Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-Apr-2022 i Shooting Times & Country

The majority of wildlife offences reported to Scottish prosecutors never went to court, according to new published statistics. The Scottish government’s Wildlife Crime in Scotland report for 2019-20, which was finally published at the beginning of this month, shows that, while almost 200 wildlife crimes were recorded, there were only five convictions for wildlife offences. Careful examination of the data suggests that police were not catching perpetrators of wildlife crime and when they did prosecutors were not taking them to court. In 2020, only 49 cases were referred by the police to the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service. However, the prosecutors chose to take no action or to use an ‘alternative to prosecution’ for 37 of these. This left only 12 to go to trial. The accused was found…

I would like to report that the demise of the Irish water spaniel (IWS) in Mike Swan’s otherwise excellent article (In search of Britain’s great lost gundogs, 6 April) is well and truly premature. The IWS can be traced to a dog, Boatswain, born in 1834 and bred by one Justin McCarthy, at a time when there were two varieties in Ireland, the northern and southern Irish water spaniel. It is the southern variety that is believed to be behind ‘McCarthy’s strain’, although it is not known whether he resurrected the southern strain or manufactured a completely new breed. With just over 300 registered puppies born worldwide in 2021, the IWS is critically endangered but by no means out for the count. Could I also correct the oft-repeated statement that…

There’s a certain prestige in using your grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s pair of Purdeys or Bosses, but how often do those lucky people shoot superbly? Not infrequently, I have older gentlemen come for a lesson and their shooting, in terms of their technique, is OK. “But do you wear your grandad’s trousers much?” I often ask, midway through the lesson. They usually tell me they don’t, because he was “a huge fellow” or because he was only 5ft 6in tall. “Then why are you plugging away with his old guns that don’t fit you at all either?” is my next question. Many of these people are from an era where gunfit wasn’t spoken about much. There was a feeling that if you had a nice gun and did a fair bit…

As 1 May approaches, so does the official start of the new hunting year. Masters and staff take up their new positions and the ones remaining look forward to another season. The Hunting Office runs a number of training courses during the season for new Masters, staff and those who are stepping up to hunt hounds for the first time. It is an important element to continue to maintain the highest standards in the field and kennels across the country. With hunting under constant observation, ensuring those who are at the coalface are of the highest calibre is vital. The Hunting Office calls upon some of the most experienced people in the hunting world for their expertise. Whether it’s kennel management and hound welfare, hound breeding or the detail of…

FOUR YEARS AGO, Michael Gove introduced plans for legislation to ban the use of electric training collars for dogs in England. It was a proposal supported by not only animal-rights groups, but also the Kennel Club. I suspect that it was a calculated decision by the Conservative Party to show that it could be equally sympathetic to animal-welfare issues as its Labour opposition. Perhaps surprisingly, the proposed ban has never been enacted, though Lord Goldsmith, the Government minister for animal welfare, has said that it is still planned. I’ve long argued in this column that e-collars can play an important role in dog training, as long as they are used both sensitively and sensibly. Banning them by law, as is the case in Wales, would be a serious mistake. Far…

I have bittersweet news — and the sharp tang of the bitterness is much stronger than the soft comfort of what sweetness there is in it all. Followers of this diary will know how much I have enjoyed the company of the Mallerstang Mob and the exceptional sport to be found with them under the absolute rule of their supreme leader, Reg Metcalfe. I joined the Mob three or four years ago, though I had shot with them fairly regularly as a guest for at least half a dozen seasons before receiving the high honour of membership. It was a shoot built on moles because Reg was, and still is, a mole-catching superstar. This and the goodwill with which he is regarded by farmers in Cumbria’s Eden Valley helped him…

On my ranch north of Mount Kenya, it hasn’t rained properly since September 2020. This season’s long rains are now weeks late and it’s entirely possible they will fail completely, which means the horizon of the drought gets pushed back to July, or possibly October. None of the signs of rain are there. The guinea fowl and francolins are still in flocks rather than pairing up, there are no dragonflies that hover with their heads pointing east, termites are not building their earth cathedrals, the elephants are not moving and the birds from the northern deserts are still with us. The farm looks like a dead planet, with a layer of talcum-powder dust hovering above what my eye recalls as waving fields of green pasture. Some days, the sun filters…

