Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Country Diary
At the start of a new year we can reflect on how lucky we are still to have so many quarry species, but will big bags be shooting’s downfall?
Anew year inevitably brings a time for reflection. As the years advance, I have long since realised that I have been so fortunate to have experienced and enjoyed aspects of shooting and fieldsports which we will never see again.
In my younger days, when wildfowling below the sea wall, I was able to fill my side bag with a variety of ducks and waders, rarely returning home empty-handed.
I was fortunate, too, to be able to hunt in the mounted field with a variety of packs and to enjoy the sport when it was still imbued with genuine excitement and the thrill of the chase. It was a time when the fox was still respected as a key element of the chase rather than an animal to be despised and shot at every opportunity.
When the hunting ban was enforced in February 2005 I chose not to hunt again. Trail-hunting is a pallid imitation of the real thing, while the ban itself has only resulted in the slaughter of countless foxes. Before the legislation gamekeepers quite rightly controlled foxes on their grounds, but cooperated with the local hunt to guarantee sport when their coverts were drawn.
Nevertheless, I must raise my cap to the hunting world for its determination to maintain its legitimate way of life and to continue with so many of the traditions that have long been a key element of the sport.
In the shooting world the many changes I have seen in my lifetime were brought home to me while picking-up a few days before Christmas on the shoot to which I have referred many times in my Country Diary. This was the modest shoot that I and my good friend, Charles Fenn — who so sadly died last October — established five years ago. It has now been developed into a 50-bird affair, to include both pheasants and sporting ducks.
We had paused for seasonal fare between drives and I overheard a beater describe his amazement at having seen a small flock of lapwings. He had never before encountered them, yet he had lived for some score or more years in the heart of the countryside and was an intermittent wildfowler. Fully protected in 1981 under the Wildlife and Countryside Act, these plover were common enough when I was wildfowling and duck shooting inland and regularly featured in my bag, along with redshank, curlew and bar-tailed godwit.
Lapwings were fine fare on the table, as indeed were most of the then legal waders, though I seem to recall that young curlew were to be preferred to older birds tainted with a marshland tang.
Today’s wildfowler is confined to nine species of duck: pochard, mallard, pintail, shoveler, teal, wigeon, tufted duck, gadwall
“Hats off to the hunting world for its determination to maintain its way of life”
and goldeneye, together with three waders, golden plover, snipe and woodcock. But before the 1981 act, sea duck such as eider, scaup, long-tailed duck, common and velvet scoters and smew could all be shot if one was so inclined. However, these uneatable divers and sea duck were quite rightly afforded full protection.
While at the time the removal of certain waders from the shooting list was annoying, on reflection it was a precaution subsequently justified by the alarming decline in the case of curlew and lapwing. Curlew numbers have dropped by 46 per cent since 1994 and the bird is now of the greatest conservation concern in the UK, while lapwing numbers have crashed by 49 per cent between 1987 and 1998, with major losses in southern England and Wales.
The cause for the decline of the latter has been attributed to changes in farming practices, including trampling by cattle on improved pasture with a resulting loss of nesting habitat. Determined efforts are being made to provide suitable nesting areas for both waders.
Shooting is still in reasonably good heart and from my own limited perspective this has been an excellent season so far. However, there is still a looming thundercloud on the horizon that, inevitably, will have to be tackled — the question of excessively large bags of reared birds. It is a problem that is not going to go away and needs to be tackled internally before politicians step in.
Tony Jackson, former Editor of Shooting Times, lives in Somerset, stalks, picks-up with Labradors and helps run a small shoot.