The uphill struggle for Ireland’s red grouse

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