Innholdsfortegnelse for 21-Jun-2017 i Shooting Times & Country

“Oh my goodness. What a charming little cartridge bag,” cooed the PR girl. I looked down then stole a few furtive glances at men around me. She was right. Theirs were much bigger. But I suppose it is because theirs are all about 50 decades newer. Mine would have been sufficient for your average day in the mid-1940s. “Here comes another diatribe about the horror of big bags,” I hear you mutter. Yet the reality is, while I’m happier knocking down grouse over pointers than reaching for another box of squibs on drive six, big-bag days are entirely necessary. In last week’s issue Michael Ford lamented the fact that shooting, once “a sport”, has been turned into a “commercial venture” (Have your say, 7 June). I disagree with the sentiment…

24 JUNE CARTER JONAS CHARITY CLAY SHOOT Goldstones Farm, Ashdon, Essex Tel 07773 779952 26 JUNE GWCT ESTATE WALK Deeping Fen Farm, Lincolnshire Tel 07976 207113 30 JUNE — 2 JULY SCOTTISH GAME FAIR 2017 Scone Palace, Perthshire Tel 0844 776 6777 11-13 JULY GREAT YORKSHIRE SHOW 2017 Great Yorkshire Showground, Harrogate, North Yorkshire Tel 01423 541222 14 JULY FARLOWS AND OUTSIDE DAYS — ONE-DAY INTRODUCTION TO GAME SHOOTING COURSE Stockbridge, Hampshire Tel 01722 780009 19 JULY FESTIVAL OF HUNTING East of England Showground, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire Tel 01733 234451…

Michael Gove moves to DEFRA Michael Gove (below) has been appointed as the new Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, in an unexpected return to cabinet following a post-General Election reshuffle by Prime Minister Theresa May. Mr Gove told Sky News he was “surprised and delighted” at his appointment and would work to ensure rural workers are “at the heart of policymaking”. He takes over from Andrea Leadsom, who has been made leader of the House of Commons. Both ran against Mrs May in the Conservative leadership battle last year. Shooting supplier gets Royal Warrant Trustach Shooting Supplies, based outside Banchory in Aberdeenshire, has been granted a Royal Warrant by HM the Queen. The business, established in 2015, is the UK’s sole distributor for Caledonian Cartridges. Owner…

I’m sure that the working terrier fraternity is grateful to Johnny Bluck for almost singlehandedly restoring the image of terrier work in the UK (Tales of terriermen past and present, 7 June), but that isn’t really what prompts me to write. I’m somewhat confused regarding Shooting Times’s position on the issue of images portraying hunting dogs — or terriers in this instance — and dead quarry, such as rats and foxes. I very much enjoyed the Editor’s article on ratting with terriers (Running with the rat pack, 3 May). I thought the photographs added greatly to the feature. As a middle-aged man who has kept working terriers since the age of 11, I also got a kick from seeing a terrier on the front cover, complete with dead rat. I…

“I didn’t even have a passport when I was put forward for the keeper job in Austria” Austria is not known in sporting terms for its driven pheasant shooting. If you spoke to somebody about hunting in any part of Austria they would probably talk about deer, wild boar and chamois. However, on one estate about an hour north of Vienna, on the Czech border, Steve Weeks, an English keeper from Wiltshire, is changing that. He has already got people talking about driven shooting in this remote corner where western Europe meets east. The Liechtenstein family own a mixed farming and forestry enterprise covering 6,500 hectares, 1,400 of which is set aside for shooting. Steve and his wife Sarah, who is also the underkeeper, are responsible for this family shoot…

Here is a quick and easy recipe that will turn grey squirrel into a tasty treat. It is a twist on Rob Collins’s Southern Fried Popcorn Squirrel, which you will find in his book Recipes from the Hedgerow. My children can’t get enough of the stuff — if only it were so easy to get broccoli down them. Ingredients 4 SQUIRREL THIGHS 1 TABLESPOON FLOUR PINCH OF PAPRIKA SALT AND PEPPER 1 MEDIUM EGG 100G BREADCRUMBS 2 TABLESPOONS VEGETABLE OIL 3 HEAPED TABLESPOONS MAYONNAISE 4 WILD GARLIC LEAVES Four squirrel thighs will make light nibbles for two or three people. You will need eight or 10 thighs, served with chips and salad, to feed four as a main meal. I don’t have the time to make my own mayonnaise, so…

“Sand extraction companies are tolerant of their feathery squatters, even if they have to change plans” When learning to become a bird ringer it is recommended that trainees should acquire as much experience as possible so that they are ready for almost anything when they earn their licences and start to catch birds on their own. My training included catching finches and tits in woodland, rounding up moulting Canada geese, ringing lots of once-common starlings, studying waders on the Wash and making winter roost catches of thrushes. I was also lucky enough to work with a group that met up early on a few Sunday mornings each summer to catch sand martins. Sand martins are the smaller cousins of house martins and swallows, sandy in colour and very much linked…