Good gloves for airgunners AIRGUNNING Q Can you recommend a good pair of gloves for airgun shooting? I’m trying to find some that provide a good combination of grip and feel? A I know how difficult it is to find the right gloves for shooting. I used to compromise by buying ones that gave good grip and then chopping off the end of the right index finger so I could feel the trigger properly. Thankfully, I switched to MacWet gloves five years ago and they provide a remarkable degree of grip — even in the wet — and more than enough feel to be able to read sensitive triggers without having to take a pair of scissors to them. I now use them for all my airgun, rifle and shotgun…

THOUGHTS FROM THE FIELD There is arguably no sound more synonymous with April than the cuckoo’s call. It is so evocative that composers, from Beethoven to Handel, have written works in its honour. Superstitions surround this African migrant and most tend to involve death. The cuckoo is indeed rather sinister, particularly if you are a small bird. Its plumage is similar to that of a sparrowhawk and many ornithologists believe this is an evolutionary trait, developed to help scare and scatter other birds. This provides the hen cuckoo with an opportunity to lay an egg in the unguarded host nest. Hen cuckoos lay up to 50 eggs in one breeding season, favouring the nests of dunnocks, reed warblers and meadow pipits. The sight of a bedraggled little brown job working…

The financial squeeze on shoots shows no sign of letting up as fuel and feed prices continue to rise. Wheat, the key feed for gamebirds, has continued to rise in price as the war in Ukraine enters a new phase. Feed typically makes up just under a quarter of the cost of each bird and is the second most important cost per bird after the cost of buying the poult. The AHDB (Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board), which tracks wheat prices across the country, has recorded prices around £300 per tonne for feed wheat in most parts of the UK for several weeks. This was already a rise of £100 per tonne in the past six months. However, the publication of a key report from the US Department of Agriculture…

Rural workers in Wales have raised concerns for their future as the Welsh government appears increasingly hostile to fieldsports and deaf to concerns over conservation. A post widely circulated on social media claimed the Welsh government and Natural Resources Wales (NRW) had decided to phase out all fieldsports in Wales. This is not true. However, policy in Wales towards fieldsports has become somewhat antagonistic in recent years, with much more restrictive general licences(News, 30 March), a probable change in the law around the use of hounds (News, 13 March) and the Welsh government openly stating that it does not support live quarry shooting as a leisure activity. This has led many to conclude that the Welsh government is moving towards a ban or a set of extreme restrictions. Concern over…

Two face charges of illegal hunting Two men are set to appear in court after an incident near Alton in Surrey last year. Ricky Evans, 20, from Hog’s Back, in Surrey, and Joe Inman, also 20, from Fullers Way North, Surbiton, have been charged with hunting a wild mammal with dogs, trespassing on land at night to take game and with criminal damage. They are due to appear at Basingstoke Magistrates Court on Tuesday, 3 May. Walk tall, unless you come from farmers The benefits of hunting are well recorded in this magazine, but we have never realised it made you taller — as archeologists have discovered. A study of skeletons from 38,000 to 2,400 years ago shows that the first farmers were on average 1.5in shorter than their hunter-gatherer…

When choosing any dog, there is an absolute labyrinth of information and questions you need to ask. Different breeds have different requirements, energies and suitabilities and even varying diet needs. But what about gundog breeds? The most important and obvious question for any gundog owner to ask is “what job do you want the dog to do?” This will give you a good idea of which breed is best suited to you. There is nothing to say that any of the spaniels, retrievers or hunt, point, retrieve breeds cannot do any of the jobs within the gundog world. You can never say one particular breed cannot do a certain job because there will always be one that proves you wrong. However, it makes sense to select the dog that has…

