Innholdsfortegnelse for 1-Mar-2023 i Shooting Times & Country

The other night, at a theatre in North London, a bloke at the bar told me he’d had a strange day. I’d never met him before but he said his mother had come down from up north and opened a piece of tinfoil on the kitchen table to reveal something that looked like a rabbit. “It was all purple,” he said to me as he ordered another glass of wine. “She insisted she was going to cook it.” He asked me over and over to guess what it was. I went with hare. “Smaller,” he replied. It turned out it was grey squirrel — “and very nice as well,” the man confirmed proudly. We only stood and chatted for 10 minutes or so, but he told me there are all…

If you are a gamekeeper trying to protect grey partridges from buzzards, you can apply for a lethal-control licence from Natural England (NE) — but you are unlikely to get one. It’s a different matter for fisheries where cormorants or goosanders are a problem, as thousands of licences have been granted by NE for shooting these birds, under the ruling of “preventing serious damage to livestock, foodstuffs, fisheries etc”. NE has just released details of the 11,675 licences it issued between 2014 and 2022. In the West Midlands, a licence was granted for destroying kingfisher eggs in the cause of “preserving human health”, and the same reason was cited for destroying swallow nests in Devon. In London, a licence was granted for the destruction of a peregrine’s nest for “preserving…

A unique Jura cromie red stag head sold for a bargain £900 at McTear’s latest auction on 22 February. The “rare and impressive” taxidermy features a cromie red stag, a subspecies of red deer with swept-back antlers, on a carved wooden shield mount from Rowland Ward. The beast, which resides solely on the Isle of Jura, was shot in Inver Jura in September 1951 and belonged to the family that served the island as headstalker. The hammer price was less than the estimate of £1,000 to £1,500. FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM @SHOOTINGTIMESUK…

As I write this, it’s not even three weeks since the shooting season drew to a close but plans are already well under way for the next one. Gamekeeping is a job of many different seasons and we are currently in the middle of another one — budget season. I wouldn’t say this is a particular favourite of mine but it is a necessary evil. The problem is that not everything is straightforward in this game and there are an awful lot of variables to take into account. Sometimes you have to make your best educated guess. It is a pointless exercise formulating a budget that is unrealistic. While it might look great on paper, when it comes down to actually trying to achieve it, you are on the back…

Unless you are one of those lofty types for whom an invitation to shoot at Sandringham, Arundel or Hilborough is the norm, most of us have little need to develop our skills and know-how in shooting driven English partridge. This is due to a fairly straightforward reason. The grey requires a host of very special circumstances in order for drives to be dedicated to shooting them. The sheer scale of land required, the intricate management in terms of food and habitat and the concerted endeavour of ongoing predator control — all need to combine in order to produce a shootable surplus. Such efforts are Herculean and, to be mercenary, somewhat costly. Little wonder then, with all of these challenges and the complete reliance upon the weather being favourable during the…

100 years 100 years of keepering WISDOM AND TRADITIONS GATHERED OVER A LIFE AT THE COALFACE, THIS WEEK WITH LINDSAY WADDELL It’s fair to say that the fairer sex, if I dare use that term these days, have often had a hard life in rural Britain — from domestic service to gutting fish that came off the herring boats, the hours could be long and the pay was poor. Interestingly, it is often imagined that keepers in the past were all men, which isn’t entirely accurate. Some readers may have heard of Mary Fishburne, who worked on the Holkham Estate in the 1800s as a gamekeeper and went on to live until the ripe old age of 80. These days there are quite a few female gamekeepers, which is great…

You may be looking at this recipe and thinking: “This is just an excuse to use up some more pheasant breasts.” And you may well be right — but what an excuse it is. Everyone loves a cheese toastie and this bad boy is loaded with smoked cheddar, sauerkraut and BBQ sauce. I have used shop-bought sauerkraut here as it seems to work better in a toastie than home-made. I have also used a sandwich loaf from a high-street bakery, along with a little lard on the bread for extra toastie excitement. You don’t really need a recipe for most of this, but the BBQ sauce is well worth the effort. “There’s nothing worse than when the filling fights back” This recipe makes far more BBQ sauce than you need…

You’d think rewilding would be pretty simple, wouldn’t you? Just leave some land alone for long enough and it will revert to scrub and woodland. In practice, self-sown saplings tend to be munched into nothingness by deer or straying livestock. So, in most of the lowlands at any rate, the accepted practice is to give nature a hand by planting native tree species and protecting them until they are established. I have just finished planting 17 acres of broadleaf woodland on my farm. It’s been bloody hard work and has cost me a lot of money, not to mention sacrificing some of my productive grazing land. It is only a tiny piece of new woodland in forestry terms. But every little helps, as they say. Imagine if every farmer planted…

