Gamkeeper profile
Name of estate: Portloughan Type of estate: Split arable and woodland County: County Down, Northern Ireland Acreage: 200
Sporting Gun speaks to David Sandford, owner and “amateur” keeper of Purdey Gold award winning Portloughan estate.
Why did you become a keeper?
I’ve always been a keen shooting man. When I was at school I bought some second-hand incubators when my father first bought the farm and brought up some pheasants and released a couple hundred pheasants. I suppose when other schoolboys were reading the Beano I was reading the Easy Game Advisory booklet.
Did you do any formal training?
Over the years I’ve attended a number of GWCT shoot visits and I’ve picked up stuff there. I also attended the three-day course in Loddington, which is really the GWCT amateur keepers course about four years ago. I’ve been very lucky to have three very experienced keepers around the area – Alan Coates, from Larchfield Estate; Kenny Thomas, from Ballydugan Estate; and Stephen Brown, from Ballywalter Estate – and they were very generous with their advice and help.
What's the history of the estate?
My father bought it, it was a grassland farm on the shores of Stragford Loch and he farmed it commercially. The tree planting and the development as an estate – creation of the duck flightpond – didn’t really happen until 22 years ago when we had a visit from the GWCT and we started to plant around 25,000 to 30,000 of mainly broadleaves.
I got Hugo Straker from the GWCT in Scotland to come over here about 20 years ago and advised me on the planting and what I should do. He looked at it as if it was a clean sheet of paper and we worked together and I’ve done the planting as they’ve recommended.
Was the Purdey Award always a goal of yours?
No, it wasn’t really. Perhaps in the back in my mind I did think if it worked we should enter but it wasn’t the drive for it. I retired about four years ago and I decided to up the ante a bit on the shooting side and we released 1,500 pheasants.
The grey partridge project was something I wanted to do, I remember I was 25 in the late 70s, when I last saw a covey of wild greys on the farm and that stuck in my mind. In Northern Ireland they have been extinct as a breeding species since 1991, there just aren’t any.
What steps did you take to bring back the grey partridge?
I decided to do it the “hard way”. I release parent and coveys – which is the most difficult thing to do, but proven by the GWCT to be more successful. So rather than just buying 500 poults and releasing them, what I do is start early at the end of the previous season, hold back the cocks and the hens, they pair up naturally, we then put them in a smaller pen, they then hopefully lay eggs and hatch them out. We hold some of those birds back but we also release about 60 – about five coveys with parents and birds. The plan is to do that for five years, I’m currently half way through my third year. Last year we were lucky where two of the birds we released the year before paired up and produced a wild brood – the first time we had grey partridge breeding in the wild in Northern Ireland for 25 years. We currently have five pairs that I know of on the estate that are hopefully sitting, so hopefully we get another success this year. You tend to monitor your success or failings by the number of birds you count in the spring or the autumn. This time last year we only had two pairs on the farm that we counted in the spring, one of which had a family and were successful. This year we had five pairs in the spring, so it’s going in the right direction but it’s very early days.
How did it feel to win the Purdey Award?
Oh it was amazing. It was a great occasion, it really was, and I would heartily recommend anybody to enter and to do it because it’s a very special occasion.
When we went I thought we may have got a place but never thought we would have won it. I was exhilarated I suppose but also proud and humble. And standing in that room full of history was a fabulous experience.
In your opinion, what’s the greatest threat to our sport, if any?
One word that springs to mind is complacency. I think we constantly have to keep on exposing the virtues of what we do and the benefits to other wildlife. People that don’t shoot are going to find it very difficult to agree that shooting is a good thing, but we’ve got to keep on exposing the virtues of the other benefits – the habitat creation, predator control and what we are doing – in a nice, soft way. I think we have to work much more closely with other organisations that are not necessarily shooting orientated. The “We can do it all ourselves and don’t need to make friends” is absolutely nonsense. You can feel the winds of the political landscape changing and we’ve been a little complacent over the last 20 years.