Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-Nov-2019 i Shooting Times & Country

“It’s a sin,” said the picker-up earnestly. We were talking about that most divisive of topics, driven ducks. I didn’t fully agree with him. We’ve all seen examples of flaccid fat quackers that don’t want to lift from a pond but when driven ducks are done well, they can be spectacular. On a walked-up day some weeks previously, I heard another difference of opinion. A friend suggested a shoot lunch should always consist of game, but a local farmer argued that such a practice is tokenistic and the game market isn’t going to be reinvigorated by a few syndicates eating partridge pie. Perhaps they both had a point. It is often said that those who shoot spend their whole time at loggerheads. “Why can’t we just support each other?” someone…

23 NOVEMBER YOUNG SHOTS GAME DAY Bristol, Somerset southwest@basc.org.uk 26 NOVEMBER NOVICES GAME DAY Gloucestershire po.st/noviceGlos 28 NOVEMBER CUMBRIA PUB QUIZ (GWCT) The Plough, Lupton, 07831 831918 30 NOVEMBER SCOTTISH LADIES SHOOTING CLUB 6TH BIRTHDAY EVENT National Shooting Centre, Falkirk po.st/Scotladies 30 NOVEMBER CARCASE & BUTCHERY COURSE Greenlee, Haltwhistle, Northumberland po.st/BASCbutchery 2 DECEMBER AN EVENING TALK ON WOODCOCK Glynllifon Agricultural College, Caernarfon aharrislea@gwct.org.uk…

New dog breed The Kennel Club has announced that the harrier will officially become a breed of dog with effect from 1 January 2020. It will be classified in the hound group on the breed register. According to the Club: “The harrier is an ancient, medium-sized, British, scent hound breed, like a small foxhound but larger than a beagle. The breed was originally used for hunting hares by trailing them and it is believed that this is from where the harrier derived its name — that is ‘hare’ hound.” The Woodcock Club Shooting Times is delighted that Seeland is to.continue its sponsorship of our Woodcock Club Dinner, which will be held in London at the Savile Club next March. Simon Esnouf, who imports Seeland, the hard-wearing Danish shooting brand, commented:…

My daughter Katy (right) is almost 15 years old and has been going shooting with me since she was old enough to walk. Over the past few years she has been a typical girl, spending more time with her friends, glued to her phone and less interested in shooting and working the dogs. I felt a little frustrated and, after I gave her the guilt trip over the past few months, she finally asked to come with me. I am sure you can tell by her face that she really enjoyed being back out, and I enjoyed having her with me. It is so important to spend time with your children, get them away from social media for a few hours and reintroduce them to what they have always loved…

“If your neighbour pricks a bird, you have a duty to finish it off, even if a high pair gets up in front of you” Some years ago at a talk in London, I learned that more than 60 per cent of guns now made by Holland & Holland are over-and-unders. “I wonder if shooting a right-and-left woodcock” — referring to a side-by-side where the front trigger operates the right barrel and the back trigger operates the left — “will ever be known as shooting an over-and-under woodcock,” mused a friend in the pub afterwards. I couldn’t give him much of an answer. But over the years, I have developed some strong feelings about right-and-lefts, both in terms of how to execute them and why becoming obsessed with them can…

Home means different things to different people. Sealskin and reindeer meat, a cosy fireplace, your own bed, a glass of wine, the inside of a car; “Sweet tea, pecan pie, and home-made wine,” as the Zac Brown Band sang in Chicken Fried . Family, food, warmth, comfort, safety, companionship, peace. For a red deer hind and her family, home is all these things too. It’s a dry bed of heather, bilberry bushes, willow scrub, forests, open hills and wooded glades, peat bogs and mountainsides. It’s being surrounded by her kin; aunts, cousins and calves. While stags roam widely, especially during the rut, hinds tend to ‘heft’ to an area. Choosing it as their home and learning every inch of it, they know their patch better than any living being. For…

I must admit that though I thoroughly enjoy eating and cooking grouse, I have never had the privilege of shooting one — here in the UK, anyway — on a traditional driven shoot. The only time I have ever shot grouse was in Finland. However, it was not red grouse but blackgrouse, a species that has been having a tough time in Britain. Last November, I set off to Finland with David Wright from the Fieldsports Channel in pursuit of moose and blackgrouse. Believe it or not, the moose was the easiest of the two — the elusive blackgrouse had us chasing them for two days. First, we didn’t use a shotgun, we used a centrefire rifle. The bullet was a full metal jacket 6.5x55 — yes, that’s correct, a…

