Innholdsfortegnelse for 14-Jul-2021 i Shooting Times & Country

The vital importance of Scotland’s sporting estates for birds of prey has been emphasised yet again as HM the Queen’s Balmoral Estate hosts its first successful white-tailed eagle nest. Richard Gledson, estate manager at Balmoral, explained: “A previous nesting attempt in 2017 on the same site sadly failed, and we have had our fingers crossed since then. The birds have been with us for a couple of years, and we have been working closely with the North East Scotland Raptor Study Group, which ringed the chick last week, and with the RSPB, which has been sending data from its satellite tags.” Even the Scottish Raptor Study Group, an organisation with links to anti-shooting campaigners, was forced to admit that the situation was looking good for raptors in the area. Dr…

One of the first pages I turn to every week is Vintage Times; it’s a wonderful celebration not only of great writing but of our changing world. It illustrates how this glorious countryside has been shaped and nurtured by those who care for its creatures. If only the rabid so-called animal rights lobby could see that. I particularly enjoyed the article about otters (Ways of a water polecat, 30 June). A confession; though I hate anthropomorphism, I first fell in love with Henry Williamson’s Tarka, which was only cemented by the film Ring of Bright Water. Yes, I cried. But all that aside, I wonder if your readers are aware that it was the otter hunters who first realised the UK population was in serious decline? I was told that,…

The question of whether or not airguns make useful training tools to prepare aspiring shooters for other branches of our sport is one that is frequently put to me. And it is a question I found myself pondering again when my daughter asked if she could shoot the key ingredient for her favourite wild meat dish for herself, rather than leaving it to me to bring home the metaphoric bacon. Irresistible “We all know that squirrels and nuts are a classic combo” Violet is a 12-year-old with a fondness for what is known in our house as ‘squirrel popcorn’. This culinary delight is a rough take on KFC and a great way to persuade young people, and not so young people, to eat meat that they may be a little…

My son has a ‘museum of curiosities’ in his bedroom. His exhibits are eclectic and varied. Among others, he boasts a Cretaceous sea cucumber found in a local sugar beet field, a red stag head from a beast shot in Westmorland, a piece of Cambrian seabed lugged down a Welsh mountain and a stuffed weasel. He has added a piece of cricket bat willow to the collection. It’s about 2ft in length and the bark has been entirely stripped, leaving lines of chisel-like gouges in the pith. The ends are cut at neat 45-degree angles, seemingly snicked by a sharp and skilfully swung billhook. A marked smell emanates from the branch. At first sniff, there is a hint of badger-like muskiness. After a deeper draught, medicinal notes take over, reminding…

Recently, as I waited to pull out from Chateau Coles, it occurred to me that every other passing car had the silhouette or styling of a 4x4. The look of a 4x4 has taken over from the necessity of one. The soft-roader, or crossover, has definitely come of age. Virtually every manufacturer offers at least one 4x4 lookalike, but can they do what the packaging indicates? Modern life dictates our transport needs. Most people, including the country-inclined, ultimately need to get from point A to point B while acting as a taxi for the family, carrying out household chores, transporting four-legged family members, getting to work and, in our case, if we’re lucky, going on a few sporting adventures too. When you’re predominantly road-based, a full-time 4x4 isn’t always a…

Over the past couple of weeks I have been fortunate enough to be invited to judge a couple of practice puppy shows. These are nice informal evenings designed to give the young hounds a run-through of the format of the puppy show in less official circumstances. If they were brought out in front of a crowd on the actual day, having not seen anyone standing round the ring before, chances are they would stand there with eyes out on stalks and not show themselves to their full ability. On both occasions, hounds showed perfectly and were a credit to the hunt staff’s hard work and skill in getting them ready for the show ring. Sadly, our puppy show has had to be postponed until August. It was originally pencilled in…

There are few things more satisfying than achieving a lifetime’s ambition — I did that in 2016 when I visited the hill country of northern India described so evocatively in the books of Jim Corbett. Born in 1875 in the town of Nainital in the foothills of the Himalayas, Corbett was the eighth child of the town postmaster. His childhood was spent surrounded by thick jungle that teemed with wildlife. Being part of a large family allowed him unusual freedom, and he wandered in the forest from an early age, learning to recognise the birds and animals by their calls and behaviour. He was eight when he shot his first leopard with a blackpowder .450 Martini rifle: his career as an expert shikari — Hindu for hunter — had started.…

My recent Viewpoint on leads and whistles (Gundogs, 23 June) drew an interesting response from reader Michael Ransom, who said that when he started training his first dog a mere 20 years ago, whistles were black and dummies were green. “If you were lucky, you owned a gamebag, while the ultimate in training was owning your own dummy launcher.” Now, he notes, dummies and whistles come in a rainbow of colours and you can spend a fortune on training accessories and professional training classes. Though Michael acknowledges that there are some genuinely innovative products available, he wonders if we are losing the ability to adapt basic training equipment to teach our dogs and suspects that there is increasing reliance on purchasing kit to solve the problems or teach the response.…

