.
[What happened to the deer then? MK] We used to dress them out, basically, which meant cleaning them out on the hill and emptying the inside of the carcase, cutting the head and the feet off, weigh them and hang them up there and there was a place, Bands in Perth. It was a game dealer and they used to come round and pick them up once, twice a week. Twice a week in summer, maybe once a week in winter time. Because there were no refrigeration units or anything, you were just dependent on the weather and I would say in summertime it used to get a little bit high in there but that was the time and that was it. That was what we did then. Things have changed now; changed a lot. We have refrigeration units; you can’t do this in that area and you can’t do that; no wood in the place and all this sort of thing. You have to have bins. It’s changed – changed a lot. Game dealers change, transport changes.
I had to use my own car when I first started and when you’re going over the forest road in a small car, a cheap car, with a big stag in the back, it’s no joke. They don’t last too long. But you couldn’t take them anywhere because if you went to go out in the car it was stinking, because no matter how much you try to clean them there was little bits of blood used to get in the corners. Then of course you’re driving along in your best suit and you get a tick that had come off the deer. But it was a fact of life. But then we got official vehicles. I think I was probably the first ranger to get an official vehicle and I had an old, what looked to be an old ex-army Morris 1000 pick-up, which was a tiny little thing but I could keep the animals away from the driving part, in the living quarters, basically, and it was easy washed out. You just put the cover back and scrubbed it out.
That would be mid- to late-70s. And then of course it started to progress. We had a wild life forester, Duncan Henderson. He changed almost everything for us. I think in those days, when I started, I think the Forestry Commission rangers were just known as trappers and we had no really good equipment and Duncan Henderson started and he came along and he eventually got us good high-powered rifles. Not ex-army 303s but good high-powered rifles suitable for the job. And equipment – we started to get waterproofs first and then we got suits. I remember John Hunter and myself going into Hepworths in Stirling to get kitted out and Jack thought he would have plus fours with his – we had the choice, obviously. But I don’t think he realised at the time just how big plus fours were and he’s not the tallest guy in the world is Jock and these things used to hang out and you could have made another pair of trousers out of one leg. His wife said ‘Just put them on and show Bob how they look’, and he came out with these things on and they were a bit like a clown’s suit. Myself, I just got a straight pair of trousers.
But then, as I say, equipment got better. We had vans for long enough but then we got pick-ups which are far more suitable for the job. And then of course we had trikes to pull the deer in because early on it was hard going in the autumn to drag a stag. I remember dragging one with a forester uphill from the River Add, shot by a client, up the River Add to the road which was just close enough to three-quarters of a mile, a kilometre, something like this and that weighed one of the heaviest staffs we’ve ever shot. It was hard work. I think most rangers do have back problems nowadays because of this. But we have so much equipment now, or the rangers have so much equipment now that anyone can do it basically. You know, they have machines to get you to the animal. The actual shooting’s the easiest bit. It’s the recovery and the larder work that takes the time. I don’t grudge anyone what they’ve got because I’d rather we’d had it then rather than handing everything off the hill, which restricted your number of days to shoot. If you’ve got to drag an animal for a mile or so then you’re not going to shoot too many. Maybe one or two’s enough.
I did get a touch of hypothermia one time in the early days when we first got the trikes. I’d gone out there on the hill shortly before Christmas and I wasn’t quite as heavy as I am now and I’d spotted some hinds out but it was getting dark and I thought, well, I’ll go and see if I can shoot these. So I shot the two and I walked back, and I only had a light tweed jacket on – no waterproofs or anything, and it came on sleet and I thought, well, rather than come out tomorrow morning I’ll go and get them now just as it was going dark. But by the time I got back, I’d hitched them up and got back down to the roadside I was frozen to the marrow. I could hardly move my hands and I just stepped off the quad, picked up the rifle, got in the van and came home – and I’ve never had a headache like it. I couldn’t get warm for four or five hours and I got the infection because of this and Chris, my wife, New Year’s Eve, she went to the hospital to see the - well, she rang through because she works there, she rang through and explained and they said if you want to come in I’ll give you some tablets – and I’ve never known headaches like it. The doctor said then that I was in a state of hypothermia, you know, so after that – because I used to go out all day without anything to eat. I’d have my breakfast in the morning and then have something in the evening when I got home and not bother during the day. But after that I made a point of breaking the day and coming home even if I only had a cup of tea and a sandwich, just so this thing wouldn’t happen again. But it was my own fault. It could have been the hard way to learn but you do these things. You suffer the consequences.
