Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Good things come to those who wait
Foxes are threatening to wipe out nesting waders so an ambush is set up — and techniques learned in the Royal Marines prove invaluable as Reynard takes his time
Commando training is not always terribly useful once a Royal Marine has left 3 Commando Brigade. Being able to tune a high-frequency radio in the dark is unlikely to be helpful in civvy street. Leopard-crawling and fireman’s carries are not usually high on the ‘desirable skills’ section of a job specification. My wife is a trained police interviewer and I’ve exhausted all my resistance-to-interrogation techniques in our 17 years of marriage; it turns out that police questioning techniques are better.
So it was refreshing this week to discover that I am still quite handy
sought to distinguish smugglers from shepherds, friend from foe. Waitingand-lying-still, we would hope against hope that it might be Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein and not an unwitting goat herder strolling down that track.
White-tailed eagle
In mid-april as the crops grew too high for lamping, I was reminded of these feelings as I lay in ambush with my son, William. We are blessed to live with views of the marshes and in the Big Farmland Bird Count were able to report lapwings among our most-counted species. We also have good numbers of other waders including nesting ringed plover, redshank and oystercatchers. We have even recently seen a white-tailed eagle cruising along the coast.
Crops are getting too high now for lamping so I took Liam Bell’s advice (No guarantees with this most wily foe,
8 April) to execute a night ambush and we set out against our common enemy, Reynard. William is not so thoroughly trained in the art of waiting-and-lying-still but is showing considerable potential in this respect from the comfort of a duvet. I hoped that a roll mat and a dry night might help him transfer the skills from a centrally heated house to a sea wall.
I was using a Stalon X Series sound moderator and a Pulsar Digex N450 on a .223 Tikka T3x Lite we had check-zeroed the previous day with Hornady V-max bullets. Having been privileged to command sniper teams I was aware of how important it is to have a good spotter and with modern digital night-vision rifle scopes it seems even more vital.
William is pretty handy at supporting via his smartphone. Last year he helped me disable parental controls on the Wi-fi so I could place a bet on the Grand National. Now he can flip between x4 and x16 magnification and complete a one-shot-zero while I’m concentrating on my breathing. It’s slightly mysterious to a dinosaur who was trained on iron sights.
Drawing in Charlie
As the sun set, we enjoyed watching brent geese gathering in preparation for their journey back to the Russian tundra. A chill north-easterly breeze favoured us and offered the chance to sprinkle some sardines on the sandy point. I hoped that the strong smell and small pieces would draw Charlie in and keep him there for long enough to get off a shot. Distant foghorns sounded to acknowledge the work of the NHS and we settled in to play the long waiting game.
might be finding dead ground to winkle out shellfish away from our view — or even whether there was a fox around at all. But William retained his confidence and we took turns to scour the shoreline.
Otter or mink?
At about 3am a fox-sized slithering shape surprised us: what I can only assume was an otter. It was too distant to be sure and judging range is tricky in black and white. Perhaps a mink? I’ll never know for sure. It was there and gone like a spectral vision in grey. But it was followed not long after by an unmistakeable shape, cautiously moving along the tide’s edge.
Safety catch forwards, breathing controlled, I found the eyes and squeezed the trigger. Muzzle flip and recoil are hardly noticeable with the Stalon and the wind was in our faces so I was able to watch bits of fur and bone flying outwards and we both heard that satisfying thump. “Let’s wait and watch,” I counselled as William understandably wanted to break cover to see the size and gender of our adversary. I re-cocked the rifle. We continued to practise our waitingand-lying-still.
It was the right decision. As dampness settled on to our nowaching backs, some 30 minutes later a bark could be heard in the grassland behind and to our left. A muntjac? Or perhaps a mate to the fox lying still on the foreshore.
William squeaked through his teeth. Silence fell. Dawn’s pale rays whispered on the eastern horizon. Surely not a second? But there it was. How it had approached I can’t be sure but near the first fox a second could be seen, alert and cautious, stopping occasionally near to where I had scattered the sardines.
I slipped the safety off again. The slightest of squeaks got the animal looking our way and a second crack of 55-gr sent a V-max at 3,240fps out to 195 yards — or thereabouts — to account for the dog.
During the COVID-19 lockdown I have been persuaded by Mrs G that it was “a good day to sort out the attic”. It turns out there isn’t such a time but it did mean that I unearthed a pile of Shooting Times, and it has been interesting to compare them with today’s magazine.
In a July issue from 1961 Tower-bird wrote a piece titled Thoughts about the fox. In it he wrote: “I have said that Charles James has a sly character; he also has an underlying vicious one. He will kill for killing’s sake… I have watched foxes both course and stalk their prey and can well admire the energy, stealth, patience and reasoning powers of the hunting fox… (but) I cannot say that I like the character of Reynard.”
In many ways our great magazine is unchanged. And so too, I would argue, is the respect as well as the antipathy for the fox.
It is a good feeling to out-fox a fox. I too admire his cunning.
But two fewer on the marsh should certainly improve the chances for the nesting birds trying to bring off their young. William and I inspected our adversaries, glad of the chance to get the blood flowing again. Then we made our weary way back to a still-sleeping house content with a job well done.
Waiting and lying still continues to have its uses.