How rare are black swans? BIRDS Q For the past two years, a pair of black swans have bred on a lake on our shoot. No one has any idea where they came from. How rare are black swans in Britain? A The somewhat surprising answer is that black swans are not unusual at all. Fieldwork for the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) Bird Atlas 2007-11 produced breeding evidence from no fewer than 111 different 10km squares. These were mainly in southern and central England, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, with only two records from Ireland. In addition, non-breeding records were submitted from another 145 10km squares. There are several well-established breeding sites, including Devon (Exmouth) and the Norfolk Broads. These handsome birds are native to Australia…

Latin name: Filipendula ulmaria Common name: Meadowsweet Other names: Bittersweet, bridewort, courtship and matrimony, honey-sweet, kiss-me-quick, lady of the meadow, meadow queen, meadow wort, sweet bay How to spot it and where to find it: Growing in wet habitats, such as ditches, damp meadows and riverbanks, meadowsweet is recognisable from its froth of sweet-smelling creamy-white flowers. They bloom from June to August, and sometimes into September, appearing in clusters on the end of reddish stems. The leaves are dark green with silvery undersides, arranged in pairs on long stalks. Interesting facts: In the 1800s, chemists took salicylic from meadowsweet, created a synthetic version, acetylsalicylic acid, and sold it as tablets. Taking the ‘a’ from acetyl and ‘spirin’ from Spirea, the old Latin name for meadowsweet, it was marketed as the…

Shooting estates across northern England have given schoolchildren an opportunity to get outside again as Covid restrictions continue to be lifted. Already this year, nearly 2,000 pupils have been given the chance to enjoy the fresh air and summer weather and to get a taste of moorland culture, wildlife and heritage thanks to BASC’s Let’s Learn Moor programme and the estates that support it. The programme, which is financed by the BASC Legacy Fund, takes children out on to moorland sites across northern England where they meet farmers, gamekeepers, police officers, firefighters and mountain rescue teams. The scheme, which is hosted by eight different estates from the Peak District to the North York Moors, gives primary school-aged children the chance to learn about moorland management. “It was very engaging; children…

Check your rodenticide use is still in line with best practice. New best practice guidance has been issued for the use of rodenticides. If you use poisons to control rats or mice, you should speak to your shooting, gamekeeping or pest control organisation to get hold of a copy of the new guidelines. Visit bit.ly/HSErodenticides for more information. Spin for mackerel. It’s fair to say that mackerel fishing is not the most technically demanding form of angling, but it is a great way to get children fishing and yields a delicious catch. Mackerel will be found all round the British coast at this time of year. If you fancy something a little trickier, in a lot of places mullet are also present in good numbers.…

Keepers and rangers have yet again found themselves at the forefront of tackling antisocial behaviour in remote rural areas. Unable to head overseas for the holidays, large numbers of visitors have been putting unsustainable pressure on the country’s remote upland areas. In the Highlands, council rangers were criticised and lauded in almost equal measure after waking up a group of campers and instructing them to tidy up their messy campsite and leave. The group had cut living branches from trees and driven across grassland to set up their camp. Forestry and Land Scotland rangers were forced to call police to deal with a group of antisocial campers who refused to leave a site when asked. The men had been seen trying to kick ducks and fell trees with an axe.…

“ Hey mister,” said the slightly breathless young lad, “can you please tell me where people are getting the mouse body parts?” Well, it was from me; another crazy Swan idea that happened to work out. I was running a small GWCT stand at a schools’ countryside day in Suffolk. For this sort of audience, promoting shooting directly was likely to meet teacher resistance, so I was after a more gentle approach. Simply reminding people that the whole of nature is not vegetarian, by pulling apart barn owl pellets and showing how to tell mouse, vole and shrew skulls apart is perfect. The fact that owl pellets are regurgitated remains and not poo, even though they look like it, also fascinates the children — and many of their teachers. “It…

Deerstalking has generally been an early adopter of improvements in firearms technology, many of which are a result of the constant development of military small arms. That has certainly been the case with sighting devices. As the accuracy of rifles improved in the early 19th century, there was a clear need for a better sighting system for precision marksmanship. While there had been a number of early experiments with telescopic sights, the first reliable riflescope was invented by Lt Col David Davidson, who exhibited his new design at the Great Exhibition of 1851, where he demonstrated it to keen deerstalker Prince Albert. Davidson patented his invention in 1862. It was applied to Whitworth’s new muzzle-loading rifles and was successfully used by Confederate marksmen in the American Civil War. Riflescopes were…