But the job certainly got better, undoubtedly. Pleasanter. A lot more paperwork, of course, which if you get to my age is a bit of a nuisance, but it has to be done. Writing a weekly diary and this kind of thing, and obviously keeping records of what you’ve shot. But some of the equipment some of the guys have now, it’s expensive, but it’s the best. If they want them to do the job they’ve got to give them the best equipment. It’s a fact of life. Rifles with wooden stocks don’t work too well because they warp, so all the guys have Kevlar [woven] stocks, I think they are, and stainless steel. So there’s not a lot of maintenance and not a lot to go wrong with the equipment. [In my day] You had to make sure you kept everything dry, especially, because even with the best will in the world, when we used to have the rifle inspection every year, the guy would take the guns apart and where you couldn’t get with a cloth there was very often little bits of rust underneath. But then we started to take them apart ourselves and clean them and all this kind of thing. But generally the equipment has always been the best that could be afforded. Undoubtedly - purely and simply from a safety point of view as much as anything. Plus you can do the job better with good equipment. You can’t do the job for instance if your rifle keeps misfiring and things like this. Or the bullets were cheap. It just doesn’t work. Or worse still it can lead to a wounded best that doesn’t get recovered.
That was something you always had to keep in mind, of course. I’m quite happy to shoot the deer but nobody wants to wound them. If you’re going to shoot them, kill them. It’s as simple as that – to the best of your ability and as quickly as possible. There’s been some discussion recently about rangers taking shots in the head, which is fine, because if they want to sell the carcase, you get a better quality carcase. But the potential for wounding the beast trebles. I’ve seen – I’ve done it, actually – you hit something and you don’t hit it right. If you shoot its bottom jaw off it can still run away. It can run away. Luckily we all take dogs and they’re usually recovered fairly quickly but some don’t get recovered and it’s just one of those things that happens. Nobody’s a perfect shot all the time and certainly with clients I would never ever allow them to shoot an animal in the head. It’s too risky. I mean – I find it risky and one or two of the other rangers do. When you think the target of a stag is maybe two foot square, it’s good enough that. Anything in that, you’ll kill him. But the head’s only a foot by six inches, so it’s not worth the risk. But sometimes you can take a while to recover these things and the best dogs in the world, the fastest in the world, they’ll go two miles before you’ll get to them, you know. As I say, nobody wants this. Poor sod. Especially if a client does it, then it’s ten times worse because you know you shouldn’t have let him even take the shot, so I didn’t do it. There was one client – I sent him home, actually, because he shot an animal purely and simply when he was told not to. He shot it in the haunch at the back. He put it down and said ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter, it’s down’, but it got up and ran away and we never got it. I came home and went back with the dog but it had obviously travelled a distance and we never found it. So I just took him straight back to the hotel and said, ‘That’s it. No more – I’m not having this.’ So I went in the office and told the boss and then I rang Duncan Henderson who as I say was chief wildlife officer and told him. He said, ‘No problem. If that’s what he’s done then he shouldn’t have done it, and that’s it.’ But these are things that go on, you know.
