Innholdsfortegnelse for 10-Aug-2022 i Shooting Times & Country

Wheat prices have begun their annual harvest-time slide, but compared with most years they remain high and shoots are likely to continue to feel the financial strain of feeding birds right through the season. The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board recorded prices of £248 per tonne for feed wheat, the main grain used to feed gamebirds. This is a distinct fall from earlier in the year, when it topped £300 per tonne, but it is still 25% higher than this time last year. Feed costs for shoots have doubled since July 2016. As harvest progresses, the price is likely to continue to fall. However, uncertainty over the amount of wheat Ukraine will be able to export continues to push up prices and, with much of the harvest taking place early…

A ban on hunting curlew and black-tailed godwit in France has been extended. The restriction has been in place since 2020 and is renewed annually by the Council of State, France’s highest administrative law court. The ban was introduced as part of France’s efforts to meet its international obligations under the African and Eurasian Waterfowl Agreement. Eurasian curlew are classified as ‘near threatened’ by the International Union for Conservation of Nature due to steep population declines. The extension of the ban was welcomed by conservationists, and even France’s normally very vocal hunting lobby expressed little opposition. Hunter Dylan Romain responded to news of the ban by saying: “Both species are in decline, I can’t see any reason to hunt them.” His view was endorsed by fellow hunter Frédéric Aubrée, who…

Pigeon shooting Last week I opted for old-school shooting. A bale hide on stubble took me back to the days when diesel was 50p a litre and I was a dozy student who spent as much time asleep or shooting as I did studying. A bale hide then was a great place for sport and for late-summer snoozes. The farm’s peas have been harvested in two parts. We have a large trial plot that is still uncut. The rest have gone off at a disappointing 1.2 tons per acre. Why so low? Well, it’s not pigeon damage. I’ve shot nearly 100 of them since drilling and scary men and bangers have added to the protection. From the vantage point of the combine, it became clear that rabbits — the common…

One of the greatest pleasures of owning a grouse moor is being able to invite people. Sometimes I send shooting invites, but there are other invitations I send out that matter far more. I have been a keen Shot all my life, starting with a ‘garden gun’ (57 years ago now) and progressing from there. Things have changed a lot since then and not always for the better. Back then, shooting more 100 pheasants on a driven day was considered ‘big’ and, likewise, shooting 50 brace of grouse on a driven day wasn’t to be sniffed at. From the mid-1980s and 1990s, things started to change. Shooting was becoming more popular and bigger bags became the norm, in part driven by the prosperity of the 1980s. Just as our endless…

Running a shoot Running a line and managing a beating team is an art. It’s difficult to get right and easy to get wrong. There is a certain amount of pressure on the keeper. While the beaters are no doubt doing their best and, in most cases, know what they are doing, it is the keeper who has to make the difficult decisions and who should be in charge. When you are in charge, the single most important thing you can ask your beaters to do on a shoot day is to turn up on time. Start times vary and while most shoots get under way at around 9.30am to 10am, it doesn’t always mean the beating team starts at the same time. You might want them to go out…

OPTICS TEST The value of a good laser rangefinder should never be underestimated when it comes to accurate shot placement with a rifle. Bullet drop affects point of impact as your projectile travels downrange. The way to solve the problem is to aim off or adjust your sights, but you can’t do that with much confidence if you don’t know exactly how far away your target is. It isn’t only long-range shooters who can benefit from a good rangefinder. I do a lot of airgun shooting, when the rise and fall of a pellet over relatively short distances can result in shots being way off the mark if I don’t apply correct aim-off. The curve of the trajectory is slightly less pronounced when I use my .22 rimfire for squirrel…

From early August until the end of September, great numbers of shore birds drop in on our east coast harbours and estuaries. Grey plover, golden plover, godwit, knot, whimbrel, greenshank and a host of other waders continue to arrive, and the saltings and mudflats that were so deserted during the summer months while these shore birds were away nesting in northern Europe (some as far away as northern Russia and Siberia), now present a most animated appearance. Flocks of various species and of various sizes, from the tiny little stint (Tringa minuta) to the gaunt, grey heron, are scattered over the flats in all directions — now feeding busily as they follow the receding tide, now flying with musical call to some more attractive spot. Of all these waders that…

