Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Of reeds and men
Richard Negus and his son Charlie are kept busy with a work party — and their efforts are rewarded two days later
One of the things to remember about being in a wildfowling club,” I told Charlie, “is that it isn’t all about rising early, getting cold and shooting.” With these sage words of wisdom ringing in his ears — or endless diatribe if you are 12 years old — my son gave in and agreed to join me on a Great Yarmouth Wildfowlers work party.
Such activities are part and parcel of wildfowling. Reed beds are little different to coppice woodland. If they are left to their own devices they begin to succumb to disease and fail. If given a winter’s cut they are refreshed and reinvigorated. Another job for the fowler is to repair or replace the liggers — foot-bridges that allow passage over gutters and dykes. The corrosive sea water wears away metal and chews its brackish way through wood, turning these walkways to collapsing slipways.
Curious clubs
Charlie and I stepped out of the truck. The club’s chairman Peter Swatman was already at the reed-bed, and alongside him I saw Barry, a broad old Norfolk boy with a time-served knowledge of farming and fowling on these eastern marshes. A couple of other members appeared from behind a bundle of stooked reeds.
Charlie whispered through the side of his mouth, asking who they were. To my discredit I couldn’t remember their names. Wildfowling clubs are curious things as clubs go. At our rugby club all is bonhomie and camaraderie. Everybody knows everybody — we play together, watch the game together and drink together. Not so with fowling; this is a sport for the loner and the misanthrope. While we share a mutual love of the sport, the landscape and the wildfowl that live here, it is a love we jealously tend to keep to ourselves, only occasionally assigning the solitary magic to a small, hand-picked cabal of like-minded souls.
So it was with this fowlers work party, there was no rumbustious back-slapping, in-jokes and ribaldry as one would encounter at the rugby club or in the back of a beaters’ wagon. Peter merely explained what needed to be done and why and off we went in ones and twos. It felt odd to be here in daylight rather than at dawn, curious as well to be carrying a petrol strimmer and spar hook as opposed to a gun. But nonetheless this was still a marshland adventure the boy and I were embarked upon.
The only people on earth
We disappeared into the reeds, and the boy pulled my bright orange chainsaw helmet atop his woolly hat. Ear muffs were clamped in tight and he snapped the visor down. I showed Charlie how to start the strimmer. Neither the manic hiss from the whirring wire at the machine’s business end nor the two-stroke scream fazed him as he began to carve a path through the towering phragimites, just wide enough for one fowler
and a dog to walk down. We cut our way on towards the river wall, which I could see in the distance. All the boy could see at his height was a wall of stalks crowned by a waving sea of seed heads. This 800-hectare block is an island, an inland island admittedly, and in the stark silence caused by the boy switching off the engine, we felt like the only people on earth.
“Look Dad,” Charlie said, dropping the strimmer with a thump to point skywards. A party of six pinks flew along the Waveney. The sunlight catching on the white bars of their wings made them appear to wobble and wave at us. “Are they too high?” the boy asked.
“Oh yes,” I replied. “You’d need an artillery gun to shoot those, they’re 150m up at least.” I watched my son put on his thinking expression, I imagined him picturing howitzers and geese.
Back to the strimming he went, stumbling over narrow yet treacherously deep drainage ditches. Finally, the glitter of the river could be seen through the reed. A chugging drone of a marine engine sounded over the strimmer’s shrill. Like a theatre curtain opening, the last of the reed fell. Our appearance from out of this jungle surprised the skipper at the wheel of his Broadland daytripper craft and his head snapped round to stare at us, his mouth formed into an ‘O’. Little wonder, the sight of a boy sporting an oversized helmet wielding a howling Stihl is not an everyday one unless you are a local.
I waved a gloved hand to the sailor who vaguely wafted a return gesture. The boy removed his safety equipment and sat down on a piled stack of cut reed, theatrically mopping imaginary sweat from his brow. “I think I’ve had enough now,” he told me. I pulled him back to his feet and we trudged back down the path he had cleaved.
Back at the vehicles I chatted to Barry while Charlie investigated a tarpaulin shanty town that a now long-gone professional reed-cutter had left behind. Barry told me that not so long ago the reed beds had been expertly managed by the marshmen who kept the dykes running and tended their cattle out on the grazing marshes. In winter they cut the reed, eking out their living by selling the bundles to thatchers.
Charlie came back to join us and his ears pricked up as Barry told me that thatching reed still carried a high value and is in desperately short supply. On the way home I asked the boy if he would like to cash in on the business opportunities offered by professional reed-cutting. His sigh indicated this probably wasn’t a career path he would pursue.
A fruitful dawn
Two mornings later, Charlie and I returned to the island. In the light of a head torch we found the new ligger that Peter, Barry and the rest had put in place. We crossed it, stalking down the path the boy had cut through the ranks of reed. We weaved our way
“The sight of a boy wielding a howling Stihl is not an everyday one except for locals”
until the moon glittered off the river and there we waited for fowl.
Dawn made its spectacular appearance and so did the duck. From our couch of cut reed we watched pintail and shoveller, mallard and teal. We thrilled at the pinks in their masses lifting off from Breydon and tutted at the numbers of wheezing Egyptian geese. Finally a trio of mallard appeared within shot and two fell to one cartridge spat out from my Zabala’s muzzle. Mabel watched them fall in the half light and disappeared into the reed to busy herself in search of our quarry.
Content with our lot, we were home before 9am. The boy watched me string up our brace in the shed, then ran to take off his soaking boots and trousers. I picked his coat up from the kitchen floor where he had discarded it in his rush to get in the bath first. Being nosy I rifled through his pockets. I discovered sweet wrappers, a feather, empty cartridge cases; I also found reed heads.
Next month, Richard teaches a Ukrainian refugee about the English countryside.