Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Shooting Gazette

One of the biggest, most frustrating and lingering misconceptions about game shooting is that it’s an exclusive sport enjoyed only by a select few in society. Over the next 100 or so pages we will not only prove that viewpoint to be false but also illustrate just how accessible and diverse game shooting — and more specifically, the community serving it — actually is. For example, Richard Faulks is in North Yorkshire for us this month finding out how one farm near Pickering is doing a great job in introducing novices to game shooting. Equally impressive is the in-the-field tutoring for beaters and pickers-up of all ages by Emma Stevens of Cunningshot Dog Training, whom we caught up with after a day at Kedleston Estate Shoot in Derbyshire last season.…

It is with great sadness that I am writing to you about the death of my father, Brian Male, writes Tony Male. He was well known in the shooting, hunting and fishing community, and purchased hundreds of shooting magazines over the years he. My father started shooting when he was about 16 and died aged 78. During his time he worked as a gamekeeper and as a terrier man for the Chiddingfold, Leconfield & Cowdray Hunt. A renowned breeder of Jack Russell terriers, he won the award for National Jack Russell of Great Britain, was regional chairman of the National Jack Russell of Great Britain Club and a national and international judge for the breed. He loved game shooting, wildfowling, hunting, fly-fishing, labradors and, in his later years, wildlife photography.…

COURTESY OF Game suet pudding PREPARATION TIME: 45 minutes COOK TIME: 150 minutes SERVES 4 PEOPLE Ingredients For the suet paste • Butter, for greasing• 285g self-raising flour• 125g suet• 1 tsp baking powder• 225ml water For the pudding • 1 large onion, diced• 3g salt• 5g garlic puree• 2g chopped thyme• 2 large carrots, diced• 2 large parsnips, diced• 2g cracked black pepper• 20g flour• 150ml stout• 100ml beef stock• 12g demerara sugar• 250g diced pheasant• 150g diced venison Method 1. Seal the venison and pheasant in a hot, oiled pan – remove when golden brown and leave aside to cool. 2. In the same pan sweat the onion, garlic, thyme, carrot and parsnip until soft and season them with salt, pepper, flour and demerara sugar. Just before they…

My shooting experience prior to Glad Rags was on the beating line trying to keep our three small children and one quite badly behaved dog under control. It all changed one sunny afternoon while at a friend’s farm when I tried clay shooting for the first time. At the time I had just started my events and marketing business. A few months later I was organising a corporate clay-shooting day for clients. Some of my friends had started shooting and I thought it would be fun to arrange a clay shoot for them. After messaging a few chums, it grew legs. One press release and a few posts on social media later and the clay shoot was sold out. Thirty Guns joined ‘my day out for friends’ and Glad Rags…

It’s safe to say the majority of shoots nowadays release birds bought in from a reliable game farmer at six to eight weeks of age. Some estates do, of course, maintain laying pens and collect eggs from the stock therein before incubating, hatching and rearing their own but they are, I venture to suggest, in the minority. It’s usual practice for gamekeepers and/or shoot captains to place their order with the game farm as soon as the shooting season has finished. There are several advantages in this; some obvious, some not. The game farmer has to have some indication of how many poults are likely to be required by their clients – and approximate delivery dates – so as to ensure sufficient eggs are hatched and there is an adequate…

Earlier this year, Shooting Gazette and other magazines published by Future PLC launched the ‘Why We Shoot’ campaign. It is no surprise. Those who are passionate about shooting are eager to publicise its many benefits to the economy of our countryside, to its landscape and to wildlife conservation. Some previous initiatives mostly preached to the converted but it is great news that Why We Shoot offers much greater scope. Sharing good ideas, reports of concerted local effort and new initiatives encourages others in the shooting community to do likewise, but the real challenge is ramping up the volume of our message to others. The success of campaigns also depends on ‘image’ and the target audience. A range of surveys suggest that around 70% of the UK population is unconcerned about…

During a Yuletide made more fractured and a deal less pleasant by the various constraints placed upon us by the Government, The Back Gun fell to thinking how he had got into shooting in the first place and how he might undertake that challenge today. As in all matters of research, the first port of call was the library and the collection of gamebooks. Often fiction is well out of the door while fact is still doing up its bootlaces, but these tomes do not lie. They faithfully record the peregrinations and results achieved by several generations of family and friends in pursuit of fish, animals and sundry avian species. They make a good starting point. Two generations back, the forebears did not so much have to seek out shooting…

