Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Hungarians and English!
For Sam Carlisle, there is no purer delight than shooting partridges over a vizsla
Shortly after my fifth wedding anniversary, my father asked to see me in his office. My mother had been grumbling about a lack of grandchildren. Expecting another intervention,
I sat down across the table. “Sam,” he began, “I really think it’s time you got a dog.”
His top priority was ensuring we could continue to flight the ponds on our farm in Suffolk when the weather looked promising, without having to rely on a keeper or guest with a dog.
His labrador was too old and he wasn’t sure he had another dog in him. It was time for me to take responsibility. So the search began.
Having always had labs, this was my first consideration. My wife wasn’t so keen. We almost plumped for a cocker spaniel. Then I started to read about HPRS, or hunt, point and retrieve breeds to those a little less familiar with doggy acronyms. Remembering heathery days watching them work over moorland, I didn’t need much convincing.
While a formal day of shooting has a legion of dogs at hand, it’s the wild and solitary parts of our sport where a dog of your own is really essential. HPRS fit the bill perfectly for these sorts of days. In fact, they make the day.
Watching them scent, cover ground at a remarkable clip and then all of a sudden freeze when they pick up a sniff of nearby game, as if they’ve stared into the eyes of Medusa and turned to stone, is pure magic. Before I’d even settled on a breed — and there are a mind-boggling array of HPRS, all with their own enthusiasts — I had planned my sporting year around my future dog.
August would be on the moors. Maybe if my dog was good enough, which it surely would be, I could grow my number of invitations to head
“It’s the wild and solitary days where a dog is essential”
Above left: northwards? September would be walking-up wild partridges on green stubbles and sugar beet closer to home. A brief pause for some driven game, where my faithful hound would be a dashing sight, quicker to the mark than those lumbering labs and short-legged spaniels. Then the latter part of the season would be spent working through coppice and pointing woodcock. My daydreams knew no limit.
I quickly ruled out the shorterhaired breeds, who were unlikely to gladly venture into a frigid January pond to find a teal. My thinking narrowed to either a German wirehaired pointer or Hungarian wirehaired vizsla. It wasn’t long before I was put in touch with Roy Bebbington in North Yorkshire.
Roy is an unflinching advocate for wirehaired vizslas, even writing a book, The Wirehaired Vizsla: A Dog
Above right:
For All Reasons. A quick phone call with Roy and I was convinced that not only would the vizsla do everything that I dreamed it might, but it would also be easy to train and a delight as a family pet. With a dog duly secured from his next litter, some months later I ventured up to
“Merlin’s first ever point, on a skylark, encouraged me to keep going in training”
Yorkshire with all the naivety and arrogance of a first-time dog owner.
Haphazard stuff
Our puppy, Merlin, didn’t entirely follow the script I’d set out. The first time we took him to a friend’s house, he chewed three straw hats to oblivion. But I managed to pick up enough tips from local experts and books to have a bash at training him as my shooting companion.
His first ever point, on a skylark, encouraged me to keep going. And following assurances from Roy that he wasn’t too young to enjoy a few low-level days in the field, I took him beating on the odd driven day and even managed to get him to retrieve a few duck from our ponds in his first season. It was haphazard stuff, but there were enough flashes of competence to ensure that during the spring and summer I spent time teaching him to properly quarter the ground and consistently return to my whistle, despite the distraction of a shot or a bolting hare.
Suffolk has always been associated with the English partridge. My father remembers halcyon school holidays in the early 1950s where, in the first week of September, he and my grandfather would walk a few stubbles together each morning, shooting anything from a brace to
10 brace of greys, before the driven days began a little later in the season. This cadence is repeated each year in our gamebooks, which go back to the 1920s. And 1936 must have been a particularly stellar year for the birds, with 123 brace shot to six Guns on 21 September, followed by another 80 brace two days later.
When I was a teenager, though, looking to follow in my father’s footsteps before going back to school in early September, they had all but disappeared from the farm. Our count in 2003, when we began in earnest to try to restore the population, was a paltry three pairs. Thankfully, a couple of decades of serious effort and a few years with reasonable weather has seen decent results.
Our spring count this year was 46 pairs, alongside around 100 pairs of wild Frenchmen, mostly centred on a 500-acre central block of light land, where we focus our predator control. Given a decent breeding season, this would be enough to give Merlin a chance to point a few and, if I was lucky, take a brace or so for the pot.
The day promised to be too hot for Merlin so I rose early to beat the heat. This was simply one man and his dog, heading to the hedgerows in search of dinner. We tried a field of sugar beet to start, where there are often a few coveys of French partridges.
The prolonged drought meant that the crop was not as dense as it should have been and, 100 yards ahead of us, the only covey we saw rose and flew out of sight. It had helped to calm Merlin’s nerves, though,
and expend a bit of his energy. He already recognises the tweed breeks and gun as a sign of fun ahead, and his puppyish exuberance can still take over at the start of an outing.
Covey of redlegs
Pulling into a gateway, I was just in time to see another covey of redlegs scurry through the stubble and into the thicker field margin ahead. Merlin worked through the tall grass, but a long way ahead I saw a few partridges re-emerge on to the stubble edge and continue to run at pace ahead of us.
Merlin clocked them, but continued to scent and in a few yards was on a tentative point. He didn’t seem convinced and, as I approached, he took a small step forward, flushing a solitary bird that folded to my first shot. At my command, Merlin was off.
While pointing has come naturally to him, retrieving has taken time. He tends to get feathers everywhere and drop it a couple of times en route back to me. A faltering effort, but still his first proper hunt, point and retrieve. I was happy to have seen it and played my part well. We walked around the rest of the field, pointing a few out-ofseason pheasants and repeating the process on another redleg.
The cool of dawn had now evaporated. After a stop for water and a few blackberries from a bramble, we went to a beetle bank on a different part of the farm that I knew had at least two coveys of greys. This diverse cover is about 20 yards wide and, with a stubble on either side, is perfect for partridges and pointers.
Heading into the wind, Merlin tracked from edge to edge. I spotted the telltale signs that he was on to something. His head froze, his back lowered and he no longer moved sideways, but crept slowly and intently towards the scent. And then he was still. His front paw raised, tail rigid and nose forward, I arrived at his side. “Get on,” and he bolted forward.
Amid a whirr of wings and chirping, two of the covey broke to my left. The first fell in the stubble in front of me and I turned to complete a right-and-left. Before I knew it, Merlin was trotting back across the stubble with my first English partridge shot over a pointer. It was as classic an East Anglian scene as one could imagine.
“His head froze and he crept intently towards the scent”