Innholdsfortegnelse for 1-Jun-2022 i Shooting Times & Country

A Utah hunting guide who allegedly used “oil, grain and pastries” to lure a bear for Donald Trump Junior to shoot has been charged by state authorities. Davis County attorney Troy Rawlings said that Mr Trump — who shot and killed the animal — was not a suspect but “was actually a victim and now a possible witness in a fraudulent scheme to lead the hunter to believe it was actually a legitimate Wild West hunting situation”. Outfitter Wade Lemon, who organised the hunt, was charged after a trailcam with his phone number and the initials WLH (Wade Lemon Hunting) on it was found pointing at a large pile of fatty baits. One of Mr Lemon’s employees has also reportedly passed information to state authorities over the scheme. Lemon faces…

The connection between the British royal family and fieldsports is long and illustrious and, happily, permeates down to this year of our monarch’s Platinum Jubilee. The royal estate at Sandringham has borne witness to many great sporting days, as has Balmoral in Aberdeenshire. Extending to 55,000 acres, and with grouse moors, deerstalking and salmon angling, the Balmoral Estate is a perfect highland microcosm and is rich in species synonymous with the Caledonian pine forest. At its heart is the River Dee, over which the royal estate holds an impressive 16 miles of fishing. “The Dee was running unusually low for late April” It was with considerable good fortune that I received an invitation to cast a fly for a salmon on this very water, on the opening day, under the…

Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to have seen almost all our native gundogs working in the field on shooting days. As a result, I’ve met lots of delightful people, too. I’ve found that enthusiasts for rare breeds are very much like classic-car enthusiasts. They will forgive their breed its failures or foibles because it’s their passion, though they are generally well aware that one of the mainstream breeds, such as a springer or labrador, would be much better at doing the job they want their dog to do. It’s the same with the classic-car enthusiasts, too. They put up with the lack of power steering, the heavy brakes, even excessive thirst, because they love their old vehicle. However, almost all have a conventional modern car for everyday use,…

Subaru launched the Forester in 1997. Initially based on the Impreza, it gained a reputation for being a hard-wearing, no-nonsense, go-anywhere vehicle. It soon proved popular with country folk. I’m trying out the latest ecofriendly incarnation of the Forester, the E-Boxer XE Premium Lineartronic, a self-charging hybrid. The Forester has changed somewhat from its original estate-car silhouette and for the better, I say. The new design looks more like an SUV and there’s enough distinctive Subaru styling to set it apart. The rugged, modern styling is most apparent on the big front grille and bumper, combined with fancy angled automatic LED lights. The 18in diamond-cut wheels add a touch of bling and I rather like the autumn-green metallic paintwork and contrasting trims. “Handling over the bumps is relatively smooth and…

J LAWSON It is incongruous to see a howdah-mounted tiger hunt on the case label from a Scottish gunmaker, but that is exactly what this is. The oil-impregnated and faded paper label with black ink lettering and drawings is dramatic and different. It specifies “Single and double tiger and elephant rifles” and well as “Single and double choke and smooth bore guns”. The name J Lawson is for James Lawson, who traded from 70 Argyle Street, Glasgow, from 1890 to 1913. The emphasis on ‘choke bore’ suggests it was from the earlier years, when choke was novel enough to be worthy of mention. The label captures the spirit of the age.…

The counties of Suffolk and Norfolk boast an intense yet largely good-natured rivalry. Tractor Boys versus Canaries football shenanigans aside, the two easternmost counties would far rather rib one another than come to blows. The south folk farmers brag that their Suffolk Show (31 May and 1 June) comes first, so must be the best. The north folk counter that the Royal prefix on the Norfolk Show (29 and 30 June) proves theirs is the premier event. This parochial yet bantering one-upmanship is perfectly evidenced in the free-standing bell tower of St Michael’s, in the Suffolk border town of Beccles. The sturdy, squat five-century-old edifice can be seen for miles along the Waveney Valley. Three of the tower’s sides bear clocks. The frontage that can be seen from the far…

