Innholdsfortegnelse for 19-Apr-2017 i Shooting Times & Country

“Why are we even having this conversation?” asked the imposing figure on the other side of the table, in a tone of bemused exasperation. “I mean, it’s an issue because the press make it an issue. I’ve shot with women all my life and have never thought anything of it.” The imposing figure was Sir Nicholas Soames, whom I was interviewing for our 10 May issue and we were in the midst of a conversation about “women in the field”. Admittedly, Sir Nicholas isn’t known as a beacon of progressive feminism but I started to think his reputation is rather unfair. “Weapons for women?” he laughed when I explained the growing trend of firms making dainty guns for girls and then launching pink and purple advertising campaigns. “How absurd.” I…

Campbells of Beauly, one of the oldest countrywear specialists in the Scottish Highlands, has been granted the Royal Warrant for supply of tailored goods to Her Majesty the Queen. Established in 1858, the workshop in Beauly has been making suits for the Balmoral estate for many years and the company has held previous Royal Warrants, including those for the late HRH the Prince of Wales and HM the Queen Mother. Business co-owner John Sugden said: “[I am] absolutely delighted for all the team here at Campbell’s as this is such a wonderful reward for all their hard work and attention to detail. Many of the team have worked here for over 20 years and this is the perfect recognition for their dedication and loyalty.”…

22-23 APRIL EAST ANGLIAN GAME & COUNTRY FAIR Euston estate, Thetford, Norfolk Tel 01263 735828 29-30 APRIL THE DEERSTALKING FAIR Black Isle Showground, Muir of Ord Tel 07774 127467 6-7 MAY NORTHERN SHOOTING SHOW Yorkshire Showground, Harrogate, North Yorkshire Tel 01472 809727 13 MAY 2017 COUNTRYSIDE CLAY SHOOT Six Mile Bottom estate, Cambridgeshire Tel 01283 810910 21 MAY BENELLI SP’AUTO CHAMPIONSHIPS Southdown Gun Club and Shooting School Tel 01903 877555 24 MAY BASC & GWCT SHOOTING FOR THE FUTURE COURSE Allerton Project Visitor Centre, Loddington, Leicestershire Tel 01425 651013…

Jonathan Djanogly, the Member of Parliament for Huntingdon, was elected as the chairman of the British Shooting Sports Council (BSSC) at its recent Annual General Meeting. Mr Djanogly is a keen Shot and stalker. He succeeds Sir Peter Luff in the role. The BSSC is an umbrella group for shooting organisations throughout the UK, whose membership includes — among others — the Countryside Alliance, BASC, the Clay Pigeon Shooting Association, the Gun Trade Association and the National Rifle Association.…

Question: when is a dachshund not a dachshund? When it’s a teckel. The dachshund started as a German hunting dog, but selectively breeding over the past 200 years — typically for pets and the show ring — has produced dogs in different sizes with smooth, long or wire coats. “Dachshund” translates as “badger dog” and they were bred originally for going to ground after badgers, but they were also used for both flushing above ground and tracking wounded game. They were — and many still are — a remarkably accomplished sporting dog. The cute appearance of the dachshund is misleading, for even miniature dachshunds retain a strong hunting instinct, as many a pet rabbit has discovered to its cost. The word “teckel” is loosely interchangeable with “dachshund”, but in its…

 Pigeon shooting coming out of the winter months has been sporadic to say the least. There has been an abundance of many food sources to keep pigeon populations going and in some areas it has felt like the birds have disappeared. However, this is not the case – it is simply that the winter flocks have disbanded and with the various food sources around, the density of pigeons in an area can feel very low. “The fi rst early drillings in my area were nonstarters, with no interest shown by the birds” My own recent pigeon shooting has been very varied, from small outings on clover and backward rape — which is rape that is behind in its growth —to a couple of very good outings on late flailed maize.…

