Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A CLASSIC SERIES REVISITED
Simon Garnham looks back on some of his most treasured wildfowling memories, none of which were measured by the size of the bag
Wildfowlers are philosophers at heart. We know that fowling, like life, is a complicated equation. The sum is a tricky combination of weather plus tide multiplied by marksmanship over dog-handling and fieldcraft. Add a hefty dose of luck. Quite often the outcome is zero, but we leave the marsh perfectly satisfied all the same. We don’t always get what we are after, and we quite like it.
Take, for instance, the night at Lindisfarne when wigeon were whipping urgently southwards under a frosty full moon. The island, with its ancient priory and castle, was a dark heft across the bay. Bamburgh Castle also lay in darkness, and a more forbidding and lonely spot would be difficult to imagine. But I was not alone. Above me, wave after wave of migratory fowl were arriving, whistling and chattering. Some were within range of a wobbly Brno being wielded by an over-eager student below. Not one of those myriad birds was injured that night, and yet it still ranks as one of my most treasured fowling memories.
A first solo outing at Montrose was equally exciting. As I crouched on the sea wall, thinking that this was just reconnaissance, a skein of pinkfeet whiffled down almost on top of me with as little care as pigeons in Trafalgar Square. I watched, bemused and transfixed as they set about preening, dabbling and feeding within a few feet before realising their potentially fatal error and leaving as swiftly as they’d arrived. “Why did you not shoot?” asked the warden on my return to the car park. I wondered the same thing but was glad I hadn’t. Hundreds followed, but all in the stratosphere. I had no regrets. How many other people that evening had spent their evening among some of the wildest birds in Scotland?
My list of happy blanks goes on.
Punting on the backwaters is right up there, the stalk of vast numbers of teal prevented by lapwing in the pack. Snipe at dawn too fast to hit, teal at dusk too silent. Sometimes misses, other times not a shot fired.
The rain is pouring down as I write.
It’s firework season. Both of these things can alter coastal fowling and reduce our chances as birds do the short hop back to the Continent, or move off to flooded fields inland. In Essex, we’ll need to prepare for tougher times ahead. Our hunting will become more tricky. Fat young September mallard are now muscular veterans 20 yards higher and twice as fast. Teal are on a hair trigger, geese on red-alert.
But when chances don’t arrive, there are other consolations for fowlers. A spoonbill was my pleasant surprise this week. At first
I thought it must be an egret — remarkably common now in these parts. Then perhaps, I thought, a heron — they are built similarly. But as soon as it removed its head from under its wing, the mystery was solved. Just seeing this part of our foreshore heritage made up for the empty gamebag.
When outings go well and we connect with our quarry, it will be all the more deserved, all the more sweet for the blanks. In the meantime, our gamebooks will be filled even if our gamebags are not. It is great to take home something for the pot, but I wonder if the odd blank reminds us just how wild the fowl are that we pursue on our marshes. If it were too easy, it would just be fowling, not wildfowling. We like the ‘wild’ bit best of all.
“The odd blank reminds us just how wild the fowl are that we pursue”
Simon Garnham left the Royal Marines after 10 eventful years. He now combines managing the family’s small farm in Essex with teaching English, as well as wildfowling and running a highly informal shoot.