High summer has settled over the rough pastures and invitingly shady small woods of High Park. The meadow is waiting to be mown and every breeze sripples over a yellow haze of buttercups. The glorious tumult of May birdsong has subsided into much quieter music, with small sounds and occasional snatches of song when a wren or thrush decides to remember the departed spring. Sometimes, especially on afternoons when the sun is bright or the heat has gathered and the air turned humid under the cloud, there is something close to silence, broken only by a chirp or two from the trees and by the gentle trickle of the beck. On afternoons of this (and every) sort, motivating Horsefield is a nightmare. Sometimes I even struggle with myself. I may…

The strangest incident in Kenya’s history was a mother-in-law shot, the man told the magistrate, because he mistook her for a crow. That’s a true story from Rumuruti, a village down the road from my ranch where they filmed Mogambo, the big-game romance in which Grace Kelly shoots Clark Gable because she’s jealous of Ava Gardner. Yet wild animals have killed surprisingly few people in Kenya. Over the past century, the wildlife death toll for upcountry European settlers, an indicator for the wider general population, is 21 by lion, around 15 by elephant, at least 10 by buffalo, six by rhino, four by venomous snakes, three by bee stings, two by crocodile and one by hippo. In 1911, poor toddler Hazel Selby died after being bitten by a ground squirrel,…

When gnats besiege my brow on a summer’s evening pigeon shooting, I’m the first to complain and reach for the Jungle Formula. And when caterpillars of white butterflies reduce my cabbages to shreds, I am not amused. But these minor nuisances certainly do not stop me lamenting the overall decline of Britain’s insect population in recent times. And continued expert analysis merely confirms what is obvious to the average countryman. Numerically, at least, insects are the most important class of animals on earth, and must be the concern of us all. A relatively small number of insects aesthetically enrich our lives, notably the butterflies whose bold colours brighten what is often a relatively dull and uniform environment. Even town people can attract them to their gardens with a little judicious…

There they were, ducks in a row. Mrs Mallard and a dozen wee ones in line astern, traversing the farm pond the other day. A bit of a late hatch, but still a joy to see. Two days later there were only two left and the farmer was asking what could have gobbled them up, so I asked about fish in the pond. “No pike,” he said, “so it can’t be them, just roach and perch and that sort of thing.” So there is the answer; I very much doubt a predator problem, just starvation for lack of insects due to the fish scoffing most of them as they rise through the water to hatch. Truth be told, a small farm pond rarely has enough food for a brood of…

Millions of Europeans have chosen to settle in the UK in the aftermath of Brexit. And this could potentially be helpful to our fieldsports in the longer term. Let me explain my thinking. First, though, let’s draw a distinction between the EU and Europe. In my own view, the EU is an undemocratic, unaccountable, bureaucratic monster that constantly seeks to extend its tentacles into all parts of everyday life. Its one-size-fits-all Common Agricultural Policy wrecked some aspects of the British countryside. Europe, on the other hand, is a wonderful medley of fascinating nations populated by friendly people. And the key thing is that many of these same people have retained a much closer connection with rural culture than we have. They tend to be less hostile to rural traditions than…

Gamekeepers have demanded police action over the increasing levels of harassment they face. In a letter to the Chief Constables and all Police and Crime Commissioners of Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and North Yorkshire, the National Gamekeepers’ Organisation (NGO) and the Moorland Association called for action to protect keepers from abuse. The letter’s joint authors, John Clarke of the NGO and Amanda Anderson of the Moorland Association, said: “Gamekeepers are feeling persecuted and harassed, which is causing great distress. Being a target of this bullying is a precursor to a new form of hate crime and needs to be stamped out.” The authors also hit out at Moorland Monitors — groups that have been implicated in trespass, trap damage and unauthorised surveillance activities. A perceived relationship between…

Firearm and shotgun certificate applicants have hit out at a ‘crazy system’ of inconsistent requirements and charges for doctors’ letters. Police forces have been increasingly insisting that applicants provide a letter from their GP to confirm there are no health concerns that should prevent them from holding a firearm or shotgun certificate. This is not a service that is covered by the NHS, and so doctors have been billing applicants for the letters. However, frustration is growing both over the disparity of prices charged by surgeries and the varying demands of different police forces. The legal basis of the policy is hotly disputed; some forces do not insist on applicants supplying a letter, while other forces will not issue a certificate without one. Shooting Times has been told that Northumbria…

