NOTES ON GROUSE-DISEASE 165 



have been unknown till the commencement of the recent 

 century. 1 



But now, we have changed all that. Game-preservation 

 and vermin-trapping" have instituted a new balance of life. 

 The harrier, the buzzard, and the falcon have gone ; the 

 hill-fox and weasel are held in check. Thus, the stock of 

 grouse has been abnormally increased, and is maintained 

 ever close along the margin of that dividing line beyond 

 which Nature has decreed it shall not go. Once that 

 line is passed, she reasserts her supremacy, repels our 

 interference, and disease sweeps bare the heath-clad hills. 



The system, or to be precise (as regards the Borders), 

 the lack of system on which heather-burning is now 

 carried on, is probably a factor in the problem of disease. 

 Heather-burning, rationally conducted, is necessary and 

 even essential to the well-being of the plant, and equally so 

 to the interests both of sheep and grouse alike. To ensure 

 the best economic results, heather should be burnt in 

 sections and in regular rotation of about seven years. 

 But how often one sees a whole hill in a blaze ; the fire, 

 destroying good and bad growth alike, utterly beyond all 

 available control (say, a couple of shepherds), and free to 

 burn at its own fierce will, subject only to any vagrant 

 shift in the direction or force of the wind. There follows 

 on such careless haphazard methods a loss and a wastage, 

 the price of which remains to be made good in one way or 

 another. 



The question of whether heather-burning is or is not 



1 The first recorded outbreak of disease appears to have occurred in the 

 Reay forest, in Sutherland, in 1815 {Zoologist, 1887, p. 302). There would be 

 little human interference then. In 1766, at a meeting of owners and others 

 interested in grouse-moors in Northumberland, it was proposed to restrict 

 the shooting that year ; but whether the scarcity of grouse was then due 

 to disease or otherwise, I am unaware. 