There are occasions when I find myself deep in the internet. One click leads to another, which invites the next click. A few YouTube videos come and go before you’ve found your way back to some niche page, adverts popping up left, right and centre, and cookies following you everywhere. I’m sure we’ve all been there. It was on one such occasion that I found myself reading a comment thread on a blog post about “stinking-out rabbits”. Had I searched for it on Google, there’s no way it would have come up on any of the first few dozen results pages. But there I was, reading with interest the opinions of BobG1958 and his fellow rabbit-stinkers. It was, as you can imagine, a curious thread. The debate was fierce and…

While some shooters are happy to spend thousands of pounds on high-end optics, you can still buy an extremely good telescopic sight for around £1,000. In fact, once you pass through that price barrier, improvements in optical performance and features only go up by small increments in relation to the increase in spend. The two models featured here come from brands with a proven pedigree in the optics field. Both sights are versatile all-rounders, designed to meet the needs of rifle shooters and serious airgunners. Zeiss Conquest V4 4-16x44 RRP: £1,060 zeiss.co.uk Zeiss is known for manufacturing high-quality optics, often with high price tags. The Conquest V4 delivers the optical performance on which this German brand is built, but manages to come in at a competitive price. The Conquest V4…

In my previous training article (Confidence is crucial, 23 March), we were looking at getting the dogs going nice and confidently in a straight line to an area to hunt for a retrieve. It is equally vital that a dog can hunt for itself and hold an area to do a thorough job. There’s nothing worse than seeing a dog run round with its head in the air simply hoping to eventually bump into a retrieve. As youngsters, very often this is exactly the tack they will take when sent for a retrieve. So this month’s drill will establish the skills your dog will need to successfully hunt an area. Although a young dog might naturally have a very good nose, it does not mean that it knows how to…

As a change from my usual reports on game and wildfowl on marsh and upland, let me turn to those days of yore in the rickyards of farms of all sizes; to the destruction of rats there. The ferreting, shooting and trapping of them in farm buildings and poultry runs, in pigsties and field banks, is too wide a subject to cover here. Our confines must be the borders of rickyards and the ricks themselves. Rats are thirsty little animals and cannot remain happy for long without water. Any country boy of my vintage knew this well, and made use of his knowledge in two main ways in the area of the rickyard. In the first place, when on snaring bent, he would seek out the nearest pond or ditch…

The nesting storks at Knepp Castle have received a lot of publicity as a successful reintroduction project, but are there any historic records of these birds nesting in England? There are no confirmed records of white storks ever having nested in England, though there are a number of ancient place names that suggest they may once have done so. There is one record from Scotland, with a pair claimed to have nested on St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, in 1416. This record, translated from the original, which was written in Latin, has to be regarded with some suspicion. White storks are widespread breeding birds on the Continent, though populations were in decline for many years. However, storks have increased by more than 40% since 1980, helped by reintroduction projects in France,…

Gamekeepers are to stage an online protest against the Cairngorms National Park Authority after it published a plan that they claim will harm their livelihoods as well as the environment. The Cairngorms National Park Partnership Plan (News, 6 October 2021) includes proposals to cut down gamebird releasing and to significantly reduce deer numbers in the park, an agenda that keepers claim is driven not by residents but by figures within the park authority. The Grampian Moorland Group, which is organising the protest, pointed to Kinrara Estate, where all the gamekeeping jobs have disappeared and homes have been sold as part of a rewilding project. It claimed this was the type of move the plan will encourage. Coordinated under the hashtag #parktheplan, the protest takes place today (20 April). It has…

The French avian influenza — bird flu — outbreak is still said to be slowing, even as new cases continue to be reported (News, 13 April). New cases in Vendée, the most important department for gamebird production, showed a marked slowdown between 5 and 12 April, with outbreaks recorded at 13 new premises. Seventeen new cases had been reported the previous week, with 43 the week before. This has raised hopes that the outbreak may be coming to an end. More good news came from the neighbouring department of Loire-Atlantique, which had five new confirmed cases in the same week. A feared new hotspot in Finistère has yet to materialise, with only one case confirmed so far. While this slowdown is good news, exports of chicks and eggs to the…

