Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A captive audience
The sanctuary at Peakirk provides an education in wildfowl, says Petrel, while the Borough Fen duck decoy is a nostalgic reminder of times past
out intruders and this, with its loose hanging anti-fox climbing overlay, has been constructed entirely by the two men and a boy employed.
Small boys on egging bent have at times been known to attempt a pincer raid from without — and have been caught in possession by policemen, who have patted their pockets with messy results within. But the curator admitted to me that he was not entirely happy about weasels, which, he was certain, could gain access through the half-inch wire employed for the bottom 2ft of the fence.
With this I could only concur and wondered that no tunnel traps were kept set around the perimeter. Equally I was surprised that no drastic action of the sort common on most game preserves was taken against the crows seen floating above the gardens, even when some 20 visitors were walking round the collection.
Vigilance
I understand that the man who lives on the spot in a caravan is up and about betimes to deter any corvines in search of a breakfast. The record of few ducklings or eggs lost to crows and their cousins speaks for the vigilance displayed by those in charge.
The most common mistake made by anyone trying to learn from his or her visit to Slimbridge, Peakirk, or any other collection of wildfowl, is trying to cram too much in a single
visit. If you do this, you come away bamboozled and bewildered and wondering, not to say completely forgetful. For this reason we concentrated initially on British fowl.
We were glad to learn that the first concern of our curator friend was to find a completely representative establishment of all the wildfowl commonly encountered by fowlers and birdwatchers of this country.
Artificial
While the colours of the rarer and more exotic foreign birds may catch the eye before what we have come to consider the commoner species, they cannot escape a somewhat artificial look. I concur with one of our party who voiced the opinion that in the matter of looks the commoner fowl are just as attractive as those from foreign parts. For instance, the so tame lesser whitefronts and those bigger than expected bean geese are equally magnificent and far less vulgar looking than any coreopsis goose.
More striking than anything is the size of the birds which, in captivity, seem so much smaller than their wild counterparts. We must remember, of course, that as wildfowlers we see the birds more often in the air, when wingspan prejudices judgement, or as our chauffeur commented: “We
“He regards silkies as something of a risk on account of their long and fluffy trousers, in which young ducklings can get entangled”
usually see them looking dirty with their paddles in the air.”
The longer you look at a collection of wildfowl in captivity — be they in the best of condition as those at Peakirk certainly were — the more you feel a little unhappy about their way of life. With so many birds pinioned, no wonder that their caretaker enthuses so much about those pairs made up of a wild male that has dropped in to visit and stay, full-winged, to pair with a female unable to fly. From this union stems, after all, a fit and wilder strain, which is likely to stick to its pinioned anchor and, perhaps, to return to breed on its home ground.
Pinioning, of course, is necessary to contain valuable wildfowl and I was interested to learn that this is carried out at two days old, or as soon as the ducklings are put out from the nest. Those who pinion wildfowl should remember that they are responsible for the bird’s welfare during the rest of its natural life, and the onus of protection is that much more heavily weighted on their shoulders.
Of particular interest to our party of amateur duck and game rearers were the nursery pens, where bantams and bigger broodies clucked and fussed over broods of foreign and British fowl. The curator keeps a flock of bantams for this purpose and buys reinforcements in the market.
Like most with experience of them, he is full of praise for silkie crosses but regards pure silkies as something of a risk on account of their long and fluffy trousers, in which young ducklings have been known to get entangled.
The hatchery, with its lines of sitting boxes, is extraordinary in several respects. At Peakirk, as at Slimbridge, all the business of tethering bodies and providing a line of drinking tins has been overcome, as has the trouble of sprinkling individual egg clutches with water.
All nesting box lines are sited on a trench of sand, the surroundings being concreted. On top of the boxes are fixed battery-type cages for the hens, with water and corn troughs running their full length. As each hen is taken off, it is placed in its individual cage, and the concrete hardstanding is hosed down. Some of the water soaks into the exposed sand at the ends of the boxes and percolates along the line beneath the nests, to create humidity.
When the hens are put back they are allowed to walk in across the wet concrete, thereby taking the necessary moisture on to the clutch via their feet. Thereafter their droppings, which have fallen through the wire bottoms of the feeding cages atop the sitting boxes, are swilled away. This method has proved a real time-saver. Dudley can get round his sitting lines in 20 minutes.
Before a tour of the collection we paid a visit to Annie, widow of
Billy Williams. He was the last of his family’s long line of decoymen who rented and operated Borough Fen decoy in market-catching, pre-trust days. He continued to work the pipes for ringing until some years ago. We also visited the decoy pond in its eerily lovely surroundings.
We saw the ditch in which Billy’s father ended his days after a stroke, with 50 mallard on his back, and from the observation hut watched mallard, gadwall and shoveler swimming unsuspectingly among the reeds.
Fertile fens
The only concession to modernity is the high wire fence round the decoy and the steel net supports that are gradually replacing the old willow. Otherwise, all is as it has been for hundreds of years; the mallard flight there in their thousands and the old law of no shooting within half a mile of the decoy is still respected by the fowlers of those marshes and fens.
On all sides at Peakirk there are nostalgic reminders of the past — including a self-portrait by the distinguished director of the Trust of himself gathering the 17-fold fruits of a punt-gun shot at pinkfeet on Terrington Marsh, while his old friend Billy Williams wields a steadying paddle. At the same time, you are conscious that the future of wildfowl, and indeed of wildfowling, is the uppermost thought in the minds of the progressive moderns who continue to guard the heritage in which Billy Williams and his forebears found so much abiding pleasure.
This article was first published in the 26 May 1961 issue of Shooting Times.