One farm that I shoot has caught me totally by surprise. Walking the fields, I’ve seen plenty of evidence of pigeons picking away at peas, but I haven’t seen the weight of birds that justifies the damage. I decided to mix up my recon routine and have a look early one morning. To my surprise, birds were all over the crop. It’s rare to see birds feeding so early in the morning at this time of year and I have not seen it anywhere else. It could be the cold nights — the pigeons quickly replenish their energy level first thing and then head off to feast on ash buds — or disturbance from dog walkers and horse riders. Regardless, it’s great to be back into the swing of it…

Some years ago, my wife was so busy at work that she proposed to hire somebody to exercise her horse. I remarked that this was like me paying somebody to go to the pub for me. Why not simply get rid of the horse? I was informed that my opinion was neither required nor helpful. We now have two horses, with more threatened almost daily. When it comes to fieldsports, do you ever wonder about where to draw the line between using paid-for assistance and relying on your own skill and sweat? Almost all novice deerstalkers seek out a professional to help put them on the right track, so to speak. They learn from the stalker about the ways of deer and the craft of stalking. It’s money well spent.…

Gamekeepers have launched a campaign to save the shooting season from disaster, after Defra confirmed it would enforce a 90-day delay from the end of the bird flu outbreak before imports to the UK could resume (News, 25 May). In an email to Shooting Times, Defra explained that the 90-day restriction to movements came from the avian influenza regulations that were transferred into UK law as part of the Brexit process. After Brexit, changes by the EU shortened the period for which movements were restricted to 30 days. However, the UK regulations were not updated to match this. This has caused confusion among French suppliers, who did not realise that the UK was still using the old regulations. Industry insiders warned Shooting Times that game farmers in the UK, who…

GROWING Put the strimmer down and leave the herbicide in the cabinet. Too much tidiness can be very bad news for wild gamebirds. Wild little patches of nettles and other untidy corners can provide birds with great nesting spots and realising you have strimmed down or sprayed their cover can be depressing to say the least. So let the nettles grow tall and provide a home for wild birds and a food source in the form of caterpillars. ATTEND Join a wildfowling club. If you love wild sport and wild places and want to do something practical for conservation, consider joining a local club. Not only will it give you access to miles of foreshore, but it will also give you access to decades of acquired knowledge and experience.…

The work of one of the UK’s most dedicated wildfowlers has been recognised by BASC with an honorary lifetime membership. Ken Arkley, who has been at the centre of the struggle to preserve the fowling heritage of the Humber estuary, was given the award at the BASC AGM on 21 May. Ken is former secretary and now president of the Hull and East Riding Wildfowlers Association and negotiates the wildfowling consents on behalf of the Upper Humber Wildfowling Committee. He has been at the centre of the struggle to prevent Natural England officials from revoking long-standing permissions on the estuary. Two more wildfowlers, Clive Elliston and John Bishop, were also awarded lifetime memberships in recognition of their work, as was John Swift, who was instrumental in establishing the current system…

It’s not a hill to die on I’m getting fed up with reading about lead in your pages; it’s time we woke up, smelled the coffee and switched. It’s not like we don’t already have the alternatives in place, it’s not hard to buy perfectly decent steel shot, or even bismuth if you’re worried about the integrity of your old banger. It particularly annoys me when I hear people complaining about the extra cost of the alternatives. Compared with the price rises in every other part of our sport they are pretty insignificant. We are talking about £200 to £300 extra at most for 1,000 cartridges. Simple maths tells you that you’re looking at a few pence per cartridge extra, and that even on a decent day with plenty of…

The role I play in the countryside is a relatively diverse one. I am a land agent, a farmer’s son and I run a shoot. I am a conservationist, a tree planter, a fisherman and a deerstalker. I am a runner, finding great contentment padding along miles and miles of footpaths throughout the year. It is fair to say that I see the countryside and our landscape from a great number of angles. I wear another cap, though. One that, in many respects, seems greatly at odds with the caps listed above. I am involved in development work that, in time, could result in scores and scores of acres ending up under houses, offices, roads and gardens. A shallow assessment would question how I can care so much about the…