Latin name: Oudemansiella mucida Common name: Porcelain fungus Other names: Poached egg fungus, slimy beech tuft How to spot it and where to find it: This eerily beautiful fungus is found only on beech trees, appearing in autumn on dead tree trunks and fallen branches. It is easily identifiable by its white fruiting bodies, which appear from August to November. Under its coating of clear mucus-like slime, the cap is grey, turning whiter with age as it also flattens, becoming less convex. The stem is thin and tough, with a small skirt. Interesting facts: The porcelain mushroom produces its own defence against rival fungi called strobilurin. Studies in the 1980s led to the creation of a safe and effective group of agricultural fungicides using strobilurins, which improved yields of wheat…

This lure is mainly used for big game fishing in the open sea. It targets species such as tuna, marlin and dolphin fish. The ‘skirt’ design protects the hook from weeds, leaving you to fish longer without having to check the lure every cast. It casts like a bullet but is very stable to retrieve. these lures are used around the world to great success in countless shapes and sizes and will no doubt dominate this sector of the industry for many years to come.…

The first three keepers that I interviewed for this new series are full-time professionals. This time, though, I went to visit one of the many thousands of amateur gamekeepers who are the backbone of British shooting. Tom Martin farms 800 acres in Cambridgeshire. His mixed arable, sheep and beef enterprise is also home to his small shoot. He puts down a few hundred pheasants and has a small but healthy population of grey partridges. I asked him how important his conservation work was to him as a farmer. “It is imperative,” he says. “We have a hierarchy of how we do things — first we have to obey the law, secondly we have to make money and thirdly comes environmental measures. In the past, the last point used to be…

Once, after a rather informal and very enjoyable day’s shooting, I attempted to give the gamekeeper a tip, but botched the handover. My fingers were numb and, as a consequence, a rather wet, slippery and solitary banknote flopped to the ground. Instantly, my purported friend said, for all to hear: “Oh look — a fiver!” Cue embarrassment all round. The keeper quickly stuffed the soggy note into his pocket without looking at it, but his face said it all. I started to splutter, but realised there was nothing I could say to defend myself. An unseen ‘mood hoover’ sucked the bonhomie out of the atmosphere, leaving something awkward in its place. For the record, the note was £20. But how would the gamekeeper ever know that, given the random mixture…

Don’t be over tidy in the garden. GARDEN Many gardeners like to “put the garden to bed” at this time of year but seed heads can provide valuable winter feeding for birds, rough patches can shelter hibernating hedgehogs and leaf litter is brilliant for invertebrates. FISH Watch out for migrating fish. Salmon and sea trout will be running into the headwaters of rivers at this time of year and waterfalls can offer spectacular views of them leaping. There are numerous well-known viewing spots, such as the Falls of Shin in northern Scotland, but many smaller streams will have fish running them if you take the time to look.…

WATCH THAT HITCH Seven weeks ago I had the worst dog owner experience in my 45 years of shooting. I am writing this to alert other dog owners of a potential hazard that I never envisaged happening. Returning to my small van after walking my dog and her five-month-old ‘apprentice’ Labrador puppy, I opened the rear doors. The older dog jumped in, the puppy jumped immediately after her and clashed with her. Slipping backwards, her back leg entered the gap between the trailer hitch and bumper, her body went to the ground and her leg fractured. I can’t describe how I felt at that moment. Thankfully, with the great work of an orthopaedic surgeon and after seven weeks of careful minding by my family, especially my wife, the dog has…

I have just finished laying 240 yards of native mixed hedge. Hedge laying is an energy-sapping, manual profession, perceived by many as a quaint throwback to agricultural practices of yesteryear. We tend to charge per yard, with most trying to achieve the historical benchmark of laying a chain — 22 yards — per day as a minimum. I am no Luddite; I wield a chainsaw more often than my billhook to cut pleachers. Rather than waste time and money fashioning my own stakes from cherry or hazel, I use a treated machine-cut variety. My nods to modernity aside, the methodology of hedge laying has remained more or less unchanged over millennia. In 1724, the gardener to the Earl of Essex, Moses Cook, wrote in his catchily titled tome The Manner…

Scottish kites under threat RAPTORS Q We now see reintroduced red kites regularly on our shoot near Inverness, but is there any evidence that these birds were once widespread in Scotland? A At the beginning of the 19th century red kites could be found throughout Britain with the exception of the south-east of England, where they had been eliminated in the 17th and 18th centuries. They were thought to be widely distributed in Scotland up to about the middle of the 19th century, but declined rapidly thereafter as a result of persecution. A few birds survived in Inverness-shire, Perthshire and Aberdeenshire into the 1880s. What was thought to be the last clutch of Scottish red kite eggs was taken in Caithness in 1884 and given to the British Museum but…