But as I say, I enjoy what we’re doing now, working with the wildlife. The best part about the job now is I’m not looking for something to shoot. I’m looking for things but mainly just to report back, to write down on paper observations; sightings – a sightings register we have, and everything’s written on this. But I mean the rangers do this as well and they write on the back what they’ve seen and a grid reference. But some of them are very observant. Some of the guys don’t see anything; it’s just the way they are, just the way they are. Not knocking them or anything. But some of the guys put in everything they see but they are still looking for deer to shoot – that’s their main job of the deer rangers. But with us, if we’re out, we’re looking for specific things and if we don’t see them, we’re free to look at anything else, which is the best part of the job, because in Argyll there is so much to see. It’s seriously, from a wildlife point of view, as my nephew said, it’s seriously under-watched from a bird life point of view.
But now I work with the community – schools, Rurals, we’ve done osprey watch this year, all this kind of thing. Jock was out making artificial osprey nests the other day. We’ve done a lot of these. We do rafts we make for divers, red-throated and black-throated divers. I think almost all of the red-throated divers that nest in our district, West Argyll, nest on artificial rafts that we’ve made, so we’ve actually increased the population a little bit. We like to say we have anyway. It’s very interesting work. Some days we make nest boxes and bird boxes because we take so much to schools – can you come along and show us feeders and nest boxes and that. But what we do, we make the nest boxes, screw them up, and then take them apart and put them in little kits so that when we go to a school – we were at Skipness a couple of weeks ago and we took one for each pupil because I think there are only five pupils there at the school. So, we take them apart and it’s much easier to screw them back up when you get youngsters with screwdrivers, some of them don’t have the strength. Although there was one little girl that was doing bat boxes with Jock and she was fantastic straight away – she had the whole lot done.
Kilmichael school, we were there a few weeks ago doing feeders and we do a little mixture we make up with suet, these fat ball things and get little birch logs and drill holes in and fill these. There was one girl, she came to me and says, ‘I’ve done one. What can I do now?’ I said well, do another one if you want, there’s lots here, so she went home with these things on strings and a bird box. She was only this big and she had a bunch of feeders, you know. But kids like to get involved, get hands on. It’s fine sitting back and talking to them but it’s much easier – it’s easy for us – if they get involved. Small class and they can start making these things. We found this works a lot better. I enjoy it. It’s nice showing kids because some of them are real characters. It’s good, and we do one or two events.
We’re on squirrels just at present trying to do some squirrel population density if we can, and see where the range is. Marina came up to us yesterday. Apparently, there’s been a grey squirrel seen down in Carradale but I doubt it. I doubt it. It was running across a road but we, Jock and myself, are of the opinion that it’s possibly a light-coloured mink because you still get colour variations in mink, going back to the blues and what they call beige and that. I hope it’s not a grey squirrel. If it is, I hope it’s only the one, because we’re looking for areas to perhaps try and release some red squirrels and with the likes of Kintyre it’s basically an island with a canal, so it would slow the progress of many grey squirrels. I’m not saying they would never ever reach there but it would be a good area, Carradale, for releasing red squirrels because there’s so much variety of mature timber, both hardwoods and softwoods, and we were down there looking at it and it’s a great place. But it’s things like this that make the job interesting.
And then the following day, especially during the summer, we get a phone call – ‘Will you go to such a place. There’s little ring plovers been seen. Will you go and check it out? Have a look and see if you can find any.’ So, this was Loch Nant up Loch Aweside, from Kilmichael to Loch Nant and 24 hours and we found them. There were about three pairs on the place. Same with Marsh Fritillary butterflies. We do all this. I do all the dragonflies, checking, counting, this kind of thing, and we were asked to go and look at an area that somebody thought they’d seen a Marsh Fritillary, which is quite a rare butterfly. So Jock says, we’ll go and have a look, so we went and there was nothing there, but we saw another area which looked better and we said ‘Let’s just have a look on here, we’ve got a couple of hours to spare and what they do, you count the webs – they make little webs with little black caterpillars inside and they pull all the grass together, then it’s like a tuft. They’re quite difficult to spot at first, but once you’ve seen one - oh, there’s another! We got 72, which is a bit of a record really and everyone in the office was gobsmacked, never thought they’d see so many; and SNH [Scottish Natural Heritage] I don’t think they believed us at first – but, go on and see.
