HELPING DADDY

North Yorkshire Moors Moorland Organisation

A shoot day holds no age barriers: young or old, everyone can and does get involved. Here we have a little girl helping her dad to sort the grouse at the end of the shoot day.

An important factor to each shoot day is to ascertain the ratio of young and old birds and this is for 2 main reasons. The first being to work out an estimate of the stock of birds for ongoing management this ensures you are only shooting your surplus and not damaging the breeding stock numbers. The second reason is that younger grouse should be worth more when they are sold to the game dealer. A bit like lamb to mutton a young grouse is much more preferential to restaurants than an old grouse.

I always find it fascinating how easily and quickly the gamekeepers are able to age the grouse, to be fair they say it is much easier at the start of the season when the young/old difference is more apparent but I’m sure I would still struggle.

Early in the season you can tell the young grouse much easier as their third and longest primary wing feather is still growing and it will therefore appear slightly shorter than the other feathers. The young grouse also have much softer skulls and you can check this by pressing between your thumb and finger. In older birds you can see that their toe nails show very subtle ridges across the nail plate for signs of wear and tear and the young grouse generally don’t have these.