From the Field

January 2010 - those famous grouse

I freely admit that when Des suggested a trip to Yorkshire to photograph red grouse in the snow, I thought he was dreaming. I have never found them very easy to approach and when he told me that he knew the shot he wanted and that it required an horizon with a pink sky behind it, I thought he was pushing his luck into the realms of fantasy.  

But Des is a very good wildlife photographer and the opportunity to learn a trick or two was far too good to miss, so at 5 am, we piled the gear into my car and headed north hoping to beat the sun up onto the Yorkshire dales.

There was no doubt from the moment we got out of the car that we were in the right place.  We had scrabbled our way up some very snowy, very steep hills with the help of the Suzuki’s seldom-used low ratio gearbox simply to get here but it was worth it just for the view, never mind the grouse. The dales are wonderful at any time of the year, but under a blanket of snow they are just breath-taking.

Grouse were calling all around us, but before I had even begun looking for a shot or two, I was to come up against a problem that would plague me for days on my return. In order not to ‘blow’ the whites, it was necessary to reduce the exposure and doing so introduced horrible colour casts. Due to the extremes of,on one hand, Des’s beautiful pink sky and on the other, the unavoidably blue shadows, I was recording all my worst nightmares which would come back to haunt me when I got home.

As if their calling wasn’t enough to give them away, their tracks were everywhere and so we headed off up the hill hoping to catch one or two on the skyline against that pastel pink backdrop.

To start with these were the commonest views we had of them as they disappeared over the horizon in a  flurry of snow.

It was a concern to start with as we had no desire to make them waste valuable energy in these harsh conditions, but it soon became obvious that some of them weren’t troubled by us at all. So, leaving those that fled in peace we concentrated on working our way closer to those that seemed comfortable with our presence. This involved getting very low indeed and moving closer in small stages, taking photographs at every step in  case we never got any closer. In the end we found that we could get within fifteen to twenty yards and still they would behave perfectly normally, waddling from one patch of heather tips to the next. The snow was up beyond our knees in places and all that showed of most of the heather were the very tips of the stalks. Any deeper and they would have serious problems finding food, but for the time being there seemed enough to go around.

This shot shows just how determined you need to be to get those really low viewpoint images. Keeping everything still while the tripod is resting on top of the hidden, and very springy, heather while your whole body is shivering with the cold is not easy; but hopefully you can see how worthwhile it is when your shots burst into life on the screen back at home. Horrible, nightmare, colour-casts excepted of course.

Grouse moor management is an art  and whoever is responsible for managing this piece was doing a fine job. There were a lot of tender young shoots still showing above the snow thanks to rotational control of the heather, without which the large population of birds that we saw would already have been struggling to survive.

No time in the field is ever wasted and I came back from this trip having discovered that you are far more likely to get the shot that you want if you watch the weather forecast carefully and know what you want before you set off.

I know that it is worth taping on everything that could come off of your equipment before it falls off in deep snow and is lost for ever like Des’s lens hood.

I know that the results make up for the hardships involved in getting them and I know that Britain is one of the most beautiful places on earth.

Crawling on your hands and knees through two feet of snow may appear to the uninitiated as a nightmare, but I would do it again tomorrow even if it meant creaky joints for the rest of my life. To be so close to these beautiful birds while they went about the business of survival in these extreme conditions was a privilege I shan’t forget in a hurry.

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