Orchids – I do Lapland Marsh-orchids, which is one of the rarest [Lapland Marsh-orchid was first found in 1967 in Scotland] plants in the British Isles and we have a site and there’s about 30 – I think I counted about 30 plants there this year. These are beautiful. They’re about so high [6-24 cm high] and they are stunning colours, purpley colour. So delicate and they have big black spots on the leaves. And same again, you can walk and say – oh, there’s nothing here, but once you find one, you can go round and think ‘There’s another one, and there’s another one’, you know.
The problem with the Marsh Fritillaries, I think, there’s badgers coming in. Now badgers will eat grubs, anything, and for the first time last year I could see signs of badgers where they’d turned the cowpats over and that and I thought ‘That’s strange – but there weren’t quite so many webs this year. We found three or four. A lot of single caterpillars about the place. We might have been just a shade too late but I also think anything that’s been there has been foraged by a badger – eaten by a badger. But there again, what do you do when you’ve got one protected species predating another one?
But as I said, the work we’re doing now is interesting, really interesting. But it was when I started. That’s why I came here. I couldn’t believe how good a job it was. I had so much freedom, got on with the work, went into the office – the only time I went in was to pick my wages up at the village here. Everybody had to sign a paper and I think it was something like £17, just over £17 a week when I started. The house was 50 pence a week rent and we tried – I used to think what am I going to do when I come to retire. Where am I going to go in a tied house?. But circumstances changed drastically and we were asked if we were interested in buying this. And then I said well, I had £20 by this time, which was a big wage in those days, and I said well, I don’t think we can afford to buy it, but I spoke to my sister down in Lancashire and she said really, you can’t afford not to buy it. So we got it valued and we got 44 per cent off for being a tenant and we bought this place for £17,500. We’ve been here every since.
We’ve been here ever since I started with the Commission, actually. I did six months with Mr Cameron in Inverliever just to teach me some basics of stuff I hadn’t done as a hobby, because I was always shooting as a hobby. He taught me how to snare foxes which we did in those days and don’t do any more. Snare rabbits, which they don’t do any more. Crow shooting and roost – we don’t do that any more. I sometimes wonder now whether it’s because we stopped fox control for all the rangers that the black grouse numbers have dwindled. Because we used to catch a lot of foxes in winter, snaring. It depends on your attitude towards snaring. Some people will say, of, it’s terrible, it should never have been done. But if you do it properly, all you’re doing is catching something in a noose and then dispatching it as humanely as possible. It’s different if you leave them for two or three days. They get pulled to pieces or they die of starvation, things like that, and that’s totally wrong. But snaring is very, very effective. If you set the snares right, you don’t catch anything else. Actually, the first thing I caught was a roebuck by the front leg. I’d only set it the day before but it was dead and I don’t know, but I think it was just pure shock that killed him. But I think also, I used to kill somewhere between 20 and 30 foxes a winter on here, on Kilmichael, and all the other rangers killed similar amounts or probably more, and I think this kept the numbers down. This stopped them eating too many black grouse and all other ground-nesting birds, you know. We’re always controlling foxes but only to a very small degree now. I shoot them round here for the farmers, basically, but that’s all. I don’t carry a rifle on the Forestry ground any more at all. And the rangers, they only kill foxes if the opportunity arises. If they’re out stalking and there’s nothing else doing and they see a fox and they don’t see any deer then they’ll shoot the fox. But obviously their job is to shoot deer so if they are going into hinds in winter and a fox walking through, they’ll still shoot the deer first. If they get a chance at the fox, fine. But it’s difficult to say.
