12th November – The beginning
The official beginning of this project was my first trip up to the Cairngorms at the start of August, but I didn’t do any blog posts sadly, probably because I had to rush straight off to Berlin for a holiday with my son and so well after that it was too late..on this trip I walked for 6 days in the Cairngorms, my favourite and recurring mission was to get to and see the Springs of Dee up on the Braeriach (Braigh Riabhach), each time a fabulous experience and wow when the cloud finally allowed me to see these so so quiet, still pools of water, made all the better by the weather impinging on my quest, how incredible, what a treat. I met with Iliyana Nedkova, from Horsecross arts, the curator on this project who showed me around Perth Concert Hall and Perth Theatre and all the incredible spaces that she is inviting me to exhibit this project in, including the 22 flat screen monitors that swing across the length of the curved box office and bar. I also met with Erlend Coulson the executor of Nan Shepherd, this was such a privilege and pleasure, what a wonderful man and opportunity for me to hear about Nan from a man who grew up with her.
But time has passed and this is now a good place to start, a cold and wet November afternoon, getting dark, sitting in my new Rab insulated jacket that I bought for my trip up to the Cairngorms next week..
I have been on sabbatical since August, its been such an interesting time..not productive in the conventional sense, but thoroughly, deeply enriching, nurturing, healing and spiritually enlightening!
I’ve been reading, drawing, (training – swimming, running, doing yoga and meditation, almost consistently) and I’m about to start sculpting in clay…
The project has taken a while to form in my mind, mostly because I started to take on the idea of wanting to make an art project that could be more than an ‘awareness raising’ exercise. I wanted it to be an ‘Artivism’ a form of activism, a campaign with a strategy for asking for change or part of an existing campaign. I was inspired by Sarah Corbett’s ‘How to be a Craftivist’ in which she writes about SLOW and gentle activism. In her book she gives examples of the making and giving of crafted gifts to key policy makers, boards of directors, CEO’s etc in order to implement change in any given situation. I wanted to focus my project around the carrying (on my back while crawling) and delivering of a gift to a landowner, game keeper and or member of the Scottish Parliament, either to say please or thank you – depending on the current status of OneKind’s campaign and petition to save the mountain hares of Scotland or Chris Packham and Mark Avery’s campaign to end driven grouse shooting by the time I do the project (crawl) in the summer of 2019.
But while I have learned so much and want and will move to conceiving and devising art projects that seek and facilitate action rather than just awareness, I decided I was not ready and able to to follow such a direct plan of action for this project right now, mainly because the location for this project is so remote – I feel pretty overwhelmed by trying to plan a performative film project in such an inhospitable landscape from a distance (in Wales) and plan an extensive exhibition across two venues in Perth in this short lead up to the application for funding. So for this project I am ‘promoting public awareness ‘ one of the Cairngorms LBAP (Local Biodiversity Action Plan) objectives and targets, hopefully under the umbrella of these other existing campaigns.
I feel I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the war that is being waged between the mountain hare and the red grouse up in the heather clad moorlands of the Cairngorms right now, there are the supporters of grouse shooting and the supporters of the hen harriers and other raptors and wildlife – including mountain hares who are being shot and poisoned in their hundreds and thousands in order to unnaturally boost and protect the grouse numbers for driven grouse shooters to ‘bag’ hundreds of grouse a day during the season from August – December. I’ve got a pretty good idea of the key figures supporting a ban of grouse shooting; Mark Avery and Chris Packham are the public figure heads, but I’m not so clear on the landowners, game keepers, rangers and politicians in favour of, in my mind, this antiquated, barbaric and deeply inappropriate and problematic sport.
So the subject of my new project in Scotland is the Scottish mountain hare. Here are some facts about this wonderful, iconic, beautiful creature, yes I too have fallen in love with it! (some of these facts may very well be inaccurate, this is a blog not an academic paper so don’t quote me!). The Lepus Timidus Scoticus has been living in Scotland since the last ice age, so is termed native. They live for about 4 – 5 years, their pelage (fur) slowly changes (due to hormones so subtly different for each hare) during October/November from brown to white and then back again in the spring. The male is a Jack and the female is a Jill. They live in ‘forms’ which are small covered areas in the heather, under the overhang of peat hags or under and amongst boulders. The Jill has three seasons between February and September in which she might give birth to 1 – 5 or so leverets, they are known as ‘yearlings’ in their first year of life. The Jill doesn’t do much mothering, the leverets are pretty much sent off to fend for themselves after a few weeks, in time for the Jill’s next season. They have a small range of behavioural mannerisms (not sure what the term is for this!?); a high five (four finger) stretch, a face rub, pellet grabbing (where they take and eat their poo from their bums – due to digestion issues) rolling in the snow (to wash), yawning and running. They have 4 ear positions; upright which means they are alert, flat back which means they are anxious, tucked in to prevent heat loss and forward when post coital. They doze in their forms for 50 minutes of each hour, drop off for 1 – 2 minutes and do stuff, any of the above for the remaining 8 minutes. I am yet to find out what they do at night. The males cover an area of 1.13km (can be larger when looking for mates) and the females 0.89km. Their numbers can reach up to 200 per square kilometre. They are currently thriving in the uplands on the managed heather (a practice of cyclical annual heather burning – done solely for the benefit of the grouse) and raptor management i.e they have fewer predators because the eagle, wild cat, stoat, pine martin and fox are being killed to protect the red grouse. However their population has declined to just 1% of their recorded population in the 1950’s due to a combination of climate change, habitat loss, fragmentation and local over exploitation.
Recently mass killings (over 25,000 in one year) have been identified and filmed. Game keepers and rangers (I read that Italians have been hired and paid to do the job) have been witnessed systematically shooting to kill hares in the thousands, throwing them in their trucks and driving away. The argument for the mass slaughtering is based upon the so far non scientifically proven case that their ticks carry the Louping Ill virus, originally carried by sheep, which in turn affects, kills the grouse. So on this basis they are being slaughtered, and thus far it is not an illegal practice to carry out these mass killings.
Extract taken from the RSPB magazine in an article by James Reynolds in August 2018 –
“From 1954 to 1999 the mountain hare population decreased by nearly 5% every year. This long-term moorland decline is likely to be due to land use changes such as the loss of grouse moors to conifer forests, and is reflective of wider population declines that mountain hares are facing across their range.
However, from 1999 to 2017 the scale of the moorland declines increased dramatically to over 30% every year, leading to counts in 2017 of less than one per cent of original levels in 1954.
The dominant land use in these sites was intensive grouse moor management. Here, the unregulated practice of hare culling as a form of disease control, ostensibly to benefit red grouse, has become part of the management of many estates since the 1990s, despite the absence of evidence that it has any beneficial impact on total numbers of grouse shot”
Submitted by Simon Williams on the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology: “The mountain hare is the UK’s only native hare and was listed as Near Threatened in a recent review which was led by the Mammal Society and also involved data analysis by CEH.”
So this is the story, my chosen story of the Cairngorm mountains…follow my project through my blog as I get deeper and deeper into the mountain, the life of the hare and the battle between animal and human…
The First Minister of Scottish Parliament has agreed that the killing is “unacceptable” and promised that the Government will review all available options to prevent mass culls.
You can sign the current letter to Roseanna Cunningham, Cabinet Secretary for Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform and Francesca Osowska, CEO, Scottish Natural Heritage here:
https://e-activist.com/page/22134/petition/1
Read more at
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