Innholdsfortegnelse for 25-Jan-2017 i Shooting Times & Country

When boots scrunch as you tread the frost-encrusted earth and freezing wind bites your face, it’s a true harbinger of late January and the final days of the season. For many it is the best time; after hard work in all weathers, beaters and other helpers are rewarded with a chance to see the birds fly towards them instead of away, and hopefully put right what many a Gun missed on previous days. On Saturday I’ll be joining Shakey, the two Bobs and keeper Ray on the Rockstead shoot for their beaters’ day. This is a time of celebration as the final harvest will be reaped to the benefit of those who created and nurtured it. I look forward to working hard to offer some good sporting birds, then enjoying…

On Sunday, 8 January, William “Bill” Fenwick died aged 93. Bill trained as a gamekeeper for four years from the age of 14, before being called up for National Service where he served in Lord Lovat’s Scouts Regiment. After World War II, Bill took over from his father as headkeeper at Camphill in North Yorkshire for 16 years, before heading south to be headkeeper for HM the Queen at Windsor in the Great Park, having seen the job advertised in Shooting Times in 1964. Bill’s wife Nancy later took on the role of looking after the Royal corgis, which formed a special relationship between the couple and the royal family, mainly based around dogs, shooting and friendship. Nancy died in 2015 — they had been married for 67 years —…

28 JANUARY BASC MINK CONTROL TRAINING COURSE Woodland Skills Centre, Bodfari, Denbighshire Tel 01244 573029 31 JAN – 5 FEB JAGD & HUND HUNTING TRADE FAIR Rheinlanddamm, Dortmund, Germany Tel +49 (0)231 12040 4 FEBRUARY GWCT HIP FLASK CHALLENGE Fardonfields Farm Shop, Market Harborough, Leicestershire Tel 07808 062441 5 FEBRUARY SCOTTISH LADIES SHOOTING CLUB EVENT Cluny Clays, Kirkcaldy, Fife Tel 07971 547826 10 FEB – 12 FEB THE BRITISH SHOOTING SHOW 2017 Stoneleigh Park, Warwickshire Tel 01258 857700 16 FEBRUARY KEEPERS CHOICE GAME & COUNTRYSIDE CONFERENCE Cokethorpe School, Witney, Oxfordshire Tel 01489 780033…

New members join Woodcock Club Nicholas Fenner and Richard Thurlow have become the latest members of the Shooting Times Woodcock Club. Mr Fenner, from Topsham, near Exeter in Devon, and Mr Thurlow, from Airmyn, near Goole in East Yorkshire, earned membership through the achievement of shooting a right-and-left at woodcock before two witnesses. As members, they will receive a certificate and a badge and an invitation to the annual Woodcock Club dinner. The 34th annual Shooting Times Woodcock Club Dinner will be held at Crowcombe Court in Somerset on Saurday, 22 April 2017. Tickets are priced at £85 per head for the three-course black-tie event, which includes wine and champagne. To secure your tickets for what promises to be a superb evening, members can telephone 01252 555123 to speak to…

“There is no mention in village history of Robin Hood or one of his friends stopping by for a pint” In many ways Laxton is little different to hundreds of other DIY syndicates dotted up and down the country. For a start, members of the Nottinghamshire shoot come from all walks of life and bag size lags a long way behind the main aim of the day — having a fun time with friends. And like so many other shoots, the day always starts and finishes with breakfast and a hearty dinner in the village pub, the Dovecote Inn, owned by David and Linda Brown. The 12-strong syndicate (full and half-Guns) shoot six days, beginning with partridges in mid-October and ending with a final festive bang-up between Christmas and New…

“It was the German officer’s job to lead his men rather than taking potshots at the enemy with his pistol” I must have been a good boy in 2016 because Father Christmas left me something under the tree. It was a pistol-shaped parcel containing a 10.66mm (.44in) German Modell 1883 Reichsrevolver, in its original holster. Though the individual German states and the subsequent Second Reich had excellent firearms, pistols were never considered important. The Germans took the view that few soldiers really needed them and it was an officer’s job to lead his men rather than taking potshots at the enemy with his pistol. Consequently, little attention was paid to pistols by the German military until the early 20th century. This was in direct contrast to the US, which issued…