The Winchester Model 1887 is one of those shotguns that is odd, even a little ugly, but nonetheless a fascinating piece of firearms history. Designed and patented in 1886 by John Moses Browning for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (WRA) to a lever-action specification, the result was a form of rolling block mechanism. Available as either 12- or 10-bore with a 30in barrel, special options included fancy grades of wood, chequering, a 32in barrel and a Damascus barrel option. A few are believed to have been produced with rifling in the choke section. While the standard gun is not that common, the “mare’s leg” variant with 18in barrel (a little longer than the magazine), pistol grip and larger, curved lever for the hand is something of a rarity. They were…

Latin name: Laccaria amethystina Common name: Amethyst deceiver Other names: Common deceiver How to spot it and where to find it: This edible fungus is the most beautiful deep violet when young, fading to pale brown/tan as it ages. Both the gills and the stem are this vibrant colour or a paler lilac. The stem is also purple, with short white hairs. The colour is more intense when it is wet; when dry it can appear greyish. The spoor print of the amethyst deceiver is, perhaps surprisingly, white. It is common throughout the UK and grows in woodland, particularly beech. Interesting facts: The amethyst deceiver has an ectomycorrhizal relationship with beech, which means the fungus forms a sheath around the root tip of the plant followed by a Hartig Net:…

This is the time of year when most greylag geese are flightless; goslings are too young to fly and their parents have dropped their main wing feathers as part of the annual moult. For these few weeks, birds are constrained to lakeside grassland and fields, slipping into the water if there is a sign of danger. Greylag geese breed just about everywhere these days, apart from across south-west England, yet if we look back just 50 years there were very few in England or Wales, and these were in areas close to introduction sites. As Tim Sharrock reported in the 1968-1972 Breeding Bird Atlas: “By 1970 WAGBI [Wildfowlers’ Association of Great Britain and Ireland] had released 938 hand-reared greylags at 333 sites in 13 English and Welsh counties.” I wonder…

SPLASH THE CASH If you have £20,000 to £25,000 to spend, you could be in with a chance of becoming the proud owner of a rare single-trigger Holland & Holland .500/.465 double rifle, which was completed for the Maharaja of Orchha, Pratap Singh, in 1908. Holts Auctioneers’ Chris Beaumont said that this is considered one of the best big game rifles of all time: “Developed in around 1906, the calibre was Holland & Holland’s response to the outlawing in India of the ubiquitous .450 calibre, following the insurrection in India and the Sudan. This example is particularly rare, being made with a single trigger – a very unusual feature on a heavy-calibre double rifle, and, according to the makers, was just the second example they had built.” If you want…

1 Simms Headwaters Pro Stockingfoot waders £399  www.sportfish.co.uk When you’ve got to get wet, you want to do it in comfort and these new three-layer Gore-Tex Pro fabric waders give great mobility and durability. Front and back leg seams reduce abrasion and the built-in belt loop adjusts for the perfect fit. 2 Purdey shooting gunbox From £11,500 www.purdey.com Purdey has teamed up with Robert “Mouseman” Thompson’s Sporting Box Company to produce this unique oak gunbox that will fit into the back of a vehicle. Designed to carry everything from guns and gear to a champagne rack, it holds all the kit you need during and after a day on the peg. 3 Farlows Moorland tweed shooting vest £375  www.farlows.co.uk Hard-wearing waistcoat that comes in a variety of colours. It is…

Predators on the shoot include badgers and foxes, which Steve can legally cull, as well as a whole range of flying predators such as the eagle owl, goshawk, hen harrier, imperial eagle, sparrowhawk, buzzard and sea eagle, as well as black and red kites. “To produce wild birds here is difficult — there are so many predators that will eat them, some of which I am allowed to control and some I am not,” said Steve. “We do what we can and I hope that soon we will start to get some wild broods about too.” Feeders too are different; wild boar are particularly keen on pheasant feed, especially as Steve feeds whole maize. He uses a robust structure that a boar can’t get into but a pheasant can. “These…

 WE ALL KNOW HOW the world of pedigree dogs is fashion driven: flat-faced breeds such as pugs and French bulldogs are now all the rage and the Labrador’s long supremacy as Britain’s favourite pet breed looks set to finish before the end of the decade. I am old enough to remember when the poodle was the most popular breed but today it is unusual to see a pure-bred poodle. The world of working gundogs also changes but usually rather more slowly. “Labradors are easier to train than flatcoats and that was enough to make them the number one retriever” However, that wasn’t the case a century ago because in the space of just a few years the Labrador succeeded in ousting the flatcoat from its dominant spot as the shooting…

“Plenty of good-quality eggs, good hatch rates and little mortality in the birds” I think I spoke too soon. Just as I was starting to feel confident that 2017 could turn out to be a bumper year for wild game, the temperature dropped and it started raining. Not light, warm showers, but cold, hard downpours that have so far lasted for several days. How well our wild stock will do if the rain keeps up, I don’t know. Undoubtedly some will survive but there will certainly be fewer than if it had stayed dry and warm and sunny The pheasants in the laying pen have been unaffected by the recent weather and have laid the best I can remember. They have produced good-quality, fertile eggs and the hatch rate has…