NEWS Beaters, Guns and gamekeepers are looking forward to a steady return to grouse shooting as counts show respectable, but not bumper numbers of birds on the ground. Keeper Bob Connelly summed up the state of affairs on his shoot as “patchy”, adding that “it’s the same situation people are finding in most places”. Mr Connelly said that he intended to shoot on the Twelfth and then to see how things go. Other estates have a more substantial set of dates lined up, but few expect to break any records this year. Dave Baines, the GWCT’s director of upland research, explained the ecology of the situation. “On many moors, birds are still recovering in their numbers from poor breeding last year,” he said. “In northern England, the best grouse are…

A visit from the Princess Royal rounded off another successful Game Fair. The event took place at Ragley Hall in Warwickshire over the last weekend in July. Last year’s fair attracted a record crowd of 120,000, a figure that was matched this year. The fair saw the BASC Prince Philip Distinguished Service Award granted for the first time and one of the inaugural winners was former Shooting Times and The Field editor Jonathan Young. Mr Young said: “It was a great honour to be chosen as the first recipient of the BASC Prince Philip Distinguished Service Award. I first joined BASC — then WAGBI — 50 years ago so I could access the Crown foreshore and go fowling. “We all love talking about the future of shooting, but in reality…

Conservation A friend of mine had a mink in his farmyard last week. It was a bold little critter — after casually eating the eggs out of a wild pheasant nest, it posed for photos then slipped off into the nettles. Happily, his neighbour is a gamekeeper and the mink will not be around for much longer. In a strange way, the mink was a trip down memory lane for him. In the 1980s, when his grandparents had the farm, mink were abundant. They rolled about in the river pool below the house and ate their way through the duck, oystercatcher and plover eggs. Huge efforts to control them, combined with the return of the more formidable otter, saw numbers tumble but, obviously, they were never eradicated. Mink are far…

Let’s be honest, game shooting this season is going to be unlike any you have known before. No more will you be able to easily buy a day on a whim via GunsOnPegs. The avian flu-induced movement bans on European gamebird eggs have resulted in a scarcity of birds and to date 13% of shoots selling days have decided to shut up shop completely. Syndicates have been similarly affected by a shortage or total lack of poults, while feed prices have risen, and fertiliser and seed costs are similarly soaring. Nor, if you do succeed in buying a day, will you pick up a bargain. The cost of a pheasant on the game cart has risen by more than 30% and partridges by nearly 20%. This means that the cost…

At the age of 57, I can see the sporting obsessions of my whole life as a man — shooting, fishing, farming, writing — are rooted in two key events in my childhood. For some years, we had to take a break from the political upheavals of Africa and lived on a hill farm in Devon. The streams were full of crayfish and tiny brown trout, meadows of butterflies and flowers; elvers migrated across fields on moonlit nights; there were blackthorn hedgerows, huge granite gateposts and ancient oak trees. My father was usually away, still working in Ethiopia and Somalia, and so I fished alone mostly, learned to tie my own flies and spent a great deal of time on riverbanks studying the water. One summer, to my great excitement,…

Across 1 Went for a bite? (6)6 Somewhere to hunt for a photo assignment? (5) 7 The ring-necked pest will keep a rat from turning wild (8)9 Wildfowling location providing an old source of revenue? (6)10 Otter den at a new hotel, out east (4)12 Early slot on the annual hunting calendar - first of the first, actually (3,5,3) 15 Gundog whistle kept in small upper body garment (4)16 He approaches parasites with shooting discipline (6)18 Sometimes ruffled, these ones are for plucking (8) 19 Come out of one’s shell and through an opening (5)20 Hip containers found on both sides of flat desks (6) Down 1 The brilliance of cookware brought failure to flintlocks (5,2,3,3)2 Such a gun action won’t land us in deep water (7)3 Look into some…