Before Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha arrived in Britain it would have been rare to see an Englishman shooting driven game. Prince Albert is widely credited with popularising driven pheasant, partridge and grouse in the UK, shooting his pair of 14-bore percussion muzzle-loaders while enjoying what was, at the time, a more continental approach to sport. The Prince first learned to shoot in the 1830s and sport shooting soon became his favourite pastime. Following his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840, Albert became a regular client of Charles Lancaster. The company received the Royal Warrant (see p24) in 1843, producing a pair of custom-built 40-bore rifles in the late 1840s, a 14-bore single gun in 1855 and a pair of 40-bore muzzle-loading rifles in 1856. Another pair of rifles…

In 1977, when HM The Queen had her Silver Jubilee, Peter Moxon, the legendary Shooting Times gundog correspondent, wrote “that the royal family still retain a great interest in gundogs there can be no doubt, and it is to be hoped that The Queen and Prince Philip will continue to do so”. Prince Philip is sadly gone, of course, but The Queen’s love of gundogs endures. I recently wrote about female gundog handlers and trainers, and how women are perhaps naturally better than their male counterparts (Winning with a gentle touch, 6 April). When looking into the top female dog handlers in the country, one name frequently popped up. It was at a very early age that The Queen was appraised of the value of a well-trained gundog. King George…

It is a fact that most man-made features in Britain — such as woods, copses and pools — originated as places that provided sport and food. Creating ponds can be expensive and if you don’t know what you’re about, you can make a mess of things. But much more easily made is a scrape. These can afford you good shooting as well as providing excellent conservation value. A scrape is shallow and often dry at times, but should hold water in winter. The sides are gently sloping, merging with the surrounding area. Mallard and teal are dabblers — they need shallow water to feed, so the more edge to the scrape the better. Diving ducks such as tufted utilise deeper water. Wigeon will appreciate the water to wash and rest…

THE NEW FORESTER certainly ticks a few boxes and its main strength is off-road performance. That said, it’s still an enjoyable driving experience and it has a certain quality to it. It’s well made and versatile, so with a little more power and a slightly more usable EV mode, Subaru could be on to a winner. So what’s the bottom line? The base Forester starts off at £36,410 on the road and the XE Premium we’ve been looking at comes out at £39,410, which is not bad when compared with some of its competitors.…

Q Is one strand of electric fence wire enough on a release pen or do we need two? Will adding a second strand actually make any difference? A Our pheasant pens have only a single strand of electric fence. Our partridge pens, however, have two. As the bottom wire of a pheasant release pen is either dug in or pegged down, a single strand of electric fence is enough. We use two on our partridge pens because the pens are smaller and are usually only resting on the ground, so it is easier for things to dig in. It is also harder for the birds inside to escape the attention of predators on the outside by hiding. The higher wire is set 10in to 12in off the ground and the…

Estate owners and gamekeepers have been getting schoolchildren out of the classroom and on to the moors as spring brings the uplands to life. In Scotland the regional moorland groups have launched their Estates That Educate programme. The first visit was hosted by the Tayside and Central Scotland Moorland Group. The pupils met a range of working dogs, learned about pest and predator control, handled some day-old chicks and got hands-on experience of preparing gamebirds for the table. The Angus Glens Moorland Group was next, with the Gannochy Estate providing the ground and local farmers and keepers supplying exhibits and experiences. The children got a chance to play with firefighting gear in a game of football with forced air units (rather like leaf blowers). Adults have been getting a taste…

Footage from trail and phone cameras is revealing the true story of what is happening to wader nests, providing an extraordinary glimpse of the challenges faced by Britain’s struggling ground-nesters. Among the best known of these projects is the camera set on a curlew nest by the Curlew Country project, which focuses on conserving the small and rapidly diminishing curlew population of the West Midlands. In recent years it has caught the laying and incubation of eggs and the hatching of the chicks. However, the young have always disappeared within days, with an off-camera predation incident suspected as the cause. At the time of going to press, the birds were on the nest and incubating without incident. The first-hand experiences of gamekeepers and their value in protecting ground-nesters was shown…

