Shooting Times & Country Magazine
English style in Austria British keeper ringing the changes
A keeper from Wiltshire took on a large estate in Austria to introduce an English-style driven pheasant shoot. Tim Weston finds out more
Austria is not known in sporting terms for its driven pheasant shooting. If you spoke to somebody about hunting in any part of Austria they would probably talk about deer, wild boar and chamois. However, on one estate about an hour north of Vienna, on the Czech border, Steve Weeks, an English keeper from Wiltshire, is changing that. He has already got people talking about driven shooting in this remote corner where western Europe meets east.
The Liechtenstein family own a mixed farming and forestry enterprise covering 6,500 hectares, 1,400 of which is set aside for shooting. Steve and his wife Sarah, who is also the underkeeper, are responsible for this family shoot and all that goes with it.
“It is very different from the UK in terms of shooting,” said Steve. “When I arrived there was virtually no infrastructure at all. We had to start from scratch in terms of pen building, game cover and planning drives.”
Steve arrived in Austria three seasons ago with his family after working as a keeper in Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Hampshire. Personal circumstances led him to look for a change, but he never thought it would lead to an estate more than 1,300 miles from what was then home. “I didn’t even have a passport when I was put forward for the job by a keeper friend, Brian Mitchell,” he admitted. “I had an interview in London with Prince Constantin of Liechtenstein and the agent. It went well, and within a fortnight Sarah and I were in Austria. It was all quite surreal.”
The royal family decided to employ a keeper from the UK after having several locals who did a decent job but didn’t have the experience or expertise to take the shoot to the next level. They wanted a more English-style shoot with birds presented as we are used to here.
“On the face of it that seems quite straightforward for a keeper, but there were quite a few challenges,” said Steve. “For example, the sourcing
“I didn’t even have a passport when I was put forward for the keeper job in Austria”
of materials for the construction of pens, hoppers and drinkers, which had to be ordered from England, and specialist seed for cover-crop planting. One of the great things here is that the team I work with are really supportive and want to see the shoot progress, so if I ask for something that I really need I will get it. That makes life a little easier.”
In the first year Steve and Sarah built six new pheasant pens in the extremely hot Austrian early summer — temperatures can reach 40°C and don’t drop below 28°C at night. They had to plan new drives and reorganise the old ones to present better birds.
“One of the main challenges was to select crops that could withstand wild boar damage”
“Game cover isn’t something they had really heard of here, so I enlisted the help of Chris Bright from Bright Seeds in Wiltshire. Chris and his colleague flew out to visit, take soil samples and come up with a plan. One of the main challenges here was to select suitable crops that could withstand wild boar damage and the hot temperatures,” Steve explained. “The help of Bright Seeds has been invaluable to me.”
Planning what is, in effect, a brandnew shoot is never easy, but planning a new shoot in a different country with none of the equipment you are used to and not speaking the language is even harder. The whole family have taken German lessons and though none of them would say that they are fluent, they can converse.
There are some differences between releasing pheasants in Austria than in the UK. “The pheasant pens need to be much more robust here; wild boar are a real problem when it comes to walking right through pens,” said Steve. I use thick bottom wire and super-power electric fencers. We also have a top electric wire running around the pen to stop pine martens — they are a real killer.”
Shoot days are also a little different in Austria, as Steve explained: “On my first shoot day there were more than 80 people and 12 vehicles in the field. The estate forester organised the beaters and I had practised my German to give instructions. The trouble was very few of them were German, most came from Slovakia or the Czech Republic. That was a fun day.
“The really great thing about shooting here is that it is a proper family affair. The Guns all bring their children and partners who join them on the peg. Again, something I wasn’t used to but I think it’s great.
“Though the ultimate goal is to achieve an English-style shoot, I don’t think we should try to make it just like the UK, so we include some Austrian hunting traditions,” added Steve. “For example, the tableau where all the game taken that day is laid out and a different tune is played with horns for each species of game taken as a mark of respect. It is the behind-thescenes side of the shoot where we can and have made it perform better.”
Demand for game
Another aspect that Steve appreciates is the demand for the game at the end of the day. “In the UK I never had a problem selling game,” he said. “However, here I have a queue at the entrance to the larder when we have finished shooting. It is members of the public wanting to buy pheasants in the feather to take home for the table. Again, this is culturally very different from the UK; the people here seem more in touch with the huntergatherer side of fieldsports and I suspect it is because feathered game is not easily obtainable.”
Steve and Sarah have a lot of plans and ideas to improve the shooting on the estate and I can’t wait to visit them again to see it getting better and better.