Innholdsfortegnelse for 01-Apr-2020 i Shooting Times & Country

Defra has been slammed for launching deeply flawed general licences for stoat trapping. The licences, which were sent to shooting and gamekeeping organisations just a few weeks before they were intended to come into effect, include a series of onerous conditions. The general licence to trap stoats was chosen as the “least burdensome” way of regulating the use of traps to ensure that the UK complied with the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards. However, drafts of the licences disclosed to shooting and gamekeeping organisations have been criticised as unworkable and a ca tastrophe for many wild bird populations. Stoats are known to be significant predators of ground-nesting birds and are frequently controlled by gamekeepers to protect both released game birds and wild birds. They previously had no legal protection…

Your readers might be interested in this recipe I created as pigeon shooting is a hot topic at the moment. You need four pigeon breasts, 1lb sausage meat, 1 medium onion, a teaspoon of dried mixed herbs, salt and black pepper, a teaspoon of paprika and a packet of ready-made puff pastry. Mince the pigeon breasts, finely chop the onion and add to the sausage meat in a bowl. Mix thoroughly, sprinkling herbs, half a teaspoon of salt, plenty of ground black pepper and the paprika. Unroll the puff pastry, mould the mix into a sausage shape and place it on the pastry. Roll it up and cut to length, applying plenty of beaten egg wash, then bake on a lightly oiled sheet on a low shelf in a fairly…

As nesting time approaches, it’s critical for ground-nesting and song birds that those of us in the shooting community get on top of corvids. This year it seems more important than ever. On average I account for around two dozen magpies and similar numbers of crows, rooks and jackdaws between March and May each year — a drop in the ocean compared with professional keepers. But in April 2019 the general licence debacle prevented that control, just when the vulnerable species needed it most. Like many others in the shooting community, I’m keen to make amends this time around; I’ve noted much larger numbers of corvids of all sorts this winter. The RSPB is not well known for being pro-shooting. Even it, however, acknowledges that in sites of predation pressure,…

Drey poking is one of the highlights of my late winter and early spring shooting calendar. The culling of grey squirrels on most of my permissions is limited to quiet sorties with an air rifle, from when pheasants are released in the summer through to the end of the season. But the gloves are off now and gamekeepers are happy for me to adopt a noisy approach when bringing the rodents to book. Though sniping squirrels at feeding stations primed with peanuts is by far the best way to make a big bag, drey poking is a much more enjoyable occupation. Rather than sitting still and quiet in a cramped hide, you get to yomp around the woods in the company of friends without the fear of excited chatter spoiling…

When the deputy editor told me he had arranged for an EGE shotgun to be sent to me for review, I had to admit I had never heard of it. “It’s coming from ASI,” he added. It must be OK then, I thought, if it is coming from the main UK importer of AYA and Rizzini. A little research revealed that EGE was founded in Istanbul by Ertugrul Saydamoglu and Berat Ozan Ozsahin in 2018, having spent 10 years working together in the Turkish gun trade. The company offers a variety of shotguns including single barrel, side-by-side, over-and-under, both inertia and gas-operated semi-automatics, pump action and a magazine-fed bullpupstyle shotgun that it mentions can be used for “home protection”. Not sure we need that one in the UK. Warranty The…

Though known as the “farm of birds” in the 14th century, the Pembrokeshire islands of Skokholm and Skomer, and those of Ramsey, Middleholm and Caldey, could well have been called the “farm of rabbits”. There were no predators such as foxes, badgers or stoats, so that their only foes were winged ones — buzzards and great black-backed gulls. Various writers have remarked on the abundance of rabbits on these islands and the source of revenue they provided. An instance of their value in these early days may be taken from another island, that of Lundy, where in the reign of Henry III a castle was to be built from the proceeds of the sale of skins. From 1324 to 1452 the annual catch on Skokholm and Skomer was between 2,000…

Shoots around the country have been wrestling with decisions about how many birds to put down, how many days to offer and whether to shoot at all. One gamekeeper told Shooting Times: “It is an enormous gamble. Potentially we are paying thousands of pounds to buy birds, then paying thousands more to feed them, then come the season we may have no one to shoot them. “If that happens we have no income and tens of thousands of mouths to feed.” The ability to attract customers was only one concern. Wheat prices have begun to rise rapidly as harvest forecasts remained very poor, coronavirus disrupted supply chains and the pound tumbled. Concerns were also raised about the ability of shoots to access supplies of birds from the Continent and the…

Gamekeepers in the Peak District have tackled the first major wildfire of the new season. A spell of good weather dried moorland and brought visitors into the hills, with predictable consequences. The fire was spotted at around 7.15pm by a local keeper who reported it to the fire brigade; however, their firefighting Argocat was unable to handle the rough terrain and firefighting efforts were left to the keepers. Three local keepers brought the blaze under control by midnight and when the firefighters returned at first light the flames were out. An area of around 30 hectares was destroyed. Fortunately, the ground was wet enough to prevent the peat from burning and the fire was limited to the surface vegetation. Both Scottish Land & Estates and the Moorland Association have now…