It is not very often that I am surprised by a gun that comes to the shooting school for review. This month's gun, the Fausti XF4 .410 with 32in barrels, was a pleasant surprise and partially changed my mind about using the bore size for game shooting. I am adamant that game Shots should be safe and reasonably competent and don’t believe .410s give much margin for error, so aren’t ones I’d recommend to a client in normal circumstances. When any of us are shooting it should be our intention to kill cleanly and the .410 needs to have the ballistic capability to kill cleanly consistently. Of the thousands of clients we see at the shooting school each year, I can only think of two who shoot with .410s; they…

We have an image problem By Ben Samuelson Our sport suffers from more than its fair share of stigma. In the days when I wrote CVs, I would happily put shooting on my list of interests. Now, I’m not so sure. Shooting is perceived as being exclusively for middle-aged white men (OK, like me). The Corbynistas would say shooting is the snobbish preserve of the redcorderati… While this may have once been the case, I am delighted to say that it isn’t anymore. One of the finest Shots I know is also the mater familias of an eight-child household. I shoot with a lady in Oxfordshire who shoots beautifully and runs one of the finest gundogs I’ve ever had the privilege to disappoint. My 16-year-old daughter is as keen to…

The Legacy Funded Scholarship Programme run by BASC to help people interested in developing their knowledge of conservation, land management or gamekeeping is now open for this year’s applications. The scheme, launched in 2019, offers successful applicants a maximum of £4,500 per year towards tuition fees or study materials. Curtis Mossop, BASC’s head of pathways to shooting, said: “Through BASC’s legacy fund, this scholarship programme is able to make a substantial difference to those wanting to further their education. Through the devastation of the past year, this programme offers an opportunity into a future of land management that might have otherwise been out of reach.” One of last year’s scholarship recipients, Charlie Newman, said: “I am so incredibly grateful to BASC for this opportunity. The scholarship has enabled me to…

The pandemic may have brought the game shooting season to a halt but it has not stopped Longthorne Gunmakers from unveiling its trigger-plate boxlock range. The range, developed and made in the UK, features the gunmaker’s innovative patented barrels (game or sporting), Longthorne chokes (extended and flush), an adjustable comb mechanism and recoil pads. Longthorne’s marketing director, Elaine Stewart, said: “We are really very happy with this range. It’s taken a while to pull it all together, especially given the current situation; we have made lots of design improvements along the way and we believe the finished product has been worth all the effort. We hope our customers do, too.” For more information, visit: longthorneguns.com…

Adam Hudson and Mark Eddon set up Sporting Situations on the latter’s family farm near Pickering, North Yorkshire, in late 2019. Alongside the shoot’s let days are ones which will be of interest to anyone interested in participating in game shooting, namely its 50-bird novice driven game days. Entering this side of game shooting and learning the etiquette of a driven day can be daunting if you don’t know where to start. Some people will just be too worried to take their first step to booking a day’s shooting for fear of embarrassing themselves, or even worse, shooting unsafely. I’m sure we can all remember our first day out in the field and wondering just which of the approaching birds was ours to shoot. Sporting Situations wants to promote best…

DR AL GABRIEL BASC council member “Despite general misconceptions about the elitist nature of fieldsports, it is actually a welcoming and inclusive community. I speak from personal experience as an ethnic minority. The image of shooting is changing: social media in particular has really helped to showcase the best of fieldsports and helped like-minded people to discuss and organise events. While social media can be dangerous when used inopportunely, I am always pleased to see new shooting groups and ladies’ days being organised throughout the country. Game cooking, country fashion and the outdoors have injected a slice of enthusiasm into our way of life. “I regularly arrange deer stalking days for ladies and novice stalkers free of charge to ensure people get stalking opportunities. Similar opportunities were offered to me…

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Many moons ago, when I would busy myself by hanging around on the BASC stand at some show or other, it was possible to guess what people would want to ask. If the wind was in the right direction and we’d had a good breakfast, we would even know the answer. There was one question that I dreaded, though, and that was, “How can I get out and go shooting?” This was a really tough one for my colleague and I, because it was invariably asked by just the sort of person who we felt ought to be out shooting but clearly wasn’t: enthusiastic, young, someone who had a wage and wanted to get into something they had always liked but had lacked opportunity. We would advise them to ask…

Twelve months ago, on the Petworth estate, we were faced with three choices when lockdown was first announced: proceed with business as usual, reduce the number of birds we released or close the shoot, either permanently or for the season. We ended up with a much-reduced season; November and January were a great loss but at least we got to shoot, keep our syndicates, gamekeepers and beaters together and enjoy a much-limited sport. “The consequences of millions of released gamebirds wandering are both dire for ecology and expensive, for they must be fed.” We now find ourselves in a similar position, facing similar choices. To those of you who went full steam ahead, I’m afraid to say I think you got it wrong and in some cases are now left…