“Manage the habitat sympathetically, allow an angler a brace for the pot and encourage catch and release” In 2015 the National Trout & Grayling Strategy was implemented on rivers in England and Wales. It had been a decade or more in the making, was the cause of much discussion and ultimately required all brown trout used for stocking our rivers to be sterile. Apply the logic behind the strategy to other walks of life and there would be a ban on feeding birds in the garden; coarse fishermen would not be allowed to use ground bait; and each pheasant released by a shoot would have to be both sterile and marked in some way so that only the released birds are shot. It is all about preserving the spawning health…

Latin name: Lamium purpureum Common name: Red deadnettle Other names: Purple archangel, French nettle How to spot it and where to find it: A common plant of roadside verges, waste grounds and field edges throughout the UK, red deadnettle grows to a height of around 20cm-25cm. It has a long flowering season, with its pink-purple flowers appearing from as early as February until as late as November. The leaves often have a purple-grey tinge to them, while the stem has a square cross-section. The uppermost leaves can become a deeper purple-red when the plant grows in areas where it is more exposed to strong sunlight. Red deadnettle is a member of the mint family and like other members of the deadnettle family, such as yellow archangel, its hairy, heart-shaped leaves…

“When it comes to the environment, high-minded principles don’t preclude low tactics” The reputation of registered charities has taken a battering over recent years. Surveys have shown that they no longer enjoy the levels of public trust that they once did. And the big animal charities — as typified by the RSPCA — have arguably led the spiralling descent down the plughole. The Countryside Alliance (CA) deserves much of the credit for exposing the unacceptable face of the RSPCA. In doing so, the CA took on a mighty foe that many, in years gone by, would have considered unassailable. But the CA was only telling the truth — albeit telling it well. There was a good deal of underlying substance to the CA’s claims, and once these matters were exposed…

ORDER Matching the Hatch, Pat O’Reilly’s essential 1997 guide to selecting the right fishing fly for the right occasion, has been revised for a new pocket edition. Due out next month, the book features all the same valuable information and remarkable photography as the first edition, but with 20 years’ more experience for Pat to draw from. Available from Quiller Publishing, for £12.95, from 16 February. SEND US YOUR PICS Are you heading out on a beaters’ day? Send us a picture and we’ll print it in Shooting Times. This well-earned day at the end of the season is a great annual event and we want to show shoots up and down the country in an upcoming issue. Send the images, with captions of who is in the picture, to:…

Chris Packham has come under fire once again after he was forced to retract claims that protected lapwings are being shot in the UK. Posting on Twitter last week, the TV presenter alleged that “despite a 53 per cent decline in lapwings they are still being shot” in an attempt to encourage more people to sign his Parliamentary petition for a moratorium on the shooting of declining waders. Shooters were quick to point out Mr Packham’s mistake — lapwings are not on the quarry list. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust communications director Andrew Gilruth, commented: “[Mr Packham] posted an online message that was so wildly wrong even Donald Trump would blush. To drum up support for an e-petition he stated that lapwings are shot. They are not.” Countryside Alliance head…

IN THE DARK Regarding the colour of a dummy for training (Sporting Answers, 11 January), may I suggest that the owner trains their dog in the dark so that no colour needs to be considered? The dog will use its ears to locate the point of fall by sound and its nose to achieve the find. Try it and see. B. Watcham, by email ANGLING FOR A GOOD DAY OUT In your Editor’s Letter (Happy New Year, 29 December) you refer to Tom Sykes’s experience of going to Scotland to shoot pink-footed geese, failing, but having an enjoyable time, and asks “in what other sport would this be possible?” The answer is: angling. After a day at Bewl Water, an angler asked me how many trout I had caught. I…