READ The famous countryman and Shooting Times contributor Sir Johnny Scott has a new book coming out in April. The Countryman Sets Forth Again is a collection of Johnny’s much-loved articles and it covers, as you might expect, a wide number of topics relating to all aspects of rural life. It is published by Quiller and is available to pre-order for £20. MEDICAL People don’t often talk about their gym routine on the Gun bus — not in our experience anyway — but the truth is that as you get older, you become less flexible and your shooting goes downhill as a result. Why not join a gym this summer and keep trim ahead of next season? We have commissioned Richard Negus to write a piece later this month about…

Email your letters / stletters@futurenet.com LETTER OF THE WEEK The missing piece of the (game) pie I feel compelled to reply to the letters recently published in Shooting Times about the commercial viability of shot game. Mr Gough (Letters, 15 February) is correct, the masses do not want the product — at least not in the way it is currently presented. I feel that there are various reasons for this. Namely, if supplied in the feather, most of the public could not and would not want to prepare said birds for the oven, or have the know-how. The product is just too expensive, and even if the supermarkets prepare it for the chiller, the fact is that our modern, sanitised public repels at a product showing pellet marks. Reared and…

With both my own culling and my guided clients coming in at a relentless pace, it was great to take a few days away from the estate so that I could visit the British Shooting Show, also known as the BSS. I had been invited to attend alongside Swarovski UK to talk to visitors on the stand about the products that I use and their practical applications in the field. I hadn’t been to the BSS since before Covid, so it was nice to be back and meet up with old contacts and friends, as well as making a few new ones. As someone who works outside in all weathers, I quite enjoy an indoor show where you can walk around in a sensible level of clothing rather than in…

Gundogs THEY USED TO CALL sheep the golden hoof, for these were the animals that improved the fertility of the land on which they were grazed. Such traditional practices were abandoned long ago: sheep were temperamental and tricky to look after, while a tonne of nitrate fertilizer was cheap to buy. Today, sheep husbandry remains just as tricky, but the cost of fertiliser has quadrupled, so suddenly sheep are in demand again. This past winter, two local farmers have planted green covercrops, typically a mix of fodder radish, brassicas and mustard, and are grazing them off with flocks of sheep. One of the flocks is currently grazing a field directly behind my garden, so I’m now something of an expert on sheep behaviour. The flock numbers well over 200 pregnant…

Stalking dogs RUDI VAN KETS IS A BELGIAN GAME HUNTER WHO SPECIALISES IN DEER DOG TRAINING AND PREPARING HOUNDS FOR TRACKING TRIALS Last year, around the end of May, I received a call from a close friend in Wales. It started in the usual way: catching up on family news, our local hunts and, most importantly, the dogs. After a while, however, the conversation took an unexpected turn. My friend told me how one of his colleagues, Colin, had been looking unsuccessfully for a dachshund. The problem was that he wanted a working dog to help him search for injured game, especially roe deer with perhaps the occasional fallow. I had an idea of where this was heading. A while back I had helped my friend secure a Hanoverian hound,…

Email your stories / shootingtimes@futurenet.com Shooting Times contributors were among the winners at the Great British Shooting Awards 2023, with Chris Dalton and Mat Manning both taking gold medals, and Charlie Jacoby of Fieldsports Channel winning the Lifetime Achievement Award. One of the biggest shocks of the evening was airgun aficionado Mat Manning claiming the award for Outstanding Contribution to Conservation, beating stiff competition from other ST regulars including Richard Negus, Alan Edwards and Lindsay Waddell. It should be noted that the public vote for these awards. Mat said: “It was a real surprise and a genuine honour just to be listed alongside the other nominees in this category. I was absolutely blown away to be named the winner. I shoot hundreds of grey squirrels every year in an effort…

The mysterious disappearance of a historic item has been reported by the organisers of the Game Fair. They are on the hunt to find the leaping salmon trophy that was previously awarded at the Game Fair for the trout and salmon accuracy casting competition. If you can help locate the trophy, there is a prize of two free Sunday bronze packages, which get you entry into the Game Fair, forward parking and, best of all, access to the VIP loos. So have a rootle in the attic and see if you might be the lucky winner.…