Which HPR for my small farm’s walked-up days? GUNDOG TRAINING Q I have a small farm that has lots of rough areas where wild birds thrive. We have a few walked-up days through the season and shoot wild duck off the river and off ponds as well. We do our own keepering to keep the vermin down and use my two spaniels on shoot days. They are good at flushing but a bit wild; they are not good at finding the birds afterwards and get tired before the day is out. I thought a couple of HPRs of some sort would probably be better for us, but I need advice on which ones are best. A A good HPR that will cover ground freely to locate and point game is…

You can’t blame the pledge on hunting for Theresa Mayhem’s campaign cock-up. Unfortunately, however, fox hunting is now being slated as one of the most toxic parts of the failed Conservative manifesto. Yes, it was only ever a minor consideration for most of the public. But the hunting pledge became totemic. It was raised with candidates on the urban doorstep much more frequently than many had predicted. This was partly because the pledge was interpreted as “going back to tearing foxes apart”. In reality, of course, it was supposed to be about allowing a free vote which might, perhaps, have allowed licensed hunting as envisaged in the aftermath of the 1999 Burns Inquiry. Even before the manifesto was launched, some hunt followers thought that shoving the issue into the face…

A bumper brood of barn owls are nesting on moorland managed for grouse shooting in the Yorkshire Dales. Six chicks were found in good health on Conistone and Grassington estate this month and were all ringed by a British Trust for Ornithology ringer, with help from headkeeper Harvey Wiggins. “We were thrilled to find out such an unusually large brood was nesting in a barn on managed moorland in the Yorkshire Dales,” said Sonya Greenwood, administrator for the Yorkshire Dales Moorland Group. Barn owl numbers have been poorly monitored in recent years, though their numbers are thought to have declined during the past century. The most recent UK survey — carried out between 1995 and 1997 — estimated that there were around 4,000 pairs across the country. Six chicks is…

A pair of distinctive London best shotguns will be reunited after more than a century apart at the Holts auction tomorrow (22 June). These two guns were once used on the same grouse day by two acclaimed shooters — a Boss 12-bore owned by celebrated grouse Shot Reginald Henry Rimington-Wilson, estimated to sell for £6,000 to £8,000, and a Purdey 12-bore owned by famed sportsman and author Sir Ralph Payne-Gallwey, expected to go for £7,500 to £8,500. Both guns were used on the Glorious Twelfth of 1913 on Rimington-Wilson’s Broomhead grouse moor in Yorkshire, when the day yielded one of the largest one-day bags for the British Isles, with an impressive 1,421½ brace. The guns have been reunited at this auction by complete coincidence, after spending more than 100 years…

There are few things more gratifying than taking a walk through the woods on a sunny morning, especially if it is a walk with a gun and a purpose. I recently took a morning stroll on my rounds on one of the estates where I am tasked with keeping grey squirrels in check. The keeper accounts for a fair few with his Fenn traps, but I have had more with my air rifle — well over 150 since last autumn. Unfortunately, our efforts have come too late for the most recent plantation of broadleaf trees. Several acres were planted with oak, sweet chestnut, cherry and field maple 20 years ago, and more or less every tree shows signs of serious squirrel damage inflicted when they were saplings. They vary from…

I am a diligent reader of dog stories, but one I missed earlier this year was a regional map of dog-breed popularity, based on Kennel Club registrations in 2016. As with so many statistics, the results are fascinating but mustn’t be taken too seriously. I wouldn’t mind betting that cockerpoos would score highly in top 10 statistics across the country if they could be Kennel Club-registered. However, I spent an amusing time with an online map of the UK, divided into 10 regions — north-east, north-west south-east, Midlands, east, south-west, London, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — checking out the regional popularity of the breeds. In every region except two the Labrador comes out on top; the exceptions are London and Wales, both of which prefer French bulldogs. Northern Ireland…

“The huts on our beats range from one-star dilapidated to five-star palatial” Though I managed to coax several greedy jack pike from their lairs earlier this season, those magnificent double-figure Atlantic salmon that cruise up the Hampshire Avon each spring and early summer have eluded me. But I have had terrific fun trying to catch one. I have a Saturday rod in a fishing syndicate on the Lower Avon, which is refreshingly unmanicured and unstocked with trout unlike other chalk rivers in the south. The Lower Avon is salmon and coarse fish country and our syndicate water covers four contrasting beats that run for several miles through one of the richest wildlife habitats in Europe. One of the great charms of our water is that it is perfectly fishable without…

Is it a sheep crossed with a hare? With its striking pointed ears, the border Leicester is one of the most easily recognisable of all our native sheep. Its history dates back to the 18th century, when selective breeding by pioneering livestock farmer Robert Bakewell produced a sheep that he called the Dishley Leicester. Dishley blood eventually reached the border counties: the result of cross-breeding with local stock led to the establishment of the border Leicester. By the mid-19th century they were established as far north as Caithness and the first flock book was founded in 1898. The breed has long been known as “the great improver”, as it has an outstanding ability, when crossed with other breeds, to improve their quality. Today, registered flocks can be found all over…