“Bone-dry ditches don’t encourage snipe — those darling little birds that make January days special” Anyone that runs a shoot knows that you learn to take the rough with the smooth. No matter how hard you try to show your Guns a good day’s sport, you will have days when everything runs like greased clockwork, and days that don’t pan out as well as you would have liked. Perhaps the local hunt mysteriously gets its bearings wrong and goes thrashing through the wood where you have spent weeks trying to concentrate your pheasants. Maybe driving rain arrives unexpectedly and lashes into the Guns’ faces, rendering them oblivious to the motoring partridges or grouse that whizz over the line, after your sodden beaters worked so hard on the flanks. Or the…

“An easy food source keeps hens fitter while incubating and can double the number of chicks fledged” It is a few years ago now that my wife, Maureen, and I took a summer holiday in the wilds of south-west Ireland. We arrived at our cottage after dark and when I threw the curtains open the following morning, there on the lawn was a strutting cock pheasant — the last bird I would have expected to see in such a place. Over the next few days it became clear that there was a healthy population of wild breeding pheasants, despite the oceanic climate which would have had most keepers writing off wild breeding as a complete washout. So why were they there? It was clear that there were no released pheasant…

“The relaxing of quarantine rules has made it easier to bring in dogs from the Continent” EVERY SEASON I enjoy a day or two brushing — that’s Norfolk for beating — on a shoot where the gamekeeper, Tracie Rickman, is a Hungarian wirehaired vizsla (HWV) enthusiast. Her dogs are brilliant advertisements for their breed, as they are good-looking, steady and responsive workers. They do, however, create some consternation among new Guns who have never seen them before. “What sort of dogs are those, Tracie?” is the usual question. She has to be quick to reply, as the brushers will assure unsuspecting Guns that they are Norfolk lurchers, the affectionate term by which Tracie’s hairy orange dogs are known. I first came across HWVs not long after I started writing this…

New moon for deer hunting STALKING Q I have read that it is easier to stalk deer around the time of the new moon than it is when the moon is full. Is this true and, if so, why? A Deer can see in very low light, but they do need at least some light, whether from artificial sources, such as the glow of street lamps, or from natural sources such as the moon. When the moon is bright, as it is around the full moon, deer are much more likely to feed in the open throughout the night, especially during the short days of winter and when they are under significant hunting pressure. At first light, they can be expected to retreat to cover, where they can lie up…

A twittering flock of long-tailed tits can brighten a walk at this time of year, with birds flitting from bush to bush in search of small insects and seeds. Finding enough food in the short days of winter can be a problem, and you may well see a heap of long-tailed tits on a peanut feeder or on fat balls as they top up on calories before going to roost. Ringing has shown that individuals tend to stay in the same flock, which may include several family members. Numbers are regulated by weather, with cold winters and wet springs depressing populations. As the weather warms, the flocks will break up and pairs will start building their wonderful nests — feather-filled globes of lichen and spiders’ webs. Numbers have increased recently,…

Rural organisations are concerned that the RSPB considers itself to be “at war” with moorland managers, following a highly critical public presentation by one of its senior officers. Speaking to the North of England Raptor Forum in November, RSPB senior upland policy officer Dr Pat Thompson said that certain groups, particularly the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) and You Forgot the Birds, were guilty of a “nasty and insidious” distortion of science around burning and other areas of grouse moor management as part of what he called a “phoney war”. Dr Thompson accused the moorland community of “standing up and taking credit for all sorts of things like blanket bog restoration and the increase in the golden eagle population”, which he said was “a load of nonsense”. He further…

The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust is taking the next digital step with its Big Farmland Bird Count. New software to be rolled out next month will make it easier for farmers to record and access their long-term farmland bird data. Almost 5,000 people tried shooting sports in 2016 using BASC’s ST-2 shooting simulator (below). BASC took the simulator to more than 30 events last year, including game fairs, county shows, courses, schools, political party conferences and national sports roadshows. Three men have been arrested for night poaching in Dorset. They were found with more than 100 dead or injured pheasants in their car, after firing steel shot at a land manager and ramming his car with their own vehicle as they attempted to flee the scene. John Varney, former…

