Innholdsfortegnelse for 28-Sep-2022 i Shooting Times & Country

A ban on consuming ‘alcohol and narcotics’ while hunting is one of 30 recommendations proposed by the French Senate to try to reduce the number of hunting accidents in the country. Under the proposal, the same limits would apply to drinking and hunting as for drinking and driving. Willy Schraen, president of the French Hunters Federation, responded angrily to the report, saying: “This report on hunting safety with its 30 draconian proposals forgot to mention a 31st: simply ban hunting. Which would amount to the same and would be more sincere on the part of these senators, who are under the influence of the anti-hunting lobby. This report is a perfect manual for our opponents.” However, senator Patrick Chaize, one of the authors of the report, countered: “The situation must…

LETTER OF THE WEEK Is catch-and-release really the answer? I read with interest your article (News, 24 August) about the increasing numbers of Scottish rivers moving to a catch-and-release policy. While this is to be applauded, it is not the answer. I have been fortunate to have fished the Royal Dee for 15 years and most recently have had a rod on the Wye. I am no expert, but having spoken to many gillies over the years, they all say there are many issues at work. Phosphate run-off, the acid effect of softwood plantations, seals, netting and, more recently, I would suggest that water extraction and pollution are the biggest issues. The life cycle of a salmon is one of nature’s wonders. In the current environment, I have no problem…

Wildfowling Our wildfowling club annual general meeting was held towards the end of August and I chose a route to the venue that took me past the club’s foreshore so I could take a look — or should that be a gander? — to see if there were geese around. There were lots. “Chester was a high-speed black streak, dashing to the car” Before we dealt with the treasurer’s report, lease renewals and memberships, the talk was all about goose numbers and who would be out on 1 September. Exchanges with other fowlers form the very fabric of the build-up to the wildfowling season. Wildfowlers relish the countdown to the first, their equivalent of the Glorious Twelfth. August for the wildfowler means checking duck decoys and repairing lines, a few…

Shooting clothing Although the sportsmen of Lieutenant Colonel Peter Hawker’s generation wore top hats and tailcoats while walking-up partridges, by the time Shooting Times first landed on the breakfast tables of the sporting gentry some 25 years later, much of the attire worn in the field would be reasonably familiar to us today. Some traditionalists may even be found clad in apparently comparable garb. As shooting became more popular, special features began to improve performance, be that material or design alterations to regular daywear. By the 1870s, the shooting coat and knickerbockers had become a familiar look for sportsmen. The coats were high buttoned, with two front pockets and a breast pocket. Some had a cap pocket in the waist seam. All pockets were flapped to keep out water and…

Over the years, Shooting Times has been published by lots of different companies, large and small. In the 1990s, it was published by IPC, which was known colloquially as the Ministry of Magazines. Magazines, then, were big business, but in terms of heft, our current owner, Future PLC, is about as mighty as media companies come. There are downsides to working for such a big business, but there are lots of good things about it, too. One of them is being able to carry out reader research. The average number of dogs you lot have is 1.5, many of you prefer walked-up days to driven days and, when we carried out some polling to find out what sort of gun you’d most like to have in your cabinet, the response…

If you cannot enjoy a blank flight, you should not go wildfowling, especially in early September before the bulk of the migrants have arrived. It’s not so long ago that I failed to get a shot until the fifth trip of the season, so my hopes were not that high on 8 September in southwest Wales; my first trip this season. My mate Mad Tom and I spied from a vantage point in the village, and were encouraged to see six teal lift from the marsh edge and fly 100 yards or so before pitching into a creek. With luck they were joining some others, but whatever, there were some ducks about. Our plan was to sit on a stony spit that juts out to the marsh front and watch…

Living inland amid the arable breadbasket means that geese do not feature in my everyday shooting and the mere thought of an approaching skein of grey geese conjures up romantic images of coastal marshes or misty, winding rivers. So, when I do unexpectedly encounter a goose, there is no wonder that I suffer from ‘goose fever’ — a condition that similarly afflicted even famously experienced wildfowlers of the past, such as BB and Arthur Cadman. It certainly did when I was on my peg on a syndicate partridge day in my home village and the cry of “geeeese!” was bellowed lustily by a distant flanker out on the golden September stubbles. It so happened that the maize cover crop was close to a small carp lake and the 15 Canada…