What’s not to like about pigeon? A quick and easy-to-find source of protein, it has a deep, gamey flavour and, when properly prepared, it is wonderfully tender. This recipe is one of the quickest and simplest ways of enjoying it, taking just minutes to put together. Pigeon doesn’t suit being too well done, so the accompanying fat and flavours of the surrounding bacon and chorizo ensure it remains tasty and succulent. The tomatoes add a sharp, juicy contrast, but you can also use mushrooms or slices of pepper. WOODPIGEON, BACON AND CHORIZO KEBABS Ingredients 3 WOODPIGEON BREASTS, EACH CUT INTO FOUR SLICES 3 STREAKY BACON RASHERS CUT IN HALF HALF A 250G COOKING CHORIZO SAUSAGE 10 TO 12 CHERRY TOMATOES OLIVE OIL CHILLI FLAKES 2 TO 3 SPRIGS OF FRESH…

“Rumour had it the thing had been across on D-Day and the holes in the cab had been put there by the Wehrmacht” The trouble with beaters is that they have to be transported between drives. Many shoot owners wish they could simply press a button and teleport them to the start line. It’s even worse when you have to ferret out the team who have been sitting comfortably in a barn or hut during the lunch hour and now have an afternoon facing thicket and thorn in the pouring rain. Nowadays, health and safety dictates that beaters are conveyed in vehicles which have covers over them, self-locking gates and high sides. This was not always the case. The first shoot where I was a gamekeeper had a line of…

If you are an animal in trouble in the countryside, the last bird you’d want to hear is a raven. It is the original harbinger of doom and that reputation is not without good cause. It is by some distance the largest of the crow family and is easily capable of disemboweling any of our native wild and domestic animals. In common with all members of the corvid family, it is intelligent; in fact size for size it is the most intelligent of the lot. In the past 100 years, the bird has gone from strength to strength, not only in this country but also in many other parts of the world. It has been recorded at above 20,000ft in the high mountain ranges. Ability to adapt The demise of…

Latin name: Hyacinthoides non-scripta Common name: Common bluebell Other names: Harebell (historic), granfer griggles, cra’tae How to spot it and where to find it: At this time of year, Britain’s woods are awash in a tide of intense blue, as our favourite native flower bursts into bloom. By flowering in early spring, it makes the most of sunlight that reaches the forest floor before the trees come into leaf. The UK has half the world’s bluebell population and it can be found all over the country in grassland, heath, scrub and hedgerows. The bluebell is under threat from a Spanish variety, which has blue pollen; the British version’s is creamy white. Interesting facts: In the Bronze Age bluebell glue was used to attach feathers to arrows (fletching), while bluebell sap…

There are five solid red breeds of cattle native to England: Devon, Sussex, South Devon, Lincoln red and the red poll. The modern red poll is descended from the Norfolk red and the Suffolk dun, both of which are now extinct. The former was a meat breed, the latter chiefly a dairy cow: the red poll was developed as a dual-purpose breed. When the red poll herdbook was formed in 1874 it was agreed that the breed should be deep red in colour. Today the red poll joins with the Suffolk sheep and the Suffolk horse to form the so-called Suffolk trinity, the county’s signature livestock breeds. The Red Poll Cattle Society was founded in 1888 and is still actively promoting the red poll for its beef and milking qualities.…

“Hedgehog numbers have collapsed by 97 per cent since 1950. Does anyone smell a giant stripey rat?” I see from the obituary columns that Major Hedgehog has passed away. I mean Major Adrian Coles MBE, who gained his moniker after years of tireless campaigning on behalf of the spikey critters. Major Coles had a commendable record as an Army officer and later as a local councillor. He founded the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) in 1982. He became a Chelsea pensioner and died peacefully on 23 March at the Chelsea Hospital, aged 86. There was something delightfully British about Major Coles. The same could be said about the BHPS, which does good work. I like hedgehogs. As a result of BHPS’s advice, I have ensured that all my cattle grids…

BASC has donated £7,000 to a conservation scheme to take youngsters on to Yorkshire’s grouse moors. North Yorkshire Police has already given £3,000 from their Police Property Fund to enable hundreds of six to 11-year-olds to visit the moors, help with conservation tasks and learn about the region’s unique habitats and wildlife (News, 22 March). The additional support from BASC’s legacy fund will enable more schools to take part and will allow the scheme to run into a second year, with support from a number of local partners, including the North York Moors Moorland Organisation.…

