Gamekeeper

The shooting season may be over but the hard work continues, with the focus switching to vital predator control and re-fencing hedges

TCharles Grisedale runs, owns and does the keepering on a legendary duck shoot in west Wales hat’s it. Unless you’re on the foreshore, the final whistle has been blown. It’s been a busy season and I hope everything worked out well for you all. For most, it’s time for a rest before the work starts again. For others, it’s a period of frenetic activity. There are trap lines to be re-established. Fox control is now urgent as thoughts of broods begin to surface. If you keep your own breeding stocks, they will be taking your time as well.

After 40 years, there is no longer a pheasant syndicate here. I still release a few each year as aerial predation culls them pretty hard. Meanwhile, I cull and eat the surplus cock birds and have a good 30 or so hens about the farm.

Natural selection

I have been re-fencing the hedges — all double fencing — producing wonderful habitats for insects and brood areas between the wire. Last fenced in the

1970s and 80s, the posts were rotten and vegetation too top heavy, smothering the lower storey. With the large amounts of potential breeding habitat on the farm,

I am the eternal optimist. My hope is that natural selection by goshawks will make my surviving pheasants more raptor savvy and eventually self-sustaining.

Cefngwyn is so rich in birdlife that there are many eyes watching for danger, sounding the alarm. Thankfully, there has been no sign of the murderous goshawk that was nailing everything last year, instead an oversized adult hen back from my neighbour’s pheasant shoot, I believe.

With the shortage of rabbits due to disease, I hope the paucity of her food will inspire her to guard this territory against other goshawks that try to might make a move on the land.

After the noise and stress of the shooting season, it is a lovely time of year. The strengthening sun seeps into your grateful being. Skies are full of wintering lapwing and golden plover. Wildfowl are suddenly tolerant of human presence and the noisy, ubiquitous Canada geese are starting to defend breeding sites. After months of doing very little with a shotgun — for fear of disturbing my shooting income

— it’s now time to get at the 1,000 or more corvids in the area.

I love watching big, old crows coming in from a distance, seeing my decoys and committing themselves for a close look. If all goes well, it’s game on. I think of all of the murderous antics they have been up to. Not any more. When you see lamb’s tongues taken during birth, eyes torn out of cast sheep and ewes’ vulvas ripped apart, it concentrates your mind.

I had a brief morning stint on the crows in December to sharpen up for a pheasant day away with friends and my accuracy improved through the morning. I always think it’s a little silly when, in September, Guns tell me it is the first time they have handled a gun since January. What a waste of everyone’s efforts.

I do think a shooting lesson before embarking on a day at live quarry is a good idea. Sometimes, it is the foolish arrogance of powerful men who assume they can shoot well because they are rich and successful. I put it to them that if they bought another company that was not familiar to them, they would certainly research how it worked. I cannot fathom the satisfaction in shooting badly.

“I think of all the murderous antics the crows have been up to. Not any more”

The need to control predators such as crows is clear from the damage they inflict on livestock