On 3 February 1877, Henry Tolley took out patent no 461 encompassing various improvements such as a self-cocking gun. It also included the famous Tolley Giant Grip locking mechanism. During this period there were many inventions to provide additional locking of the barrels to the top of the breech in conjunction with the standard Purdey double bolt or Jones under-lever. As far as Tolley was concerned, an extra grip was important for its big-bore guns. I have been unable to ascertain who Henry Tolley was as the family consistently used the names of William, James and Henry for all their children. I suspect that Henry Tolley was the son of either James or William, the founders of the firm. In the Giant Grip, there was a large extension to the…

The Volkswagen Group is a mighty behemoth, even by the standards of the automotive sector, producing everything from Ducati motorbikes to MAN trucks, Lamborghini supercars to Skoda runabouts as well as Audis, SEATs, Porsches and Bentleys. And, in all the time that I have worked in the industry, the insider gossip has always been that the very highest-flying engineers in the whole group are not the ones developing the 300mph Bugattis or Le Mans-winning Porsches, but the guys developing the next generation of VW Golf. The new model is the eighth generation of the most significant car in the European marketplace, and you can understand its importance when you realise that it finds its way on to half a million driveways across the Continent each and every year – well,…

Nobody said that managing the countryside was easy. Some less rational groups who don’t have that responsibility believe that they know more about the job than everyone who has ever come before and demand to have their views trumpeted, often at a volume inversely proportionate to their value. Free speech is fine in a democracy, a concept that is by its very nature not neat, orderly or quiet, but requires an appetite for confusion. But when the language and conceits of minorities stray into the realms of fantasy, then any good they might contain becomes outweighed by the irrational bits, which no one takes seriously. Here are a few examples: those striving to reintroduce apex predators into the countryside to control the deer population while happily acknowledging the attendant concept…

Director for Wales, Countryside Alliance Most of my days are spent at the desk promoting and protecting shooting in Wales. To be given the opportunity to escape from the desk for my perfect day’s shooting is indeed a dream right now, and I would have no hesitation in taking full advantage of the opportunity to make it a week-long event, just a few days either side for travel, enjoyment and recovery. Without a doubt my quarry choice for the day itself would be the majestic red stag and my first ever deer-stalking experience would have to be at Strathvaich Estate in the heart of the Highlands. The estate is around 15,000 hectares and is as wild as the Highlands come. I would pack my bags and head there in readiness…

As the 2020/2021 shooting season came to its end, sadly more with a whimper than a bang, the thoughts of shoot managers, game processors, game dealers, game farmers, agents, veterinarians and Guns turned to assessing where they were and, more critically, where they might be heading. The simple answer is that the future of shooting and stalking in the four countries of the Union is, in many ways, as shrouded in mist now as it was one year ago when we entered the first lockdown. Against the backdrop of Brexit and the changes that it inevitably brings to how we trade with Europe and beyond, we have faced the ravages of the pandemic and, more particularly, the measures adopted by the Government attempting to arrest its progress. The shooting season…

In 1885, Lt Col George Fosbery VC took out a patent for a rifled choke to create a versatile gun/rifle for use across the British Empire, allowing the gun to be used as a normal shotgun or as an accurate rifle. The portion of the choke that was rifled did not affect the shot pattern yet at the same time this small rifled area was quite sufficient to grip a single bullet and impart considerable accuracy. The invention was bought by Holland & Holland, which gave it the wonderful name of Paradox, and it was an instant success. To evade the patent, a great many makers took out versions of their own, such as Moore & Grey’s Anomaly, Bland’s Euoplia, Army & Navy’s Jungle and Jeffrey’s Shikari. Not to be…

If you are a novice beater or picker-up with a gundog struggling to find a shoot that will accept you, or if you are a shoot which wants to give something back to your community but aren’t sure how, then draw inspiration from the work currently being done by Emma Stevens of Cunningshot Dog Training or Rich and Henry Jones from the Kedleston Estate Shoot in Derbyshire. Emma hosted the first of what are sure to become extremely popular training days, designed specifically to introduce dog handlers to beating and picking-up, at the 4,500-acre shoot last season. Emma already knew Rich Jones and his brother Henry through Emma’s gamekeeper husband Tom, so Kedleston was the obvious choice for the venue to host a day’s training. It is also fitting because…

Q I am struggling with direction work with my spaniel. He seems to get it sometimes but struggles to follow my commands on other occasions. What can I do to improve this situation? A Direction work can be quite difficult to get right when you are instilling it. It is certainly a very important part of the repertoire of working a dog. When you start the exercises, keep your arm outstretched and walk in the direction you are going. In this way, the dog picks up the change in direction easier; there’s no waving of arms as it has to be very distinct. Make sure it is at right angles to the dog and ensure that you have a reasonable distance. A common problem is that owners change direction at…