The history of keepering Early gamekeepers in the late 18th and 19th centuries were employed to harvest creatures for wealthy landowners. This was not only to provide fine fare for the family, but doubtless for the army of servants employed in running such establishments. Not that the chambermaids would be feasting on venison, more likely something else further down on the list of culinary delights and that list was endless. Anything edible was deemed harvestable, nothing was protected and any means of capture was legal. Surplus was sold at market and landowners realised that the fur, feather and fin occupying their estates was valuable. These early gamekeepers had to be tough, they were not alone in realising the value of high protein on offer. People were hungry and poachers desperate,…

THOUGHTS FROM THE FIELD Pre-Christian Britons called the autumn equinox ‘Mabon’, which was celebrated by a second harvest festival. Mabon festivities focused on the wild fruits that could be foraged from hedge, scrub and trees. Usually now would be the best time for harvesting bullace, rowanberry, blackberry, crab apple, rosehip, elderberries, sloe and hazelnuts – a bounty truly worthy of celebration. However, due to the extraordinary heat experienced throughout July and August this year, many foragers have found that the fruit set earlier than usual and, as a result, many hedgerows are already bare. This is not only bad news for lovers of home-made preserves, pies and alcoholic concoctions, but also for the wildlife who rely on their own Mabon harvest to bulk up in preparation for the ravages of…

NEWS Large skeins of pink-footed geese have started to arrive as autumn begins, although both the birds and the fowlers that pursue them have an uncertain season ahead of them. Wildfowlers and birdwatchers in Scotland’s north-west are reporting the arrival of the first major skeins of Icelandic pink-footed geese. Small numbers of pinkfeet have been noted in north-eastern Scotland since the middle of summer. “We know this winter could see a repeat or something worse” However, the first big arrivals of the birds have now definitely begun, with large skeins observed coming in from the Atlantic Ocean and crossing the islands of Barra and South Uist. Visiting wildfowlers, who were shooting the islands’ huge resident greylag population, contacted Shooting Times to say they had spotted the skeins passing over and…

One of the north of England’s most prolific poachers has been handed a Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO). Ryan Thomas Spence, from Redcar and Cleveland, has a long history of poaching offences from Norfolk to Scotland and was given the CBO for poaching, after being found guilty of hunting wild mammals with dogs at yet another court hearing. In 2017, a Scottish court fined Spence £1,320 after he was caught with blood on his jacket and inside a rucksack he was carrying. Nearby, police found seven dead hares. They were still warm and had fresh injuries. The new order places sweeping restrictions on Spence, including banning him from trespassing on any land with a dog or firearm; straying from any public right of way on to any land; being in a…

One of the better turns in life was when I found out about Shooting Times. I had started reading some British shooting books in the 1960s. Especially those by BB. In the early 1970s, Dr John Crawford, of the wildlife school of Oregon State University and co-author with Pat Whatley of The History of W&C Scott Gunmakers, mentioned to me that there was an excellent magazine published on British fieldsports. He also pointed out that BB wrote for it. Tony Jackson was the seventh editor for the magazine when I got a subscription. He accepted an article on snipe and another one that I wrote on sharp-tailed grouse. In the following years I was able to spend days shooting geese in Saskatchewan, Canada, with editors Tim O’Nion, John Gregson and…

George Whyte-Melville declared that the best of his fun he owed to horse and hound. For me, I remove the equine element and replace it with ‘wading staff’. As a teenager, mink hunting, above all other fieldsports, was my passion. The thrilling intimacy of watching hound work at close quarters, the frisson of danger found in wading breast deep through dark river pools and the heart-bursting moment when you alone view the varmint and rally hounds with your best “view ho”. Oh, mink hunting, you were indeed the best of my fun. The Hunting Act affected many. Thousands forfeited their liberties, a few of us our livelihoods. I laid off staff, lost my house, business and a yard full of smart young hunters. For all that, in hindsight, it was…