Shooting Times can exclusively reveal that the aspiring prime minister Rishi Sunak is an enthusiastic country sportsman who looks forward to a retirement of shooting and fishing in the Yorkshire Dales. There were widespread rumours that the former chancellor was an active game shooter and we can confirm that this is the case. Well-placed sources have given Shooting Times convincing evidence that Mr Sunak and his family are regulars on shoots in the north of England and that his fox-red labrador is a working gundog. According to the same sources, Mr Sunak openly discusses his dream of retiring to shoot and fish in Yorkshire. This comes as the contenders set out their stall on rural issues. Liz Truss, Mr Sunak’s rival to be the next Tory leader and prime minister,…

NEWS Members of a notorious saboteur gang led by a convicted violent criminal have been found guilty of using threatening words and behaviour towards people watching a trail hunt near Oakham in Rutland. Shooting Times reported the arrest and charging of Paul Allman, Matthew Slater, Charley Waring, Cameron Allman and Reuben Waterhouse in January this year. After the incident, police issued an appeal seeking witnesses after two men in their sixties and a teenage girl were assaulted. Due to contempt of court laws, we were unable to reveal at the time that Paul Allman is a notorious thug with a prior conviction for violence and that Charley Waring has already served time after holding a knife to a victim’s throat during a burglary. That dated back to 2017 when Waring…

Walking the woods or sitting in a high seat, anticipating a shot, rifle in hand. Does what you carry matter? I recently showed a roebuck I had shot on social media and one wag replied: “You can’t have shot that, you are not wearing head-to-toe Realtree and carrying a stainless-steel rifle with a three-grand scope on it.” In these kit-obsessed times, we forget that our grandfathers killed deer and did it with much less specialised equipment. If, like me, you appreciate older things, sporting goods made with care and love and intended to last decades rather than a couple of years, there are practical options that you won’t see advertised on YouTube. For some, a rifle is a mere tool — efficiency is everything. For others, vintage shotguns and rifles…

We’ve been hacking our way through the rainforest’s undergrowth for 30 minutes when we come to a small clearing, a spot where keen international Shot, Jens Kjaer Knudsen can finally see 15m ahead of him. We settle in beneath the base of an impressive tree, our backs to the bark so that we have a 360-degree view of the encircling vegetation. If we are to succeed, we have to spot the little duiker antelope the moment the enticing tones of the call draw it into the clear ground. Jens is fully prepared when a blue duiker darts from the forest edge directly towards us only 30 seconds after our guide sounds the call. He pulls the shotgun to his shoulder and shoots, but his shot goes over the top. The…

Twenty or more years ago, I wrote an article on upland gamebird shooting for a major shooting and fishing magazine in America. In the article, I mentioned my experiences with grey partridge (or ‘gray’ in the US) An editor wrote to me that he wasn’t certain what bird I was writing about. He asked whether I was calling the Hun a grey partridge. Even today many avid shooters over here only know the partridge as the Hungarian partridge, or more commonly as the Hun. As an example of this, in the list of 2022 Oregon season dates and bag limits, the partridge is termed ‘the Hungarian’. The almost total use of Hungarian for the bird came from what is frequently credited as the first successful release of the partridge in…

One of the highlights of the past July — and indeed of most hunting people’s year — is the Festival of Hunting, which takes place at the East of England Showground in Peterborough. As luck would have it, temperatures during the event cooled to a mere 27°C compared with the 40°C of the week before. Arrangements were made by the Hunting Office and the showground to avoid hounds travelling in the heat the day before and I’m glad to say there was a great turnout of packs and everyone enjoyed a fantastic day. The Festival of Hunting brings people together from all over the British Isles and every type of hound is on show — foxhounds, harriers, beagles, bassets, draghounds and bloodhounds. There is something for everyone, not to mention…

THOUGHTS FROM THE FIELD The Parachute Regiment’s involvement in the race to bring grouse to the dining tables of London eateries on the Glorious Twelfth has a vibrant history. On 27 October 1986, the then Labour MP for Ipswich, Ken Weetch, sought to make political capital at the expense of shooting. He asked if the Secretary of State for Defence would make a statement on the total costs incurred by the race between the three Parachute Regiment battalions to deliver grouse to the Savoy hotel. In response, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Armed Forces Roger Freeman MP — a wily bird himself — said the efforts of the Red Devils display team had raised £22,000 for military charities. Weetch asked again for the cost of the flight, including the parachute drop…