Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Going beyond the wall
At season’s end wildfowl are at their most plentiful below the high tide mark, but this doesn’t mean the shooting is easy, says Richard Negus
In February there is a place of wonderment where only wildfowl and wildfowlers venture. It is a place of salty isolation, beautiful yet stark in equal measure, sometimes dangerous and occasionally deadly. This watery and wintry Asgard of which I write is the foreshore below the high tide mark.
At season’s end, while inland shooters are cleaning their guns to put away, the coastal fowler still has 20 days in which to enjoy his sport, if he is prepared to venture over the sea wall. With winter barely arriving until January these days, the tail end of the season is the time when wildfowl are in their greatest profusion on the foreshore. North-easterly winds, snow and sleet force them down to shootable heights. Many inland flightponds that had been a guaranteed source of food have now ceased providing their bounty. Farmland is similarly less attractive; most of the sugar beet has been harvested, stubbles are frozen, food is scarce.
While there may be more fowl about and conditions conducive for sport, this doesn’t mean shooting below the high tide mark is easy.
The birds are at their wiliest. Many of the migratory geese and duck have been shot at before and this knowledge is rarely forgotten. They now recognise that danger can lurk below as well as above. Decoys that may have fooled them in earlier months are shunned. Flightlines and feeding spots, discovered by careful reconnaissance, are only accessible by adventurous and lengthy wading. For all that, the true foreshore is a magical place at any time of the year but in these last few weeks there is truly no place like it.
Norfolk’s Great Yarmouth wildfowling club boasts one of the most iconic pieces of foreshore on the east coast. Breydon Water is the tidal estuary where the three great rivers of the Broads empty into the North Sea. Here is the place where the legendary punt-gunners such as ‘Pintail’ Thomas and ‘Silky’ Watson plied their trade in the late 1800s.
Today, Breydon continues to be a remarkable place to test your wits against the wildfowl that dwell below, past the sea wall. The club understandably guards this special place jealously. A mere 35 permits are issued to members to shoot here each
“Many geese and duck now recognise that danger can lurk below as well as above”
season. Applicants must have been in the club for a minimum of a year and be accompanied by an experienced member on initial outings.
Alan Savory, author and Shooting Times contributor, was a founding member of the Great Yarmouth club. Last season I followed in his footsteps to Breydon on 17 January, the same date as an outing he undertook in
1926 and wrote about in his book Norfolk Fowler. Savory was shooting from a punt — owned by another wonderfully nicknamed fowler called ‘Diamond’ Allen — in Duffel’s Drain. He noted thousands of wigeon that fled en masse at the first boom from a fellow punt-gunner.
Skyful of wigeon
Ninety-four years later little has changed. I had to trudge on foot to the Rond; punt-gunning was outlawed on Breydon in 1968. With my friend ‘Deadly’ Darren Sizer, I hid in the mud not that far from where Savory secreted himself and his craft. The sky filled with wigeon, winging their way inland off Scroby Sands. Shoveler and teal too were present in great numbers, scudding like rockets away from the rising tide, and Darren bagged himself a brace of pintail.
Breydon is one of the few places I know where you can still be awestruck by the sheer numbers of wildfowl. The pink-footed geese are not your quarry below the high tide mark. They huddle and gossip in packs of multiples of hundreds on the marshes inland. Their music is your soundtrack, a sound that Savory would have been surprised to hear, for pink numbers are far greater today.
Shooting the Breydon Water is not for the faint-hearted. The tide comes in stealthily like a tiger, cutting off your passage back to the sea wall, but the mud is safe enough and the lights of Great Yarmouth so bright that you don’t feel the isolation and solitude that is one of the aesthetic draws of the foreshore. I haven’t shot Breydon this season, but my friend Terry Ewles, the club’s treasurer, confirms the place is as vibrant with fowl as ever.
As I write, the snow squalls spatter my windows and in my mind I am transported to the Rond. My imagination sees Savory hunched in his punt as the ice floes mash and crack around the wooden jetties. A pack of wigeon, wings ablur in the easterly gale, hug the edge of the muddy creek where he waits and watches.
Drive south for an hour from Breydon and the glare of sodium lights and constant hum of traffic on the Acle Straight seem a million miles away. Here on the foreshore of the Alde and Ore, fowling is a more lonely affair.
Up to their neck
To reach some of the finest foreshore flightlines a lengthy hike along the shingle sea wall is necessary. This is followed by a wade over mud that is perfectly safe if you walk in the wake of a pal with local knowledge. A ‘furriner’, however, could easily find themselves up to their neck in short order. Some members of the club use a boat or even a canoe to reach far-flung creeks, where they cling to the mud like redshanks.
One or two members still paddle a punt; our club chairman is a master boat builder, crafting low-slung punts using traditional methods.
I enjoyed a tide flight with the wildlife artist Simon Trinder a few seasons ago where we motored in one of the club’s dinghies out to an island in the mid-channel. We waited for the water to rise around us, becoming marooned upon a sliver of land. To get this close to your quarry and its habitat is only possible when foreshore
fowling or deerstalking. Simon’s opinion of season-end coastal gunning on the Alde sees him rub his paintsmeared palms together with glee.
The river has of late been sparse of duck; “too mild”, “too quiet”, “too little wind” are frequent complaints from club members. But when the
“Wigeon have finally shown themselves, to bob on the tide like gaudy corks”
year turns and true winter arrives, with it so do the easterly gales and face-whipping cold.
Simon lives close to the river. He daily watches the comings and goings of its bird life with an eye as keen as the peregrines that dwell there and harry the flocks of avocets without mercy. He has observed the recent appearance of more waders and wildfowl on the river. Woodcock from Sweden now flush from the Scots pine belts and scrub near Iken.
White-fronted geese, Simon tells me, fresh in from Greenland were wandering like lost souls in the skies above Snape Maltings, having overshot the river. Wigeon have finally shown themselves, to bob on the tide like gaudy corks. These birds have only recently blown down to our eastern shores, running before the scouring winds. A few decades ago they would have arrived before Christmas, but now you are lucky if they get here before the end of the season.
No friend
Whether this change in behaviour and weather patterns is due to manmade climate change or merely a natural shift in the seasons, I leave to others to judge. The facts remain, however, that warmer, wetter winters are no friend to the coastal gunner, who now must enjoy much of his finest sport below the high water mark squeezed into late January and early February.
The magic of late-season fowling on the Alde has sadly been taken from us completely this year. The club, like many others, decided to close its foreshore for shooting to members at the last lockdown.
Quite rightly, our travel to the foreshore was deemed unnecessary. While this is disappointing, it is a small price to pay if we are to hasten the end of this ghastly pandemic.
The foreshore is forever shifting — sea walls crumble, the mud and sand change at each tide — but for all that it is also eternal.
To cross the sea wall and try to bag yourself a brace of duck or a migratory goose is hunting personified. I urge you to try it for yourselves next season.