Innholdsfortegnelse for 01-Feb-2017 i Shooting Times & Country

Are big bags in bad taste? Should every Gun take home game if offered? And should more game be served at shoots? These are concerns raised in our letter of the week (p.10). While I respect our correspondent’s viewpoint, I do feel that it is counterintuitive to our natural freedoms and beliefs. Country people are fighting for their rights to be individuals and to have the freedom of choice to live their way. That is not something that should suffer unnecessary rules simply on the basis that others may not like what we do. If you were a vegetarian, does that mean that you should not harvest game even though that is a pursuit you enjoy? I do not believe we should try to impose rules restricting perfectly acceptable behaviour…

Shooting Times readers are split as to whether sprockers should be recognised as a distinct spaniel breed by the Kennel Club (KC), according to the results of a recent ShootingUK poll. An evenly matched 45 per cent of people believed that the dogs should be recognised by the club, while the same percentage thought they should not. Ten per cent did not mind either way. More than 700 people took the online poll, which was launched following recent claims that a trialling sprocker has been passed off as a cocker (News, 18 January), as well as an article by our gundog expert David Tomlinson in the same issue questioning whether the dog should be recognised. We launched a similar poll on the Shooting Times Twitter feed, where a much larger…

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 21 FEBRUARY BASC YOUNG SHOTS INTRODUCTORY DAY Lains Shooting School, Quarley, Andover, Hampshire Tel 01244 573028 26 FEBRUARY COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE POINT-TO-POINT RACES Badbury Rings, Dorset Tel 07974 141933…

Lavinia Beaumont has passed away Lavinia Beaumont, widow of the Honourable Richard Blackett Beaumont (both pictured), owner of James Purdey & Sons from 1949-1994, died on 20 December, aged 88. Mrs Beaumont, née Keppel, was a descendant of the 2nd Earl of Albemarle, and the younger daughter of Lt Col Arnold and Laura Keppel. When her husband took over the running of Purdey, Mrs Beaumont immediately set about developing a range of Purdey shooting and country clothing and accessories. Her first collection launched in 1973 in premises adjoining the gunshop in Mayfair. We want your pictures If you are heading out on a beaters’ day, send us a picture and we’ll put it in Shooting Times. We want to show shoots up and down the country on this well-earned day…

NEW CARRIER My son Lewi Hughes, aged five, was picking-up at Cwm shoot, Denbighshire, with his new game carrier. Wendy Hughes, by email HAPPY PAIR These are my two dogs (below) — the fox-red is two-year-old Charlie and the black is one-year-old Bob. S. Kavanagh, via Facebook PROUD DAD This is my eight-year-old son Alfie (below) on his first time beating. I am as proud as punch! J. Grainger, by email TOP JOB I wanted to share this wonderful picture (top right) of my four-year-old daughter Jaymi-Leigh helping on my father and uncle’s shoot in Sussex. Her favourite job is rolling up the sulin line at the end of the shoot. Encouragement at this age is vital to keep the local shoots going. Natalie Buckman, by email FIRST PHEASANT This…

Nawton shoot captain and gamekeeper Brian Simpson is a full-time detective with North Yorkshire Police who fills every spare hour after his day job working on the shoot. He is the proud owner of a couple of tractors and old drills that he uses to prepare and sow the shoot’s 13 acres of mixed covercrops. One of the tractors is used on shoot days to tow the beaters’ trailer. In previous years the shoot relied on feed hoppers and varied covercrops to hold birds close to the home woods but there is now a new regime, and it is working. Brian and his helper, Timmy Arnold, line-feed wheat from a quad bike at night throughout the season. “Yes, it’s time-consuming and we feed more wheat than we used to, but…

“There was a lot of dog power and on a 200-bird day I doubt if anything was lost” IF YOU EVER GET the impression that your vet knows little about gundogs and the type of work that they do, you may well be right. For many veterinary practices, owners of genuine working gundogs make up a tiny percentage of the clientele, and unless the vet has a personal interest in gundog work, then there is no reason why he or she should know the subtle differences between a picking-up dog, peg dog or beating dog. This lack of knowledge is no surprise to John Houlton, whose name will be familiar to anyone with a serious interest in the health of working Labradors. He is a leading authority on small animal…