I’m writing this on the last day of the wildfowling season, 20 February. As the long shadows shorten and the evenings start to draw out, the teal have already paired up. The black-bellied brant ganders are roaring about the sky, harassing the unfortunate females as they prepare for their long flight up to northern Russia. The lines and lines of overwintering pinkfeet have gone from the skies of north Norfolk, their beaks set for Iceland. Winter is all but over. We have had a strange wildfowling season. Our club has been in existence since about 1919, just after World War I, when we were teamed up with WAGBI (now BASC). The club has been a wonderful sanctuary for those men and women who live here on the edge of this…

A CLASSIC SERIES REVISITED As I write, the end of the wildfowling season is a couple of days away, but my usual February fowling has been disrupted both by several unavoidable commitments alongside three weeks of flat calm, which is unheard of in Wales at this time of year. Time is a precious and finite commodity, and I’m reminded of the excellent advice of both BB and Colin Willock to wildfowlers who sometimes overthink whether they should venture forth or wait until another occasion: “Always go.” It thus transpires that the pinkfoot I brought home from the Wash in January was bagged with my very last shot of the season. I can think of no finer way to end my wildfowling year than with a two-day adventure that will linger…

Why do we wear ties in the shooting field? Ironically, when I put the question to the occupants of a Gun bus the other day it was our resident American who was the first to respond. “Oh, you guys,” he said, “with your old school ties. And your regimental ties. And your club ties. The main reason that I wear this old thing is so I don’t get mistaken for one of you lot!” The ‘old thing’ in question was, obviously, a Yale university tie. Pot calling kettle black, or what? But he was kind of right. There are still people who both give and receive social signals via their neckwear and some of them shoot or beat or pick up. The GWCT, Countryside Alliance and National Gamekeepers’ organisation all…

In this column, Simon outlines the essentials of good ferreting IT’S ANOTHER GAME OF TWO HALVES The season has ended for a lot of people and their thoughts have turned to what they want for the next one. For some it is to remove their jill from season if they don’t intend to use her for breeding, for others it is to expand and build a bigger and better squad. Ferreting is like football in that it is now very much a squad game. If you want to keep things fresh, you need emerging talent. You can then decide what works and what doesn’t before it is too late. This year has been a strange one for many ferreters. An unseasonably warm winter meant a lot of jills have broken…

During a long shooting career, I’m pleased to say that I haven’t once come across ‘antis’. Alas, that’s not the case when I’ve been hunting, when the most I’ve ever counted at one meet was more than 70. This season my local hunt has been plagued by a small but persistent group of antis, armed with video cameras and sprays. They are all invariably dressed in black or camo and heavily masked to appear intimidating. I use the word anti deliberately, though today these thugs like to be called sabs, which sounds a little more serious. One of my first encounters with antis was more than 30 years ago at a meet of foxhounds. I pointed out to a policeman that one of the antis was carrying offensive weapons. He…

OUR VERDICT I have had the pleasure of testing a lot of semi-automatic shotguns over the past month. It has given me an insight into these amazing guns and gotten me rather obsessed with their own unique intricacies. Today we are going to be looking at Mossberg’s flagship field gun, the 940 Pro. The gun has a plain black action and a black plastic stock which, to my mind, lacks any semblance of style, but underneath this gun is quite exciting. The gun is a gas-system semiautomatic, meaning it uses the gas pressure from the fired shell to cycle the action. The gas that does this is pretty dirty and can be quite corrosive, so Mossberg has nickel-boron coated the piston and magazine tube to stop fouling building up and…

The experts THE ULTIMATE SHOOTING QUIZ TEAM BILL HARRIMAN BASC’s head of firearms and global authority on guns MAT MANNING Airgunner and journalist from the West Country DIGGORY HADOKE Vintage gun expert, firearms dealer, author and journalist BRUCE POTTS Shooting Times rifle reviewer and stalker MIKE SWAN Conservation expert and head of education for the GWCT DAVID TOMLINSON Highly regarded writer and ornithologist LIAM BELL Shropshire gamekeeper, keen wildfowler and amateur naturalist GRAHAM DOWNING Shooting consultant and sporting author TONY BUCKWELL Veterinary surgeon with a special interest in gundogs TOM PAYNE Professional shooting instructor and avid pigeon shooter ELLENA SWIFT Award-winning gundog trainer and canine behaviour specialist TIM MADDAMS Former head chef at River Cottage and runs a shoot in Devon SIMON WHITEHEAD Author, professional ferreter and rabbit controller IAIN…