NIGHT FLIGHT
The transformation of a flooded field into a pond has created a duck flighting heaven for one hardy night shooter
Duck flighting over a pond in a flooded field is the perfect shooting adventure if you’ve got the stamina
Flighting is at its best when the night is wild and dusk is fast fading away, forcing ducks in off the foreshore in search of a sheltered roost before blackness descends. I recently had such an evening; it was the first time we ever shot ‘the new pond’. An old friend’s labradors picked 18 mallard from the reeds that night.
The pond had been a long time coming. For years, I would go and crouch behind a tumbledown dyke in a field which floods in deepest winter. If enough barley had been put down over the preceding weeks, a small bag of teal could be shot, but I wanted something more permanent.
The day my first ever pay cheque came through I got on the phone to Steve, ‘the jolly digger man’, one of Dumfriesshire’s countless Cumbrians. ‘ A pond? That’ll be a thousand pounds,’ he said. As long I stayed out of my local pub, I calculated I could make it to payday number two. So four weeks later, the pond was built, stretching some 40 feet across and 20 feet wide, all encased in taut Rylock fencing to keep the farmer’s anarchically destructive dairy herd out.
And then the invoice came: ‘£3,000, payable to Steve’. The horror. After three fraught days, a parental loan was negotiated and handed over with a fierce lecture about project management and budgeting. I sat in the kitchen and nodded earnestly.
Yet in relative terms, the fee was reasonable. An average day of driven pheasants costs twice as much as building a pond over which you can shoot wildfowl every few weeks during the season. It’s also important to appreciate the conservation value of such a project in a country which has drained 90% of its wetlands since the industrial revolution. Not to mention the life-affirming bliss of lying on a grassy bank in the midsummer sun, watching a clutch of ducklings paddling around after their mother.
But there was precious little sun the first day we shot the pond. As we sat shivering between two beeches, some 400 metres from the pond, summer was a distant memory.
‘ For years, I would go and crouch behind a tumble-down dyke in a field which floods in deepest winter’