FEES AND LICENCES Regarding the letters I’ve read that decry the imposition of excessive costs plucked out of the air by GP practices, I have been seeking the help of my MP. I consider the necessity of a medical certificate to be discriminatory; for instance, drivers of motor vehicles don’t need proof of mental stability to apply for or renew a licence, yet people are being killed on our roads every day. The same applies to dog licences, which were done away with yet people are being killed every year by dogs badly trained by careless owners. The cost of this endorsement of the applicant has not been regulated by law, yet there is little that is not, so my question asked how this omission could be the case here.…

Even with the wind behind them, the crows approached deliberately. Against the tarnished silver of April clouds, their unhurried progress seemed funereal — a pair of black-clad undertakers choosing their path with care. “Patterns must be faultless if they are to fool wily birds” I crouched low in the hide and hissed at the dog to keep still. For over half a mile the birds had been 40 yards up and 40 yards apart, surveying all that lay around them on their stately journey. They missed nothing: the beetle bank, rough cover, fresh drill and — of course — the hedgerow in which my daughter Elizabeth and I had cut ourselves a hide. They tilted and hung, hovered and dipped, two pairs of keen eyes working together on their slow,…

Many a new pen will be going up over the next couple of months, so now is a good time to think about what makes a great place to release your pheasants. It is one of the biggest investments for shoots and getting it right is key to success. Choosing a site well away from the boundary is obvious, but do not be fooled by the widely held view that pheasants will regard their pen as ‘home’. They may well do, but a fenced enclosure in the woods has no special magic and there is no obligation for the birds to stay. If the habitat is horrible, the birds are very likely to decamp en masse once they ‘escape’. To get high and testing birds, rather than choose a valley…

Modern-day travellers driving through the streets of the new town of Skelmersdale in west Lancashire would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that they were crossing over land that once formed a part of the 4,000-acre Lathom estate, considered to be one of the three top shoots in Lancashire during the late 19th and 20th centuries. The Lathom estate was initially acquired by Sir Thomas Bootle, MP for Liverpool, who commissioned Giacomo Leoni to replace the existing mansion with a grand Palladian-style country house and engaged Humphry Repton to lay out a landscaped deer park for the old established herd of fallow deer on the property. In 1758, Lathom passed by inheritance to Richard Wilbraham-Bootle, MP for Chester, a walked-up shooting enthusiast, who employed a gamekeeper, James Standish, to look after…

I WAS RECENTLY ASKED to pick a dummy out of a reed bed at a working test. It was a blind retrieve and the reed bed was narrow, but spread a long way from left to right. When I sent Briar, she got to the area swiftly and stopped beautifully on the whistle. I asked her to hunt and she hunted into the wind right-handed up the reeds. She did a lovely job, but it turned out that the dummy was at the other end. Obviously, I wasn’t aware of this, but was pretty sure she hadn’t missed it when hunting right-handed. I stopped her and indicated to hunt again, but used my left hand to hunt her in that direction. She did and found the dummy. It is important…

HUSSEY LTD Henry Joseph Hussey was dismissed by the firm Lang & Hussey in 1898. He then traded as Hussey Ltd at 81 New Bond Street from 1900 until 1911. He sometimes also used the name H J Hussey Ltd. Don Masters described Hussey as “unscrupulous” but acknowledged his guns were first class. This leather label with gold embossed lettering would have been used in the decade up to 1911. After that the firm became Hussey & Hussey Ltd. The claim to be ‘Gun Fitting Specialists’ appears to be a bit of marketing guff, though Hussey did set up his customers’ guns well, as evidenced by their success in the pigeon ring.…

Life isn’t fair. And when it comes to our dealings with the organs of the state, individual citizens are at a distinct disadvantage. Like it or not, society has decided that those of us with legally held firearms should not be allowed the full rights of a free-born citizen, as first enshrined in this country by the Magna Carta in 1215. I am not a lawyer. In discussing the intricacies of firearms licensing practice, my observations are made as a layman and ordinary certificate holder. Like most of us, I have never had any problems with the police. The law gives chief police officers the power to revoke a certificate if they believe you cannot be permitted to hold firearms without a risk to public safety. The police can seize…