Shooting Times & Country Magazine
There’s nothing so fine as fowling
With game shooting ravaged by the bird flu crisis, Richard Negus says there has never been a better time to join a wildfowling club
Let’s be honest, game shooting this season is going to be unlike any you have known before. No more will you be able to easily buy a day on a whim via Gunsonpegs.
The avian flu-induced movement bans on European gamebird eggs have resulted in a scarcity of birds and to date 13% of shoots selling days have decided to shut up shop completely. Syndicates have been similarly affected by a shortage or total lack of poults, while feed prices have risen, and fertiliser and seed costs are similarly soaring.
Nor, if you do succeed in buying a day, will you pick up a bargain. The cost of a pheasant on the game cart has risen by more than 30% and partridges by nearly 20%. This means that the cost for the average UK driven day — 127 birds to be precise — has risen by more than 25%, setting a team of eight Guns back almost £6,000.
There is little doubt that the combination of price hikes and lack of availability will see some fairweather Shots trading in their guns for golf clubs, ghastly sweaters and taupe-coloured slacks. Others will be googling ‘how to sell my organs’ and wondering if they really do need that second kidney.
Fear not, though. There is a way of getting some serious shooting sport without the need for a second mortgage, elective surgery or hitting a ball around a giant hole-strewn lawn while clad in pastels. Never has there been a better time to join a wildfowling club.
Fen Tigers
Wildfowling is and always will be an egalitarian sport. Its roots lie in market-gunning, an occupation carried out by a rare old set of rogues, hard-bitten seadogs and Fen
Tigers. Colonel Peter Hawker blazed a trail for fowling as a sport in its own right rather than only a commercial meat-harvesting activity.
From the late 19th century and into the 20th century, the likes of Sir Ralph Payne-gallwey, John Buchan, Sir Peter Scott and James Robertson Justice popularised
“Wildfowling was a backlash against the ‘carpet slipper’ shooting at covertside”
the image of the hardy gentleman risking life and limb on the foreshore or in a punt in pursuit of wildfowl. It wasn’t only the wildness of the sport that appealed, it was a metaphorical backlash against the ‘carpet slipper’ shooting that they saw at covertside.
Fowling was portrayed as a Hemingway-esque activity, a sport for unreconstructed males; the harsher the conditions or more perilous the terrain, the better the fun was perceived to be. Despite the smart names and titles involved in the sport’s early days, wildfowling never became commercialised like game shooting. This was in large part thanks to how the law of the land applied to sporting rights below the high-water mark, thereby sparing the foreshore from the advance of agents and absentee landlords.
The emergence of wildfowling clubs in the 1950s and 1960s further secured the sport, both from the malaise of commercial exclusivity and from the anti-shooting lobby. There are 140 clubs active in the UK and, on average, membership will set you back around £200 for the season. This will include membership of BASC or in the case of Kent Wildfowlers, which has severed ties with the national body, its own public liability and personal accident insurance.
Staring skywards
Trying to directly compare wildfowling with game shooting is perhaps unfair to both sports.
The only certainty with the former is its uncertainty of giving you an opportunity of a shot at all. If you go shooting simply because you want to shoot something, then fowling probably isn’t for you. If you embrace the notion of taking your shots if and when the opportunity arises, then wildfowling is the very ticket. However, fowling doesn’t need to be solely staring skywards for birds that never come.
My club, the Great Yarmouth Wildfowling and Conservation Association, has the shooting on more than 2,500 acres of foreshore and marsh. On some of these marshes it is perfectly feasible, as long as you don’t disturb fellow fowlers, to become mobile, walkingup with your dog the dykes and splashes for snipe or a springing teal or two. The number of Guns on each marsh is regulated by a first
come, first served logging-in system, meaning that, on many occasions, you can have a marsh to yourself and pretend you are the lord of the manor for a morning.
Most clubs will have restrictions and prohibitions. In Great Yarmouth’s case, only four geese may be shot per flight and six taken per week; a bag limit of five ducks per flight is enforced for the first week of the season. Ely Wildfowlers does not permit the washes on its Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) land to be fed. In Norfolk, there is no shooting on a Sunday, but over the border in Suffolk, the Sabbath is not held sacrosanct, so shooting seven days a week is a possibility.
Don’t imagine that fowling is all regulations and draconian rules. Wildfowling brings you freedom and access to land, sea and water like no other fieldsport. The season is long, starting on 1 September and stretching into February.
Points of order
Out of season, many clubs boast angling rights on rivers or still waters, while pigeon shooting, clay and gundog training sections are available as additional club benefits. Finally, there is the community and array of characters that membership brings.
You have not experienced the full force of British eccentricity — of arcane points of order and virulent feudal disagreements — until you have attended at least one wildfowling club annual general meeting.
Don’t get me wrong, I love game shooting, particularly the wild pheasants that I am lucky enough to enjoy, but I would argue that wildfowling is more immersive and somehow complete in a way that game shooting can never be.
Fowling rekindles the spirit of what fieldsports are supposed to be about — pitting one’s wits and skill against a wild animal where the odds are significantly stacked against you.
It is only through using fieldcraft, a knowledge of quarry species, place, tidal and weather conditions that will bring you opportunities of success.
Fowling will teach you to be a better all-round ‘hunter’ — to hunt with all your senses and to recognise the sights and sounds of the wild. Fowling is hunting in the true sense of the word, whether you are decoying ducks into a splash or geese on to a stubble, tide flighting or hiding like a wraith in a gutter or drain at dawn or dusk. There is also a humbling and poetic sense of being a part of history when shooting on such illustrious venues as the Ouse Washes, the Solway, Breydon Water, Sutton Bridge or Romney Marshes.
Only when shooting over these vast expanses, or for that matter countless other less famed wild coastal places, do you fully comprehend the insignificance of we
mere mortals. I have
“Wildfowling will teach you to be a better all-round ‘hunter’ — using all your senses”
lost count of the times I have been so caught up in the sheer majesty of my surroundings that I have forgotten to raise my gun to an eminently shootable lone teal scudding by.
The curious thing is that I never felt cheated by missing my chance. It was, I reasoned, merely part and parcel of the grand drama that is fowling.
If you have been tempted to try your hand at the game, how do you go about it? The BASC website (basc.org.uk) is a good place to start — it has a list of all clubs in Britain. I would recommend joining a club that is close to your home as early morning reveilles can become soul-destroying if you have a six-hour round trip to the foreshore.
Doubtless some of your game shooting friends will know a fowler or two. Personal recommendations are always the best way of finding the right club for you. Some clubs will have demonstration stands at local game fairs and country shows, so don’t be afraid to approach the bearded denizens you find within these marquees — they are usually friendlier than they look.
Of course, fowling isn’t for everyone and it isn’t as easy or as dry or fresh smelling as a day on a peg, but when the wind blows nor’-east over Breydon and the pinks turn their heads towards where you crouch, there is no finer thing to be in this world than a wildfowler.