All too often we read of situations where shooters have waited lengthy periods of time for their local constabularies to grant, renew or vary shotgun or firearms certificates. Add Covid’s negative effects into the mix, when constabulary staff have had to isolate or work from home, and shooters can expect to be waiting an indeterminate period of time before their certificates can be processed and returned. I had to apply for a variation to my certificate and, upon checking my constabulary’s website, I concluded that I would probably be waiting a good while before my application would be dealt with. I posted it on a Monday afternoon first-class recorded delivery. To my utter shock and delight, it was back with me by the Friday, having been processed and posted back…

There are times when it seems to me that small is beautiful and incomparably better than big. In this context I am not thinking of myself because, though I am undoubtedly small, it is beyond dispute that any traces of manly beauty, even if any were ever there, vanished whole decades ago. I am thinking of rivers and the trout that swim in them. I shall come back to the trout and tell you why I like them on the (fairly) small side. Turning first to rivers, I find it hard to think of one that I might declare too small to fish, or of a brook, a beck or a burn that could seem to me so insignificant that I should not be happy to explore its possibilities with…

Over the past 18 months of off-and-on lockdowns, who can honestly say they haven’t dreamed about shopping? I don’t mean nipping down the shops for milk, bread, cigarettes and emergency chocolate or sitting hunched over a keyboard. I mean real shopping. Shopping for stuff that sets the pulse racing and wilts the credit card. The type of shopping they call ‘retail therapy’. A new shotgun, a new 4x4, new tweeds, new handmade shoes or perhaps that helicopter you’ve been promising yourself. Well, after a stuttering start, the Government is allowing us out once again to indulge in the our favourite pastime without fear of being arrested. And what better way to celebrate than visiting the Game Fair at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire on 23 to 25 July. As I write,…

The myths and mystique that surround the stoat have certainly shaped my opinion of this small, agile and extremely adept predator. If you’ve ever seen a stoat rolling an egg across uneven ground at what seems like 60mph, you can’t help but admire the audacity and sheer downright determination. When you finally find the egg, you cannot believe your eyes when not a chip or dent has occurred on this roller-coaster of a smash-and-grab raid. For many keepers, the stoat represents one of the key predatory species. Ignore it at your peril, as this mammal has the ability to replicate the damage caused by foxes, especially in the run-up to the spring breeding cycle of many ground-nesting birds. Hypnotised The shrill scream of a rabbit in distress snatched my attention.…

With restrictions finally easing in England and Scotland, I managed to escape north of the border to see my family for a long weekend. Buzzing with excitement at the end of a long week and a longer lockdown, I set off for Scotland. The excitement, however, was quickly put on hold as I joined the queue of Thursday night travellers trying to get a head start on the bank holiday weekend. Undeterred, I continued forward and eventually made it to the land of the Sturgeon. The plan for the weekend, in addition to catching up with family, was to try for a sea trout. Sea trout can be, and often are, caught by salmon fishermen during daylight hours. However, the keen sea-trouter knows their quarry can be a little more…

TAKING YOUR DOG TO the Game Fair (23-25 July) and want to win a rosette? Remarkably, it’s not that difficult to do so, as the success of my dogs at former fairs has proved. As my friends would delight in telling you, my dogs have always excelled in enthusiasm but not in discipline. The secret of success is to start practising now. Dust off the dummies and remind your dogs what retrieving is all about. OK, I know there’s not much more than a week to go, but it is amazing what you can achieve in a few days if you put some effort in. You can be reasonably confident that the great majority of dogs you will see at Ragley Hall won’t have done any retrieving since last season,…

RIFLE FORESIGHTS This combination foresight was made and supplied by BSA for sporting and target rifles. It provided interchangeable options to suit the conditions. Precision-engineered and hand-finished, they were primarily intended for BSA No 2 miniature rifles and air rifles. Each sight had two alternative posts that could be changed by pressing the standing sight flat, thereby positioning the second. For example, a shooter could specify a thin ring and a barleycorn or a bead and blade. DH…

Now is the calm before the storm in the arable country. Farmers’ grainstores have been swept clean, combine harvesters and tractors serviced and some may even have snatched a week’s summer holiday. Harvest looms, and it is up to the sun and fair winds to do their job in ripening the wheat harvest. However, farmers can ill afford to stand still and next year’s crops are already in the planning stage. New varieties of wheat are in constant development. Seed that is resistant to both disease and climate change, therefore requiring fewer inputs, will be investigated and mulled over. The AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board) has eight new varieties on its recommended list for the 2021 autumn drilling season. The names of these new varieties are remarkably eclectic for…

Pigeons have been very quiet since the start of spring. With many peas being drilled as a replacement break crop to winter oilseed rape, spirits were high among many pigeon shooters. However, the cold weather has put rural Britain behind and birds have not pulled on to the peas in any number. They are starting to appear, though, and are showing a lot of interest in the winter barley. It’s always a tricky crop to shoot, but nonetheless important to protect when it is at its most vulnerable.…