HEATHER BURNING 
nothing so cleansing as fire. Again, by burning in strips and patches 
the grouse will not be encouraged to pack together too close, and there 
will be less risk of fouling the ground. 
In connexion with the all important question of food there is another 
almost as necessary to the welfare of the grouse, and that is a plenti- 
ful supply of grit of the right kind, which is most necessary to aid 
digestion. In regard to this I have a suggestion to make to owners of 
moors. 
In hard weather, with deep snow on the ground, it must be very diffi- 
cult for grouse to find a necessary supply of grit, especially on flat 
moors, where there are no rocky faces jutting out. And at this time 
the food they succeed in obtaining must require more than the usual 
powers of digestion. It would be a comparatively easy task to rig up a 
rough sledge and drag loads of grit over the snow to different parts of the 
moor ; the grouse would soon find the heaps, and this would assist them 
greatly in their struggle for existence. 
That the heather is less nutritious, and therefore more difficult to 
digest in early spring, has been proved by the Grouse Committee’s 
researches (p. 399), where it was found that the weights of crop contents 
show that in late winter and early spring up to two hundred and fifty 
grains of heather are found in the average afternoon crop, as against 
fifty grains at any other time of the year. 
It was also found by dissection that grouse have apparently the power 
to keep a certain amount of grit in the gizzard, but the conclusion arrived 
at was that probably when the bird felt itself short of grit it took less 
food, and thereby lost weight and strength, becoming more liable to the 
attack of strongylosis. If this conclusion be correct, the artificial supply 
in hard weather of heaps of good quartz grit is a good idea. In con- 
nexion with this question of “ grit” supply. The Mackintosh writes to us 
from Moy, July, 1912. ‘‘ I have been hard at work breaking more ground 
for grit : without plenty of grit it is impossible to have a healthy stock 
of grouse.” 
To sum up then this question of heather burning. The ideal moor should 
be so carefully and thoroughly burnt that there should be a succession 
of heather patches and strips ranging from the freshly burnt clean ground, 
to heather of not more than fifteen or sixteen years old. In no case should 
any old stick heather be tolerated. Where there are long stretches of flats 
where little or no grit is easily available, at any rate in hard weather, 
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