New bird flu cases recorded in Britain Further adding to the chaos caused by outbreaks of bird flu, four new cases have been recorded in the UK. Cases have been recorded in Southwell, Newark, and Sherwood, Nottinghamshire, with another two in Suffolk, near Redgrave and Market Weston. Movements of gamebirds, including releases, within 10km of these sites will now be restricted for 90 days. UN acts to increase imports of wheat Wheat prices have fallen slightly after an intervention by the UN and news that India may relax its export ban (News, 25 May). Responding to fears of a serious global food shortage, the UN has been trying to agree sea corridors to allow the export of Ukrainian wheat, potentially allowing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of extra grain on…

Lindsay Waddell mentions the fact that white-tailed sea eagles are taking farm livestock with no redress to the people or organisation responsible for their reintroduction (Upland Keeper, 18 May). There are a lot of questions that need to be answered regarding what is going on in our environment; who is subsidising it and how are they allowed to continue doing it when they have losses of more than 83%? That’s a lot of dead birds. Why are keepers blamed every time a ‘special’ bird of prey goes missing? Who gives permission for birds to be tagged with radio transponders or to be taken from nests and relocated? Why, when a harrier goes missing, is it a keeper involved? The truth is that the hen harrier has always been a rare…

One of the more eccentric royal characters to grace the country house shooting circuit during the mid-Victorian period was the Maharaja Duleep Singh, the last ruler of the Punjab and head of the Sikh faith, was born in India in 1838. Thought by his peers to be the fourth best Shot in Great Britain during the 1870s and 1880s, he was obliged to transfer the sovereignty of the Punjab, the Koh-i-Noor diamond and all state property to the British Government under the terms of the Treaty of Lahore in 1849 at the age of 11 in return for a pension of £50,000 (£4.5 million in today’s money). He was subsequently taken to England by his British guardians, granted the rank and precedence of a European prince by Queen Victoria, taught…

Here’s a challenge for you: google the words ‘The Queen’ and ‘pheasant’. You will find the search engine’s top picks provide countless links to a litany of tabloid angst and misplaced adjectives. Her Majesty, if some sections of the media are to be believed, does nothing at Sandringham bar ‘strangling’, ‘wringing’ and ‘clubbing’ the necks of our most popular gamebird. A host of publications that show such boastful pride in puffing their own peculiar brands of patriotism veer markedly towards the republican when it comes to the royal family’s participation in fieldsports. It seems that there is no insult sufficiently low for them to sling at members of the House of Windsor when they spend time at the covertside or on the moor. Her Majesty is not singled out. The…

It has now become natural to us all to feel that we share every part of the lives of HM The Queen and her family, as they share the lives of their people. In the past 18 months, this has meant great sorrow and joy. Everyone who has lost a father, husband or a deeply loved friend suffered that loss again at the death of King George VI, who was so truly a father to his peoples, and the passing of that great lady, Queen Mary, was felt as a personal grief by many millions. Now with the long-awaited day of the Coronation, we can rejoice together amid the great tide of goodwill towards The Queen, her husband and children. However, we do not always think of them on great…

Q I am about to buy my first multi-shot pre-charged airgun and don’t know whether to go for one with a very high magazine capacity. What is the best option to go for? A Choosing the right magazine capacity really depends on the type of shooting you plan to use your airgun for. Companies like FX Airguns make magazines that can hold several dozen pellets — very handy for shooting at night, when you don’t want to be constantly reloading in the dark. In all honesty, though, a standard eight- or 10-shot magazine is sufficient for most airgun pest control. I would recommend that you base your choice of airgun more on its general performance and how it fits you, rather than how many pellets its magazine can hold. You…

Q While hiking in the Pyrenees last summer, I was astonished to see a pair of ptarmigan, a bird I’d always associated with the mountain tops of the Highlands. Were ptarmigan introduced here? A The Pyrenean ptarmigan population is the most southerly in the world. The species is widespread across the northern hemisphere, even breeding as far north as Svalbard and Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. Ornithologists regard the isolated populations of ptarmigan in Scotland, the Pyrenees and Alps as glacial relics, left after the last ice age. The Pyrenean population is a separate subspecies, Lagopus muta pyrenaica, but they are very similar in appearance to Scottish birds, Lagopus muta millaisi. The population is highly fragmented, as only the highest tops are inhabited. As a result, the birds show…