The Wessex Inter-Shoot Challenge, a biannual event for shoots, large and small, is being on Saturday, 6 May at Chitcombe in Dorset. Teams of three Guns will compete for the Saffey Champness Grey Partridge Trophy and the Sportarm Ladies Trophy, with all proceeds being shared between the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. Entry is £40 a head (£120 per team) and you can request an entry form from Chris Vallance — contact him by tel 01258 820497 or email: chris. vallance1@btinternet.com.…

 NO BRITISH MAMMAL has suffered such a catastrophic decline in the past 30 years as the water vole. Once widely distributed throughout the whole of mainland Britain, this water-dwelling rodent has undergone a site loss of at least 94 per cent. The reason for the population crash is simple: mink. Water voles evolved in a mink-free environment and struggle to survive alongside such a voracious predator. “Weaning Stig off game scent and getting him to concentrate on voles wasn’t easy” In many regions mink populations have now been brought under control due to the use of mink rafts pioneered by the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. However, locating surviving water vole populations is a real challenge for researchers. It is slow and often tedious work, but no one had found…

A TIME TO REST AND TAKE STOCK Our ferrets are deep into their season. Sporting ferreters have curtailed their activities and are thinking about breeding and general ferret welfare during the summer months. I am still ferreting. Working ferrets together while starting to break down into season tests your patience because they are not the same beasts from a month ago. I have to accept this and prepare a team to overcome hormone-driven obstacles. The jills that I have worked and selected to further my line will be mated with the appropriate hob once fully in season and rested. I have certain criteria that I look for to improve my line: both parents must be well tested in the field, be driven yet easily handled in any situation. I prefer…

“Ravens are bold birds; we want them to be wary of man, which would save waders” Grouse counts for the spring were completed in March and keepers will be hoping for good weather in the coming months. Incidentally, the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) sometimes offers this service free of charge. It is a useful tool for tracking how well your stock has survived over the winter and how many pairs are in the square kilometre transect. Over time this builds into a valuable record. The keeper is always better armed with as much information as possible when he talks to people about managing his moor. Last year the Moorland Forum published the results of its study into how we might better protect our declining waders from predation. With…

Permanent hide hints PIGEON SHOOTING Q I’m thinking about putting in some permanent hides at home. Could you advise on what would be the best materials from which to build these hides? A Permanent hides are great and if located properly on good pigeon farms can reduce a lot of time setting up. However, the location of a permanent hide is key and it will be affected by crop rotations year on year. I used to have a couple of permanent hides at home located under reliable flightlines and reliable roosting woods. It is possible to put a short-term permanent hide in for the year and this is something I’ve done around gamestrips. Good permanent hides can be created using various materials. Bale hides make great permanent hides but it…

ATTEND The Gamekeepers Welfare Trust is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a series of Gamekeeping for Life conferences. The next event is being held at Floors Castle in Kelso, Roxburghshire, on 25 April, and the keynote speaker is Lord Dalhousie. The final event will be at Sparsholt College, Hampshire on 3 May. COUNT The Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust’s (GWCT) annual Partridge Count Scheme is well under way. Farmers, landowners and gamekeepers are asked to spend a few hours counting wild grey partridges. The information received will help the GWCT understand what is holding back grey partridge recovery. Visit www.gwct.org.uk/pcs to take part. GIVE EVIDENCE Natural Resources Wales has launched a review into the use of firearms on land it manages and the deadline for evidence is fast…

Gunmaker marks 60 years in business C. H. Haygarth & Sons in Caithness, Scotland’s oldest practising family-owned gun and riflemaker, is celebrating its 60th anniversary in business this month. The firm was formed by the late Colin Haygarth after moving to the county in April 1957 from his native Wirral and is today run by his son Ross. NGO annual general meeting next week The National Gamekeepers’ Organisation (NGO) is holding its annual general meeting next week on Wednesday, 26 April at the Stonebridge Golf Centre in Coventry. The meeting begins at 10am and members are asked to contact the NGO office if they are able to attend, tel 01833 660869. English Open returns to Suffolk Highwaymans Shooting Ground in Suffolk is hosting the 2017 English Open English Sporting from…