How pleasing to read an article by the late Jack Ivester Lloyd (Vintage Times, 11 January). I always enjoyed his writing, particularly the exploits of his Bagley rat hounds. I was fortunate to meet Jack briefly at a country sports fair in the mid-1970s, when I was whipping-in and subsequently hunting the Stoke Hill Beagles in Devon. Sadly, I think it unlikely that the BBC will ever be broadcasting on radio or television a programme covering any fieldsport as it did in Jack’s day. I feel lucky to have grown up in more enlightened times, when true countrymen such as Jack Hargreaves, Oliver Kite and Phil Drabble were broadcasting. It was always a rush to get home from school in time to watch Country Boy. It is sad that these…

“The tracked vehicle is difficult to get stuck, though some keepers have managed to stick them” In the 1960s, on the estate where I grew up, I used to have to walk six miles to school — three miles downhill in the morning, three miles uphill at night — and when the estate had been shooting I used to gather up the paper cartridges and smell the burned gunpowder. I almost became addicted to the smell. Sometimes, Davey Munro, the headkeeper, could be heard coming in his short-wheelbase Land Rover and he would stop to offer me a lift. The only thing was my wee legs were so short that it was a job to jump up into the front seat. Shoot transport was different from what we have now.…

Fieldsports have been part of 53-year-old Paul Bagnall’s life for as long as he can remember. As a five-year-old he would cycle to all the local farms to ask for permission to work his ferrets. At that time permission was easy to get and not many farmers would refuse a five-year-old on a bicycle — how times have changed. He would work out how far he could do a round trip on his bike in a day and that was the area he would visit. At one time, he had permission to ferret on ground from Woodstock to Henley-on-Thames — try doing that on a bike today! When he turned 15, he got his first shotgun and with his established permissions he was able to “upgrade” his ferreting to roughshooting.…

It had been an exceptionally good day’s sport. The weather was sunny and reasonably mild, despite dire warnings from the forecasters. January cocks can be great flyers and there had been some toweringly high birds, some of which fell, to be speedily retrieved by an outstanding team of picking-up dogs. Everyone was exceedingly friendly, and the sloe gin after the first two drives tasted like nectar. My only disappointment was failing to win the sweepstake. It looked for a long time that I had predicted the winning figure, until one of the beaters arrived with one more bird. It was like losing a game of tennis despite having held match-point. I only had a nine-mile drive back to where I was staying. It was still light and I wasn’t in…

BILL HARRIMAN BASC’s head of firearms and global authority on guns MAT MANNING Airgunner and journalist from the West Country BRUCE POTTS Shooting Times rifl e reviewer and stalker DAVID TOMLINSON Highly regarded writer and ornithologist LIAM BELL NGO chairman, Shropshire gamekeeper and keen wildfowler GRAHAM DOWNING Shooting consultant and sporting author PAUL RAWLINGS Gundog expert and A-panel spaniel judge CHRIS DE CANI Riverkeeper, with specialist knowledge of chalkstreams TONY BUCKWELL Veterinary surgeon with a special interest in gundogs TONY JACKSON A game Shot, keen stalker and former editor of Shooting Times TOM PAYNE Professional shooting instructor and avid pigeon shooter SIMON WHITEHEAD Author, professional ferreter and rabbit controller IAIN WATSON Keen stalker and senior CIC international trophy judge Contact the team Email: stanswers@timeinc.com By post: Shooting…

Many people assume that any white domestic duck is an Aylesbury, a breed that evolved in Buckinghamshire’s Vale of Aylesbury in the early 1800s. However, the Aylesbury has a pink beak and flesh- or orange-coloured legs and today, pure-bred examples have become a rarity. The smaller Pekin, with its orange beak and legs, has become the standard white domestic duck. As its name suggests, the Pekin originated in China, where it is reared outdoors in millions, for the Chinese esteem both their flesh and the eggs of duck more highly than chickens. Today, a Pekin hybrid is the dominant breed in commercial domestic duck production in the UK. Despite centuries of domestication, these duck retain reminders of their mallard ancestry, such as the curly “drakes’ tail” feathers.…