The Government announced in 2018 that it will provide £50million of funding to plant 11million trees in England by 2022. Much of this is to underpin the Woodland Carbon Guarantee, which encourages farmers and landowners to create new woodland in return for payments of woodland carbon units as these trees mature. The chief aim of this mass tree planting, we are told, is to “leave the planet in a better state than we found it”. This will be achieved by the newly planted trees capturing carbon. This funding is additional to the Countryside Stewardship Woodland Creation Grant, which focuses on the habitat benefits provided by woodland. So far so green. However, there is one rather deer-shaped elephant in the room. Browsing on hedgerows It is estimated that there are between…

During a lull between jobs as a teenager, I found work catching moles. For all that my friends laughed at me, it was not such a ridiculous career prospect in those days. A few friends were quietly envious of my income as it began to grow into the spring and it was not hard to find work anywhere from farms and golf courses to fancy gardens and livery yards. I charged £5 a mole, which seemed to cover most of the expenses required to make it work for me. A good Duffus barrel mole trap cost around £5 and once I had enough cash to invest in a dozen at once, I was off. At its best, mole catching is a great way to get out and about around the…

Most edible mushrooms, indeed most larger fungi, appear during the late summer and throughout autumn. But a handful encourage our hopes by growing in spring: the morel, the black morel and the St George’s mushroom. None are particularly common, though the black morel has become considerably more so since the late 1980s, when it found a new and agreeable home in the woodchips used to mulch shrubberies. The St George’s mushroom is a species of permanent grassland, so old pasture, wood and grassy path edges, roadsides, parks and domestic lawns are the places to look. Not that actively looking helps much. Like most fungi, you simply come across them. Unfortunately, this mushroom is much rarer than it once was as permanent pasture loss has been regrettably rapid and extensive over…

IN THE YEAR WHEN we finally left the EU, there was a certain reassurance in learning that the French bulldog is no longer Britain’s top pedigree dog, as the labrador regained its number one slot in 2019. The Frenchie reigned at the top for just a year. In 2018, 36,785 French bulldog puppies were registered with the Kennel Club (KC), but last year that had fallen back to 33,661. It’s still a huge number, especially considering that there are few breeds as flawed both physically and genetically, but I suspect that it has hit peak popularity. Intriguingly, the Kennel Club’s figures for last year reveal a sharp fall in the number of almost all breeds of puppies registered with it. Though the labrador may have regained its place at the…

Attempts by anti-shooting campaign group Wild Justice to block the release of game birds on and around protected sites this summer have failed. The group had asked for an urgent court hearing and for the court to order the Secretary of State to issue a “stop notice” preventing releases this summer. However, both Defra and an alliance of shooting organisations objected to speeding up the process. Wild Justice conceded that it was unlikely that the measures it was seeking could be put in place before the summer and withdrew its request for the process to be accelerated. BASC, the Countryside Alliance, the Game Farmers’ Association and the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation had been allowed by the High Court to register as a joint “interested party” in Wild Justice’s challenge (News, 4…

Gamekeepers have asked people to stay out of the countryside during the COVID-19 outbreak. The plea comes after large crowds decided to visit the Peak District and North Wales, with significant numbers also turning up in the Highlands and Islands as people sought to self-isolate. Large numbers of second-home owners also headed to Norfolk and Cornwall, raising concerns over the limited capacity of local healthcare systems to cope. Scottish Gamekeepers Association chairman Alex Hogg said: “This weekend our estate was like Blackpool beach, with people showing up in the strangest of places, dogs raking everywhere and sheep scattering to the four winds. That’s not to say anything of the 100 people who touched all our gates with gay abandon, not giving a damn about spreading any virus. It makes me…

I have known the yellowhammer a long time because it was my companion when, as a very small boy, I walked the few hundred yards to my primary school in rural Angus. The bright yellow colour and the distinctive song endeared it to me and I have retained my love of it ever since. Rural Angus was a very different place from today. The farming year was one of crop rotation, stubbles that stayed all winter, and I still recall the threshing machine doing the rounds of the farms. Harvest mice were common and the yellowhammer and its bunting cousins were plentiful. The male is a striking bird with a bright yellow head and chestnut-barred back and wing coverts, with some lighter brown streaking on the breast. The female, as…

Every now and then, you get a day you will never forget. Sometimes it is because you bagged lots of rabbits, others simply the enjoyment of being with like-minded souls. But this day’s ferreting started like no other. I was back in deepest Suffolk and about to ferret an equestrian centre with Tabitha and her lurcher, Nimbus. First, I had to empty my drop boxes and, as I walked up, I heard the lids clank. This upped my heart rate with visions of a dozen rabbits or more. But what I discovered left me speechless. The first had a polecat, asleep, under some live rabbits. If that were not strange enough, the next was even more bizarre. I opened it to find a fully grown and extremely healthy dog fox…

WHITE-TAILED DEER A widespread and abundant species in both North and South America, the white-tailed deer was first introduced into Europe in what is now the Czech Republic in 1840. Introductions elsewhere in Europe followed, of which the most successful was to southern Finland in the 1930s. Today, this population numbers around 100,000. They can be found throughout southern Finland and some have reached Sweden. White-tails are unrelated to any of Europe’s native deer, so there is little risk of hybridisation. They take their name from their distinctive white rump and underside of the tail, which is typically raised when the animal is alarmed. Somewhat larger than a roe deer, the bucks are easily recognised by their distinctive antlers that curve forwards. Seven or eight tines are normal, but multi-pointed…