Of course, half term week at the end of May which is always reserved for a fishing trip turned out to be the hottest, clearest and most hopeless fishing week of the year so far. We had planned a couple of days on some seriously remote and rarely fished lakes in mid-Wales where the trout grow bigger than most in that vicinity. At 1700 feet up the temperature was at least bearable, but with the sun beating down the fish were not going to play and the boy took to swimming rather than fishing.
Our friend Dai joined us and talked about shooting grouse on the hill in the 80s and early 90s. There had been black grouse too and they had done particularly well when the forestry was being established, but they have gone now as have the grouse shooters. We did hear a grouse on the first day and I bumped what looked like a barren pair by the top lake. In August last year we flushed a lovely covey of a dozen or so on a hill opposite on the way to a different lake so a few grouse do survive in that part of the Cambrian mountains without any active management. Sheep numbers are lower than they have been in the past and the heather is in good condition if rank in places. Habitat would not seem to be a limiting factor to at least a low-density grouse population with a small shootable surplus as had been the case in the past. That leaves predation and particularly the crow and the fox. Corvid numbers are not high from the experience of the two trips we have had up there and the same can be said of other areas of the ‘green desert’ we have fished over the years. Once you get far enough away from more intensive livestock farming operations corvid numbers seem to drop away. The same cannot be said for the island moor towards the English border that Dai has been trying to revive for a decade or more. There, surrounded by sheep farms, he has to contend with clouds of black marauders as well as an endless train of foxes coming up to his moor from the low ground around. The more biodiversity – grouse, curlew, hare, frogs – he creates through habitat management the more predators he attracts. He left us on the second day to regretfully (he was a hunting man before the ban) deal with a vixen and a litter of cubs he had spotted a couple of nights before.
When red grouse fall to very low densities they seem to be extraordinarily resilient. Just a handful of birds stubbornly reproducing a chick or two - enough to keep clinging on. In the second covid year Dai and I spent a week isolating together (entirely legally) on a massive water company owned estate fishing some incredibly remote llyns. We came across grouse in singles, pairs and threes in places most people will have written them off. The seismic changes that are facing upland farming communities in the form of energy production, rewilding and carbon capture might spell the end for these remnant populations, or they might just provide them with a boost. Predator control and intensive habitat management over such vast areas might not be feasible in the modern world, but fewer sheep might mean a bit more heather and a few less predators and tip the balance towards the grouse.
I am lucky enough to have an invitation to walk up some grouse with good friends in the south of Scotland on the twelfth of August and already know that will be one of the best days of my season. How wonderful it would be to walk those Welsh mountains with a few friends and some dogs in August or September and come home with a few brace and the knowledge that you have taken a sustainable harvest. That would be a privilege beyond measure and it should not be impossible, especially with mad optimists like Dai trying to turn the tide in the Welsh uplands.
This article was first published in the Shooting Times on 9 June 2026.