The whole circumstances have changed. We used to get black grouse in the glen here. I haven’t seen a black grouse in the glen... We had some friends came up from England once for a holiday and he came in, and as you can see, I keep poultry here, a lot of black ones, and Graham said to me ‘Your chickens walk a long way,’ and I said ‘How do you mean?’ He said: ‘They’re half way up the road there.’ So I went out and there were three black grouse on the road just here. Haven’t seen that – you just don’t see them any more. When we came here first, we stayed with a ranger on Knapdale at Gariob who he basically told me about the job, and we stayed with him a couple of months until we found accommodation, and we rented some accommodation in Ardrishaig, but meanwhile we were driving round the glen in here because we’d heard these houses up here were for sale. We went down to Ford and back this way and at Barmor Farm it was nearly dark and Chris, my wife, said ‘What’s all that down there?’ and I said ‘It’s crows; it’s hoodies.’ There were big cattle troughs and they were all black grouse. They had come in to feed, you know, off any pickings they could get from the animal feeding and and there was probably, oh, I don’t know, somewhere between ten or a dozen of these things – it was fantastic. All males, male birds. It’s a thing that concerned me, black grouse, because I think they’re a beautiful bird and we’re looking toward captive breeding even and release. A friend of mine that’s down in Lincolnshire, he’s got two pairs of black grouse. One pair he hatched himself this year. He had more but they died, but he didn’t have a lot of luck. He didn’t do it right, basically. When you’re hatching birds, what I do when I’m hatching pheasants here, I gather the eggs until I’ve got a good clutch and then put them under so they all hatch at once. What my friend was doing, as she laid every day was putting the eggs each day under a broody hen so they were all hatching at different times. Some of them didn’t hatch because the hen left it, because these other ones were maybe three or four days old and they were running out and she was going out to them and the eggs were getting cold. So, as he says, ‘I’ll know better next time’ and next year he says he’ll do better. So I’m hoping to get some eggs off him and try some kind of release programme.
Unfortunately I’m due to retire next year and it’s a long-term project, black grouse. But there’s nothing stopping me doing it privately. I spoke to a good friend who has Dunadd Farm where I fly my falcons and he’s quite happy. He’s up for it. He says, ‘We’ll do it on here, no problem at all.’ You need marginal ground as well. So, it’s something we’re going to give it a try anyway. [Are there a number of people in the area interested in black grouse? MK] No, unfortunately there’s not. I hate to be nasty, but a lot of people like to pretend that they’re interested and we must do something, but they haven’t done anything. We went to a meeting some years ago and we had maps all round the area and there was a grouse research girl that started, Sandra MacLean, Ross Preston was here. They’ve got the best will in the world but not a lot of practical knowledge on bird life, or I didn’t think so – or we didn’t think so. And she had a limited budget and they wanted to know how many – we’d have to count the numbers for the next three years. All the rangers turned round and said look, they’re dwindling, we’ll have to do something. We need to do something now. ‘Oh, but we can’t. We have to count them and prioritise and all this’, which is fine if you’ve got a big population to start with but if you’ve only got a small population you really need to do something about it. We reckoned this was the first opportunity that we had to do something – but nobody was doing anything, only counting and as I said, I was on West Knapdale at the time and I said, ‘Well, West Knapdale’s got quite a few. I would like to come on here perhaps with my grandchildren sometime and say, look, I remember when there were only a few on here and now look at them.’ I said ‘I don’t want to go back and say I remember when there used to be black grouse on here and now there’s none.’ But that’s what’s happened. She said, well we only have a budget of £300 or £3000 or whatever, and Jock Hunter said, well look, you can buy a lot of fox snares and a lot of legal traps for crows with that money. Do that and you’ll do far more than spend it on just wandering about looking for grouse. Come to the rangers, ask, do you have black grouse, and concentrate on that area – they’ll tell you what’s going on because they’re out at all times of the day and all over the forest so these are the guys that know. Volunteers are fine, because she was going to get volunteers to go our to count. There was one lady came to me. She said ‘Bob, you’re involved with this black grouse.’ I said well, to some extent, yes. She says ‘Well, I’ve volunteered to help out but I don’t know what a black grouse sounds like or looks like.’ So I showed her a photograph and I have a CD of bird calls and I got in the house and I put that on and I said ‘That’s what you’re listening for. Because you’ll hear them long before you’ll see them.’ And she said, ‘Well, I didn’t know that.’ And I mean, she was a nice woman, nice person, but when she’d gone I thought it’s ridiculous this – sending volunteers out that don’t know where they’re looking or what they’re looking for, which is all wrong. They were volunteers. They didn’t cost any money but I’m sure the time could have been better spent elsewhere. But last week, Marina and I and the forester in charge of West Knap, we were on there looking at sites now to prioritise because there are so few. You get one grouse here and one grouse ten miles away and this sort of thing, so we’ve cut the numbers down from about half a dozen proposed sites to about three or something. Hopefully we can do something with this. But this is just black grouse. They’re a handsome bird and I feel just a little bit sad that the numbers are getting down, you know.