Sport abroad My first village dog was shot and killed. I barely got to know him before I was lifting his body from the pile of dead dogs at the dump. I needed to give him a proper burial; I couldn’t just leave him there. Now when I say village, I mean a native Alaskan village deep in the bush — disconnected from any road, only accessible by a wobbly bush plane, millions of acres of wilderness between you and Anchorage. I moved out there to teach at the school. Generally, the only outsiders in those villages are the teachers and they often don’t last. Life for dogs out there is hard. They are left in the roads to starve or freeze. They are tied up permanently. They are shot…

CompetitionWIN CENS EAR DEFENDERS Over the years, at Shooting Times, we’ve received a huge number of brilliant stories written by readers. We wanted to celebrate that tradition in our birthday issue by teaming up with our friends at CENS. Please send us 600 words about a day in the field (to shootingtimes@futurenet.com) over the next two months. The Editor will judge the stories and the winner will receive a set of custom-made CENS ear defenders. The winning story will be published in our Christmas issue. Best of luck.…

In my boyhood we played a game that allowed full expression of the imagination: when, ideally, would you like to have been born? And we decided that the 1880s, the decade of Shooting Times’ founding, was about perfect. The game was usually played in an Edwardian octagonal tree-house perched in a cedar tree where we often spent the summer nights before rising at dawn and marauding with airgun, catty and butterfly net. It was a hunting base, in other words, and so the criteria for the perfect birth-year were based mostly on sporting opportunity with one other, very selfish, consideration: we didn’t want to have been nobbled in one of the world wars. Never repeated World Wars I and II weren’t vague notions in the history books then. Fathers had…

OUR VERDICT Zoli is famed for its shotguns, but the manufacturer’s Taiga range of bolt-action sporting rifles has never had much traction here in Britain. It’s a shame, as these rifles offer old-world quality blended with good accuracy and value for money. In fact, they are made to an older design developed by Swedish gunmaker Husqvarna. As such, Zoli has updated and, to my mind, improved a classic bolt-action rifle into the Taiga on test today. There are also Bavarian, synthetic and fluted-barrel models. “Who doesn’t love a well-finished rifle that costs less than £1,400?” I really like the walnut stock, the highly polished blued action and barrel, and the silky smooth cycling and detachable magazine. I also like that it is available in all the popular deer calibres. Best…

Researchers from the International Snipe Hunters Club are eagerly awaiting the reappearance of a record-breaking common snipe after a satellite tag fitted to the bird told an extraordinary tale of its eastward migration. The bird wintered in the Camargue in southern France and then, in mid-April this year, it headed east. It crossed central Europe and rested briefly in Hungary before flying high over the war-torn Donbas region of Ukraine and into Russia. The bird was one of 165 snipe tagged by the French Office for Biodiversity and the International Snipe Hunters Club. Nearly all of these birds stopped west of the Ural Mountains, spending the winter in either European Russia or Fennoscandia. However, this remarkable bird pushed on, flying clear across the mountains and well into Arctic Siberia, arriving…

Grouse shooting I’m fortunate enough to have a small piece of the Pennines to shoot over, and even more fortunate to have a nice lot of grouse on it this season for my friends to enjoy a day — or more if they do not live 200 miles away. In my tender years I count myself lucky that I have enough friends still alive and kicking to be able to enjoy a day’s walking-up, on ground that’s not easy at times. We’d taken a tally of 16 brace at the end of the first day over the ground but it was a hot and humid day, hard work for everyone. I had high hopes for a few more on our second outing, which was looking like a more temperate day.…