Country lore used to have it that seeing gulls inland was a sign of bad weather at sea, but these days herring gulls seem to be as happy to live in our cities as they are in fishing ports. Presumably the belief goes back to the time when “earth stood hard as iron” during the winter months, and well before rubbish tips and conveniently placed reservoirs provided the key feeding and roosting sites that gulls appreciate. Though black-headed gulls are the most numerous of our winter gulls, there are significant numbers of herring gulls, too. Tighter management of tips has reduced flock size but herring gulls now scavenge in cities and on pig fields. These large gulls, with their silvery-grey backs, form multinational gatherings in the winter. The largest number…

“Fred had acted as a cuckoo in the nest, scooping shooting offered in friendship” Most shooters are decent people. But human nature is what it is, and there are always those who will try to take advantage of others’ goodwill. This happens in many ways, with varying degrees of severity. Let me give you an example. Some years ago, my friend Gerald invited me to Scotland for a few days of inland goose shooting. He had developed a contact at a farm bordering the Tay estuary. Being self-employed, Gerald could get away at short notice. When the geese were in, the farmer would give him a call and up he would go, packing guns and dogs and travelling overnight. Gerald invariably booked his accommodation at the farmhouse, which had B&B…

READ Shooting Times contributor Bruce Potts’s new book Custom Rifles of Great Britain is a must-read for anyone who owns or is planning to buy a modified rifle. Bruce takes readers on the journey of choosing, building, owning and shooting a custom rifle, including all the details — from stock choice to inlays. Published by the Crowood Press, the book is available at an exclusive low price of £24.06, including postage. Visit www.crowood.com and enter “ST Offer” into the website code box when prompted. The offer is valid until 28 February 2017. SHOOT Get out shooting or book a day on the clays with the Scottish Ladies Shooting Club. The non-profit-making club was started three years ago with the intention of getting more women in Scotland into shooting. It has…

Make sure you come to find us at the 2017 British Shooting Show next week to take advantage of an exclusive subscription deal. The annual event is being held at the Stoneleigh Park Exhibition Centre, near Kenilworth in Warwickshire, from Friday, 10 February, to Sunday, 12 February. Some of the biggest names and leading manufacturers, retailers and shooting-related accessories will be among the exhibitors as the show returns for a ninth year. Shooting Times will once again be in attendance and our stand will be located in Gunmakers Hall, Hall 1, Zone 15. We have a special deal, giving anyone subscribing to the magazine at the show a 35 per cent discount, as well as their choice of a free gift. We will be delighted to see you there, so…

THE JOY OF COCKERS I found the cocker championship report (Dotty takes top spot, 18 January) interesting and was pleased that there was a “new” winner. My cockers are primarily pets and I only go beating because the dogs enjoy it. The high standard they can reach in the right hands encourages people like me, leading to more enjoyment on shoot days and a more obedient dog for the rest of the time. There are other benefits of owning a cocker — you get to experience, if not understand, psychology and why one way of training works for one dog and not another. You are rewarded when they do something unexpectedly well, which more than compensates when the opposite happens. In the close season, you continue to hunt with them…

“Andy was up to his waist in the water, trying to extricate his panic-stricken dog from twisted reeds” Disaster can strike so swiftly and without warning. Our modest little DIY syndicate of five Guns and a guest, plus the same number of volunteer beaters, had engaged in, for us, an excellent combined first drive from an acre of the splendid kale and mustard seed mix, called Utopia, and a small but prolific wood. The result: a dozen pheasants had been picked, were braced and suspended on a gate. We are, I confess, late starters and it was approaching 11am when the Guns walked quietly to the pegs around the end of a dense hedge and reed-girt sheet of water in the expectation, or rather the mixed hope, of a handful…

Mike Anderton is helped tremendously on the shoot by his underkeeper Lewis Thompson, as well as his two sons Will and Oliver, who work with their father on breaks from university and school. “Swinside is the main wood at Lingholm, we can feed birds up into there and fly them back,” said Mike. “When we extended the shoot, we felled some blocks of Sitka spruce and larch and let these naturally regenerate, creating warmer woods with better cover. The drives at Lingholm have been created by watching where birds fly off the steep sides of the fell, then creating pen areas below. “We have experimented a lot over the years and all our birds are fed by spinning on quad bikes, which allows us to pull them where we want…