When I feel that in this day and age we should be able to stop all this. We should be able stop the rot, so to speak. The world has so many resources now that in a small country like the British Isles should never become extinct. I don’t they will because there are one or two people captive breeding. Whatever you say about keeping birds in cages, they’re still alive; they’re still there. You have a nucleus to start all over again. You’ve still got them.
We do other work. We’re looking this year, this spring to try an artificial otter holt, but we haven’t picked a site yet. Of course, we’re involved with the beavers project, which is – people are undecided. A lot of ayes and nos over there. We’re trying to put as much [information] forward as possible. They did this interview on television a few months ago but it didn’t actually say much, but I feel that the Zoological Society – it’s all very nice sitting in an office and talking about things and looking at bits of paper but you just need to get out into the area and look at it. The problems or lack of problems and what can go ahead. For instance, there was one guy who was saying that we’ve chosen this area on Knapdale because the sides are steep and it will discourage the beavers from straying. And I thought, that’s crazy. They never go more than 80 yards across land, let alone up hill. All the movement they do is through waterways and I thought he’d been a bit naïve here. But then again, he could talk. He was good at the interview. [Do you think it will happen with the beaver? MK] Yes, I think so [2009 – it did]. We should get the licence within the next two or three days and I think the fairly new Scottish Government is well up for it. I really do. I don’t know whether it will be successful or not but Marina was talking yesterday to a roomful of Forestry people about the project because she’s just back from Norway to have a look at what they do. Without hesitation, if it doesn’t work, they must remove them, any way, shape or form they must remove them and I think you’ve got to be hard hearted and forget the people who say right, you’ve already introduced them now, you can’t just get rid of them. Ignore that – they must. If it’s not working, they must go, wherever they go to – whether they go into captivity or, dare I say it, if they make beaver coats out of them, they must do something about it.
[What sort of situation would be considered that it wasn’t working? That it was a failure? MK] I think the main thing would be is if they were spreading too much onto farmers’ land. Because it’s alright – we can put them on a loch in Knapdale, but they’re territorial and Father Beaver’s not going to say to Beaver Son when he’s grown up, ‘oh, you stay in and join in.’ He’s going to say ‘Right, offski, find your own way in life.’ And they’ll do this. They travel – travel down waterways, up waterways. They might get on the River Add; start digging their holes in their burrows. They don’t always make dams. They will make burrows, which might affect the farming community, in which case they’ll either have to be culled or trapped if possible, and removed. The Norwegian people do it. We’ve seen photographs of trees that were being felled – big diameter trees – and they were next to the road and you can see one tree’s gone almost over the road – so they were caught up and removed. If they can’t be caught up then they’re shot. Or culled, whichever way you look at it. But then again, I think Norwegian people perhaps have a different attitude towards wildlife than they do in this country. There’s always people going to say, well, you can’t have that. You’ve brought them here and they’ll find a thousand reasons why you shouldn’t remove them or cull them. It’s a bit of the Bambi syndrome, which is something we always get with the deer. Obviously, Bambi, you know. But I don’t think it’s being cruel or anything. It’s just being practical about it. The country’s so well populated now that everything you’ve got has a place, but it may be a very small place. You know, select your areas and keep that species in that area and that species in that area. And regards the re-introduction of wolves, personally I think it’s a crazy idea, because knowing predators and raptors, they’re the laziest things in the world. You only need to look at the cheetahs that get shot in Africa because they’re killing cattle, killing calves. Africa’s a lot bigger than Scotland so on that alone, I don’t think it would work.
