Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Start your hunt for a once-in-a-lifetime trip
With dream overseas excursions likely to be back on the agenda for 2022, Chris Rogers shares memories from his favourite adventures
With the game shooting season well under way in the UK and my client stalking diary looking healthy with bookings, is it safe to assume things are getting back to normal after the pandemic? What I know about virology could be written on the back of a postage stamp but I sincerely hope so. After a year and a half of travel disruption, 2022 might be the perfect year for adventure and that sporting trip you’ve always dreamed of.
Several foreign clients are now enquiring about hunting in the UK again, so I’m optimistic I’ll also be able to go on the trips I had planned. If you’re only in the early stages of planning some sport abroad, the options can be pretty daunting.
Over the past 10 years, I’ve been on a number of different hunting trips. Wild boar hunting is a great experience and is probably the most accessible for everyone with a mixed shooting background. I’ve participated with mixed success in France, Germany, Croatia and
Romania. The general theme has been the same and, compared with a driven shoot in the UK, all participants on the day, be they beaters or Guns, are usually extremely sociable. It’s very much a community experience and whatever gets shot on the day is seen as the result of teamwork between the lucky hunters and the local beaters.
Socialising as a group was particularly important in Germany, where our hosts laid on a fantastic spread at the start and end of the shoot while we stood around braziers. At the end of the day, there were traditional hunting-horn recitals for each species shot while the beasts were respectfully laid out among branches on the snow. Following this, the whole group headed to a local restaurant for dinner, beer and schnapps, followed by singing late into the evening.
Further south, in Croatia, I participated in a very large-scale shoot organised by a hunting club. Again Guns and beaters socialised together at the start and middle of the day, cooking sausages and various cuts of pork on skewers over a large fire while partaking of the local homemade brandy, rakija, in far larger quantities than we drink sloe gin on a shoot day.
Combining species on a hunt is a good way to maximise the time you have there and, on the same trip, we also drove to the Dalmatian coast to hunt mouflon. As with most of the
“Wild boar hunting is a great experience and the most accessible for everyone”
wild sheep species, they aren’t that jumpy, but they require physical fitness to access their home ranges in mainly mountainous terrain.
It was a strange area to be hunting in, with the Mediterranean in the background, and we headed to seaside cafes for lunch between stalks. There are not many places where you can have squid-ink pasta
to refuel after a hard stalk. One of the best things about Croatia was meeting the locals in the village where we stayed. We were made to feel very welcome and were invited to different houses each night for dinner.
Our hosts included the local chief of police, a millionaire businessman, in shiny sportswear, who had us over to his slightly tacky new-build villa, and the town mayor who put on a feast in his garden shed, where we were joined by grumpy war veterans.
That particular night was hard work as the elderly attendees didn’t really seem that interested in an English deerstalker and his Scottish mate, until it slipped out that my pal had served with the British army in Croatia, effectively on their side and not too far away from where we were. The night, at that point, took a lively turn, resulting in a late finish at the local bar.
Amazing views
By far my best mountain experience to date was Carpathian chamois in Romania — alpine, snow-capped mountains starting at 2,000m high, with amazing views when the weather was fine, but howling winds and low cloud that kept us off the mountain when it wasn’t.
Weather is the main limiting factor in the mountains and it’s why these sort of hunting trips are usually a minimum of three days. There is every chance that on one of them you won’t get out at all. Eastern European countries certainly deliver with the food, usually all home-made dishes, soup starters, meaty mains and plenty of desserts. Not filling up on the endless bread that seems to come with every course is wise advice.
Some trips are partner-friendly, such as a trip I did to Spain for ibex. We stayed in a well-appointed private villa in the hills a couple of hours north of Valencia, near the ancient walled city of Morella. The abode boasted a resident chef serving excellent food and, of course, equally good local wine.
Ibex are a real success story of international trophy hunting as the populations were once almost extinct. Government protection and then limited hunting permits have helped to aid their recovery, which has provided jobs and even created little businesses.
The landscape can best be described as that of the spaghetti westerns. It is arid and rocky and farming is carried out on a historic terrace system. Abandoned farmsteads littered the
countryside, as did stone fossils of giant snail shells.
Moose calls
If luxury hunting isn’t your thing, but you want a once-in-a-lifetime experience, why not try moose hunting in the Arctic Circle? A few years ago, I joined a group of British hunters who had made friends with some Swedish and Danish hunters.
We travelled to the far north of Sweden to live in a log cabin for 10 days, consuming meals of varying quality before sleeping in bunks heated to boiling point by the wood burner. While the accommodation was basic, the landscape and habitat was breathtaking. There was no careful stalking around, hiking for miles or making comedy moose calls — it was all about the dogs.
We were placed out in high towers on tracks through the forest and left to wait to see if the dog would move a moose past your location. The dog handlers used