The glaucous gull is a true winter bird, appearing out of a snow shower over a stormy sea — or on a rubbish tip with other gulls. An adult glaucous gull looks like a large herring gull but without the black and white markings on the wing tips. Young birds are more distinctive, uniformly cappuccino-coloured in the first winter and ghostly white in the second and third winter. Glaucous gulls breed on the northern coasts of the American and Eurasian coast, moving south in the winter and wandering the northern oceans. Adults do not breed until they are at least three — and more probably four — so there is plenty of time for immature birds to wander the oceans. If you see a large coffee, white or grey gull…

Idon’t think I have ever known a time when gamekeeping, game shooting and all that goes with them have been more under the spotlight. The general licence withdrawal and subsequent reissuing, and the ongoing consultation processes, could be the tip of a rather large iceberg. Not unstoppable by any means, but something we all very much need to keep an eye on and work at. We must ensure future challenges to what we do and how we do it are met with a strong, well-explained and well-balanced defence that government departments will listen to and note when redrafting legislation. There are a number of fast-approaching issues the shooting community — I feel shooting community is a more fitting description of who we are and what we do than shooting industry…

I passed the ball wide and made a run-in to the box. In came the cross and I got a hefty boot to it, sending it soaring over the bar. As I looked up and watched the ball clear the fence behind the goal, I saw another skein of geese. I stopped and gazed, recalling evenings past, hunkered on the foreshore waiting for noisy distant greylags to drift closer. This was the third week in a row that geese had flown over the football pitch, in vast skeins of 50 or 60 all the way down to pairs and trios. They seemed to be following more or less the same flightpath, perhaps heading for Rutland Water a few miles away. I returned to my game of football, yet more dodgy…

THE VITARA SZ5 STARTS off at £22,499; adding the Allgrip 4x4, which is a fairly reasonable extra £1,800, takes it to £24,299, and to be fair there’s a decent amount of kit for your money. There are lots of extras you can have fitted to personalise your own Vitara and you can spend quite a bit of time selecting vehicle configuration options. These range from different front grilles to side mouldings, and are not overly expensive. IN SUMMARY the Vitara is pretty good, meeting the needs of both the urban runaround and rural plaything — it’s only the front ground clearance that could hold you up. But it is rather fun and smile-inducing.…

I’ve always been a keen forager and enthusiast for wild food. When I used to shoot in Sussex and Kent I would often come back from early-season days with the game bag full of mushrooms and would enjoy them grilled with pheasants shot on the same ground. I used to know all the best meadows for mushrooms, which were almost always permanent pasture, usually with grazing horses, because mushrooms and horses seem to have an affinity. Freshly picked field mushrooms can be easily recognised by their pleasant earthy smell. In the arable prairies of Suffolk, where I now live, there are few permanent pastures and I can’t remember when I last gathered a mushroom. Some years ago I did pick what looked like field mushrooms, though I was a little…

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 TONY BUCKWELL Veterinary surgeon with a special interest in gundogs TOM PAYNE Professional shooting instructor and avid pigeon shooter JEREMY HUNT Runs Fenway Labradors and a professional gundog trainer TIM MADDAMS Former head chef at River Cottage and runs a shoot in Devon SIMON WHITEHEAD Author, professional ferreter and rabbit controller IAIN WATSON Keen stalker and senior CIC international trophy judge…

I have some very kind friends who shoot considerably more frequently than do I and who give me stuff. Partridge is always welcome, duck much more so, and, on the infrequent occasions it is venison, my thanks are profuse. Pheasant? Well, thank you, but there is still some in the freezer from last year. It always seems a little bit too much like hard work to prepare for what you get in the end, and somewhat demanding on the cook, unless you use the skinned breasts. Frankly, I almost always go with the latter, beating them flat, dusting with flour, coating with egg and breadcrumbs and frying. They are rather reminiscent of chicken nuggets and no drink for this recipe comes readily to mind, save a latte or perhaps a…

1 Ribbed shooting knitted jumper RRP: £169 Farlows.co.uk A jumper for fowlers and fisherman. With Alcantara patches to the elbows and shoulders, this jumper is highly durable and will keep you warm and comfortable. It is available in dark or light olive and comes in sizes S-XL. 2 Flip Target Max RRP: £10.99 Sportsmanguncentre.co.uk Test your accuracy with this moving target. For every hit you make the target presents you with another one. It can be used with either an air rifle or a small-bore rifle. 3 Essential shotgun cleaning kit RRP: £49.95 Gmk.co.uk Packed into a neat and secure case that is perfect for travelling purposes, this essential shotgun cleaning kit contains everything you need for cleaning your gun after a day’s shooting, including a bottle…