[Sightings of pumas in Dalavich in the eighties? MK] I never saw any. I don’t know of any rangers that saw any, and we were out and about probably more than anybody. But Eddie Maclean, the gamekeeper for Major Warde-Aldam of Ederline, he reckoned he saw one asleep in the wood. We keep an open mind. They’ll disappear in these forests and you’ll never see them but friends that’s in the glen here saw one years ago in the early eighties. I went down the track – the trees were quite small at the time – but there were splashes of blood crossing the road and I thought ‘What the hang’s this?’ So I got out and I followed it, and it was fresh. It was early on a summer’s morning; it was July, and this thing had crossed the road and I thought, ‘What the hang’s that?’ So I followed it through the small trees to the edge of the farmland. It had gone over the fence and down at the bottom of the banking was a marshy bit and there was a dead Sika stag in this and I couldn’t get to him to recover him but I could see he was maybe three or four meters away in the water – well, he wasn’t that; two or three meters – but all his back and his haunch were lacerated. Just loss of blood. I followed the trail back in the trees until I lost it and he was bleeding heavily all the way and this is obviously what had killed him. But all his back and haunch were lacerated. It could have been anything, I should say. I couldn’t say for certain what it was. Unexplained, definitely. It could have been dogs, because dogs will go at the back end; most cats will try to get to the front end. But if they can’t get to the front end for some reason they’ll pull the back end down. You see lions jumping on the back and trying to bite the spine. I would say that would have had the same effect. Some of these things, you know….
There was a guy shot a bullock. He’d been hearing stories and he went down this spot and saw a pair of eyes and Bang! And when they got there it was a bullock they’d shot. It’s crazy. But I’ve seen carcases of deer – I left a hind out, a hind calf out on the hill one time and I thought ‘We’ll get it tomorrow morning’. When I went back the following morning it had been skinned inside out. The skin was completely inside out. There were just bones left. [What would do that, do you think? MK] I’ve no idea. I know – it seems strange, it was a bad day. I can’t remember why I left it, but it was later on the following day and it was stripped. Stripped clean. But I‘ve seen eagles and ravens strip a stag that got twisted in the fence, its leg. It had gone over and it couldn’t get out, one leg, and that would just starve to death there. I had clients that week so I couldn’t get over, but once the clients were finished at the end of the week the whole carcase had been stripped clean. Everything. There was eagles coming off it and ravens, and ravens and eagles will strip a carcase clean in three or four days. Especially now: since the ravens were taken off the protected list in around 1980-81, there’s a lot. There’s an awful lot of ravens now. I’ve seen a flock of 49 crossing the road out at Carron. I get friends coming up here and they say ‘Do you ever see any ravens?’ I say ‘There’s one or two around!’ Because they don’t occur down there [England]. But things happen which are unexplained. Completely unexplained. There’s a wee dam up the forest there. When the trees were standing I was round the side of that and there were the remains of a Sika hind, and what I thought at the time was that it looked as if it had been plucked – the skin. Now, there’s only leopards do that, but I don’t suppose there’s leopards here. But – you never know.
There was a guy in the south of England; he went out to a clearing to photograph deer coming out early in the morning in the summertime. He made a hide in the tree and he sat there and the first thing that came across the clearing was a leopard and he took a photograph of it. Another guy in Wales caught one in a snare, in a fox snare. So you never know. When you look at these forests, 20,000 acres of trees; or the very minimum 20,000 acres – they could be anywhere.