I was late coming to dogs. As a serving police officer I knew that I could not devote the time and commitment to having one. I barely had time enough to go beating one day a week in the season. Then one day my partner (now my wife) said that there was an English springer spaniel in need of a home. He had belonged to an elderly couple and had become homeless following the death of one of them. We went to “have a look”. He was big, handsome and very wary of men. He would need to have a lot of time and commitment. I was a police officer; my partner a nurse. It was surely too much to ask. We looked at each other, then back at the…

1 Be diligent with your recon: pay careful attention to how the birds are feeding on the ground. 2 Make sure that you represent what you’ve seen when decoying and replicate a realistic feeding situation. 3 Timing is everything: trust your instincts and don’t risk letting fields build for too long — one day maximum. 4 The best time for shooting a drilling: if you’re out and setting up by 11am, you can expect to hit your main feeding period from 1pm onwards.…

I had a good laugh recently. First, there was a great story in the Telegraph about a polar bear named Lirpa Loof that had been seen on North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. The article explained that it had come from Svalbard and that thousands of barnacle geese make the journey every year, so why not a polar bear? It went on to suggest that bears could one day head south to Glasgow, where they “would likely be able to survive by scavenging the city’s bins for discarded haggis”. Then there was fascinating advertisement in The Times, with a picture of an Irish setter with the wind in its ears. Apparently, the new BMW dDrive dog basket, equipped with a revolutionary TwinPower Turbo fan, “is designed to satisfy the unspoken…

It was a request from a friend to mount a set of antlers to be hung in a restaurant that got me thinking... A good set of antlers from one of the larger species of deer weigh several pounds; those, say, from a red stag with a hint of park blood can easily be in excess of 10lb. This means when mounted on a shield they need to be secure. The idea of them becoming detached at an inappropriate moment when hung high on a wall might not turn out to be particularly amusing. The request for the restaurant job was not only that they should be safely attached to the shield but that they must appear neat and tidy without the clutter of exposed screw heads or obvious mechanical…

“The camera had confirmed what I wanted to know: that there was a dog fox active in the vicinity of the spinney” I have been intrigued by the mysterious deaths of two little birds, which must be linked. I was wandering along a well-used run that skirts the edge of a meadow, on my way to check a camera trap on the shoot. The camera is located in a small boggy spinney, and set about 10ft up a crack willow, overlooking a smaller one, that has snapped and fallen across a deep water channel, known to us locals as “Pike Alley”. The natural bridge that the fallen willow has formed is often used by foxes, badgers and otters and it has become a favourite perching spot for a pair of…

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,…

For those of us who live in East Anglia and the south-east of England, the arrival of the first willow warbler is always a happy event. Its fluting descending series of notes is a joyful sign that summer is really on the way. But why do we hear so few of these once-common birds? A recent paper by Dr Catriona Morrison of the University of East Anglia and the British Trust for Ornithology shows that there are too few good breeding seasons in England to boost numbers, probably because the weather and land management changes have affected insect supplies. Birdwatchers are recording far more willow warblers in the north of Scotland and Northern Ireland, where warmer springs have increased the length of the nesting season and improved breeding success. The…

1 BARREL 20-bore with 26in barrel, options included up to 32in barrel and raised rib. 2 STOCK normally pistol grip, this gun sports a straight-hand stock 3 ACTION pump action, bottom eject, tubular under-barrel magazine 4 DECORATION none on this gun but an option on more exotic models An enthusiast of American shotguns I know went almost misty-eyed when mentioning the Remington Model 17. His fondness for it was a similar sort of yearning shown for the years of lost youth. I was amazed. After all, I thought, it’s just a mass-produced pump-action shotgun. But as I came to learn, it is something special. The Remington Model 17 was another design that owed its conception to the genius of John Moses Browning,…