Shoot briefs can go on too long. But a particularly memorable one was limited to this, “Safe and sporting, please. Safe and sporting.” It seemed to summarise the essence of what it means to be a good Gun. “Sporting behaviour means to be fair and respectful” To be accused of unsafe or unsporting behaviour is about as damning as it gets. The concept of unsafe has changed very little since gunpowder was invented but I was interested to consider recently, when challenged by a reader, how the concept of ‘unsporting’ evolves. In most dictionary definitions, sporting behaviour means to be fair and respectful. For us as shooters, this tends to pertain to fellow Guns and the collected field. And, just as importantly, it applies to our attitude to our quarry.…

Deerstalking It’s quiet in the woods at this time of year. Undergrowth is dense, brambles are high and deer are content to laze out the warmer days in the thickest of cover. But with the rides newly mown, there was a chance to make contact with a roebuck that I have spotted recently on one of the trail cams, so I set off for an early stalk. With not the slightest breath of wind to rustle the leaves, the woods were as hushed as a cathedral as I crept along the familiar network of rides, scanning through the gloom of early dawn with my thermal binoculars, knowing that my Pulsar Krypton thermal add-on, newly delivered by the helpful folk at Scott Country, enables me to take a shot — if…

Grey partridges Shortly after my fifth wedding anniversary, my father asked to see me in his office. My mother had been grumbling about a lack of grandchildren. Expecting another intervention, I sat down across the table. “Sam,” he began, “I really think it’s time you got a dog.” His top priority was ensuring we could continue to flight the ponds on our farm in Suffolk when the weather looked promising, without having to rely on a keeper or guest with a dog. His labrador was too old and he wasn’t sure he had another dog in him. It was time for me to take responsibility. So the search began. Having always had labs, this was my first consideration. My wife wasn’t so keen. We almost plumped for a cocker spaniel.…

Salmon fishing My association with Shooting Times has been long and happy, as I have enjoyed the magazine for well over 40 years. During that time, many great sporting writers have graced its pages with their work and their names are forever etched in my memory — Gough Thomas, Colin Willock, Fred J Taylor and John Humphreys. All were formative influences on my younger self, but being a fanatical young salmon angler, it was the articles penned by Arthur Oglesby that held a particular fascination for me. “I travelled through his writing and my own imagination” Fishing the waters of the River Ribble and its tributary, the Hodder, I travelled through Oglesby’s writing and my own imagination to the banks of the Vosso in Norway, with its great slab-sided salmon…

If walked-up grouse shooting is so dandy then driven grouse must be the complete deal, right? The summit of sporting achievement? If it’s 10 times the price, it must at least be several times the experience, surely? I’m not so sure. I have had the privilege and the joy — and it is both, believe me — of shooting driven grouse with both single and double guns and it is a fantastic but daunting experience. I admit that, with time, the daunting aspects might diminish somewhat but since I am unlikely ever to be able to cram in 50 days amid the heather before heading south to my other estates to set about my own and other peoples’ partridges, I must reconcile myself to never really being comfortable in a…

For those of us lucky enough to be involved in game shooting, and for people who live rurally and have farming and shooting contacts, finding somewhere to go beating is fairly straightforward. Knowing what to do is almost second nature, and knowing what to take and what a day’s beating entails is, in most cases, a simple matter of asking a friend. Fewer people live and work rurally than they did even 25 years ago — never mind 140 years ago, when the first copies of Shooting Times hit the press — and many of the people who want to give beating a go don’t have the contacts. Others are put off from giving it a go because they aren’t quite sure what to do when they get there, or…

Jumbo crossword / Compiled by Eric Linden / 1580 Across 8 Is shooting insurance for the common people an encumbrance? (6,9)10 I ask about deer (4)11 Sort of casual without a sporting terrier (5)12 See Anson’s partner in action on the fringes of a deep valley (6)13 Delicious apples give colour to the plover (6)15 At its peak, we make fun of the gun part (3,3)19 Argues about arrangements of crops (4)20 Scramble around copses with sports optics (6)21 Initially, gundogs feature on the first page in the wee small hours (4)23 Immerses oneself briefly in declines in the landscape (4)25 A flock of geese will retch on the glen, endlessly (6)26 Really get your teeth into a dog treat (4)28 Parked the vessel, tail clipped (6)29 Plant enough…