I was round on Inverinan a couple of weeks ago and I was quite high up looking over Loch Avich and Inverinan Forest and I thought, you could lose a pride of lions in here, you know – and nobody would ever know. Nobody would ever know. I saw things you don’t see much. I saw a white stag up on the back of that hill there. I was stalking roe deer in the morning, roe buck, springtime, and I looked and I saw this bit of white and at that time we had a lot of (the fences weren’t that good), we had a lot of sheep in the forest up there and I thought ‘The blooming tups have got in again.’ So I went down and came up opposite it and it was maybe 300 yards away but there was no doubt whatsoever what it was. It was a young red deer stag, maybe two or three years old, and it wasn’t snow white, but it was dirty white, if you like. The colour that sheep are in springtime. But I only saw that once – never saw it again. It’s strange. This is why as I’ve got older now I tend very much to keep an open mind about things. You just never know. You just NEVER know. When you think there was a puma trapped on Loch Ness-side – that was well publicised a few, a good few years ago now – but there could be anything about. You could have lynx in this wood. A European lynx is only slightly bigger than a fox. How many foxes do you see when you’re driving about? You don’t see many. You don’t see many at all.
But, it’s interesting work, real interesting work. As I say, it’s got more interesting since I started this conservation, but as Jim Hunter said, we should have started this about 20 years ago. But in those days, it was just grow trees, keep the deer off the trees and that was it. Shoot as many deer as you can because they’ll eat the trees. Sometimes you wondered whether you’d see – the only time a tree was ever of any value was when a deer was eating it. Especially larch. You’d see them cut the larch down and leave them by the roadside because there was no value for them. But yet, they were this big and there were deer eating them, the foresters used to go crazy. It didn’t make a lot of sense sometimes.
But the atmosphere within the Forestry Commission I don’t think now is quite as relaxed. They were quite easy going in those days. There’s a lot of targets now, of course. Even the rangers have to find targets. They have to do dung counts to try and assess how many deer on the place, which I don’t think works. Even if it works, they don’t work unless you stick rigidly to the figures you’ve worked on. Don’t assume 20 hinds and carry on shooting. It’s pointless doing the exercise. Completely pointless. Try and achieve the target. Once you’ve got there, then you should stop and then assess it the following year. That’s the way I always worked but obviously they don’t. What do I know?
But it has been interesting work. The weather sometimes gets you a little bit annoyed but when it’s nice, it’s nice. That was the only thing, like I said earlier, about the 3.30am start. It was a pain in the backside, but once you’re out there, there’s nobody else in the world because very few people move around at that time in the day and it’s light. The earliest I’ve ever shot anything was twenty past three in the morning. And it’s light and it’s brilliant because the wild life – you wouldn’t believe when you see it. You know, you see stags on the main road. There was the junction at McGinty’s Yard, when you come out of Cairnbaan and then across into the forest, I drove round there one morning and there was a big stag standing in the middle of the road. But you don’t see it any later. That was about four o’clock in the morning. You don’t see them any later because people start to move about and the wildlife knows this so everything lies up for the day. It’s just the way things work. No problem with that. I’ve seen roe deer in this glen walking down the road. During the rut, especially when we had a lot of deer on, you’d see stags anywhere and everywhere. They’d be walking across this glen here. There were five crossed this road one night – that’s only about four years ago – into Kirnan woods. One of the mechanics was coming home late one night and he turned into the glen where the new houses are and there was a stag walking up the road – near the main road. Just where the shop used to be [in Bridgend opposite Kilmichael Glen turn-off], it was on the corner there. He said ‘I couldn’t believe it. I nearly ran into it. Just standing there looking at me.’ And it popped over the wall, through somebody’s garden and away.
Yes, it’s been interesting. Interesting work. Look at the time. I can talk too much sometimes.