The other day I became involved in a discussion as to whether it was acceptable to feed a dog a mixture of raw meat and dry food, as the two take very different times to digest. A check on the internet suggested that a dog will digest raw food in about five to six hours, but dry food takes up to 10 hours or even longer. I’m quite prepared to believe that the two take a very different amount of time to digest, but does that really matter? If I look at the things I eat, I’m sure that many take differing times to absorb, but that doesn’t cause me any problems. I might add that I try to eat a varied and generally healthy diet, with no takeaways or…

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 rifle 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 Times,…

With its slender build, long legs and, in the case of the cock, striking colours, the Old English game is one of the most handsome of fowl. As its name suggests, it is an ancient breed produced originally for cockfighting. When this was outlawed in 1849, the breed’s future was in doubt, but enthusiasts who appreciated its toughness, feisty nature and ornamental looks rescued it. They formed two clubs, one in the north, one in the south, and as a result two types evolved: the Carlisle and the Oxford. The Old English game bantam is a more recent development. The Old English are highly active: they thrive when kept free range and don’t like being confined. They are good flyers, so can easily clear standard poultry fences, and show a…

Members of the Angus Glens Moorland Group have donated funds to the remote Cortachy Primary School so that students can be kitted out in an official school sports kit (as pictured below), rather than borrowed shorts and T-shirts, for the first time in years. More than 300 anglers (some of whom are pictured below) have joined the Voluntary Bailiff Service, run by the Angling Trust and the Environment Agency, to act as the “eyes and ears” on riverbanks in a crackdown on illegal fishing. Air pollution levels have reached “very high” or “high” in eight regions across the UK, according to DEFRA. The worst areas are central London, the South East and eastern England. The Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, the charity that provides financial assistance to people…

I am increasingly concerned about the number of 400-plus bird days I hear about. Please don’t think I am in the least jealous: I can only wonder we are losing any sense of what is distasteful. It was not long ago that a 200-bird day was considered a “big day” and bordering on the excessive. I wondered if Shooting Times might like to debate what is an excessive day? If we don’t curb this, I believe we are playing into the hands of the anti-lobby, who will doubtless find support with the public if they became aware of it. With this number of birds being shot, I would like to see shoots publish the percentage of their bag that goes for human consumption. That would be a great quality “kitemark”.…

“Foxes nobbled one or two poults as they normally do, but we didn’t have any mass kills” I hope you all had a good season. Ours was mixed; the poults did well when they went to wood, diseases were practically non-existent and we hardly lost a poult to the weather. Foxes nobbled one or two as they normally do, but thankfully we didn’t have any mass kills or anything get into the pens. Straying was about average and the birds certainly wandered less than last year, which didn’t mean we dogged-in less, it just meant it took less time as there were fewer for us to push back. We had a nice number of birds building up in the drives when we started, they were flying well, everything was looking…

That’s another shooting season over and done with. As much as I enjoy being out shooting and working the older dogs, it is time to get back to some serious training with Dolly and Logan, the two springer spaniels, and Remy, the yellow Labrador. Over the past few months I have really been concentrating on the spaniels, working on developing a close hunting pattern and some basic retrieving, but now it is time to start training some directional handling. Remy has been having some time off and I haven’t been doing very much with him. He is growing into a well-built dog but is very immature compared with the spaniels. I am going to start working on some short memory retrieves combined with sending him back. Some people question whether…

Latin name: Chrysosplenium oppositifolia Common name: Opposite-leaved golden saxifrage How to spot it and where to find it: Golden saxifrage grows in wet flushes or shallow springs, beside streams or on wet mountain ledges. Its bright acid-green adds a splash of colour to a stream or bog and the small yellow flowers open from February until July. It grows up to about 12cm high and has a spreading habit, which means it can form “mats” several metres wide that give a bright yellow sheen to boggy ground. It is most commonly found in western Britain, favouring acid soil, and it becomes scarcer as you travel east. It has a square stem and kidney-shaped, blunt-toothed leaves that grow in pairs, as opposed to alternately like its close relative the alternate-leaved golden…