Keeper’s diary

The run-up to the start of the shooting season is fraught with concern as to whether it will be a success and all the hard work pay off, says Adam Cope

The first day of every season is a tense time for any keeper. It’s always a relief to get it out of the way. Preparation and planning will help to prevent mistakes but there are plenty of things you can’t control that can go wrong. Luckily, this year all went to plan and the shooting gods were on our side.

Apart from the day-to-day feeding, topping up water and dogging-in, I’ve had to prepare the new gunroom in the barns at the farm, clean out the beaters’ wagon and cut gaps in the hedges and clear paths so that the beaters can easily get to where they need to be on shoot days. It’s been busy and I rely on help from my regular beaters and pickers. I’ve been inundated with pickersup and beaters wanting to help, which is great. Some of my regulars are so keen to be involved that they travel up to 50 miles for each shoot day. Consequently, I have an excellent and reliable team for shoot days, including my three regular pickers-up. They make a huge difference to the smooth running of a shoot day, as well as helping with the out of season workload.

The team

Getting a few key members of the team briefed on how I’d like each drive beating, where needs “blanking in” and where to place stops is really important. In preparation, we take a trip around all of the drives a few days before the season starts (I also make them take notes), to make sure we’re all “singing from the same sheet”. Mickey Johnson, David (Crockett) Ward and Johnny Smith all take leading roles along with Will Abbott, who is working with me part-time as a trainee. We learned a great deal from last season and it became clear that we needed more transport. I’ve invested in a quad for Johnny, which means he can react quickly if we see birds wandering from where we need them. Crockett now drives the game cart, which saves time collecting the game at the end of drives and storing it well while it cools off.

A few of the cover plots have been moved or reshaped since last season and we now shoot with nine guns rather than 10. Plus we have a new drive, so setting out the pegs has been fun and I’m experimenting with some different ideas. The beginning of the season is a great time to try things. It is a case of evolution, not revolution, though. I will try something new each shoot day and the beauty of doing this early season is, if it doesn’t work out, I can easily make up the difference on the next drive because there are so many birds around.

Wise selection

Our first day was a great success. All of the work and planning paid off. The syndicate was happy to pay a bit extra to cover the cost of one less Gun, but the bag didn’t suffer and we ended up with 145 after five drives and some great selective shooting. The syndicate members are all good shots who understand that you can only shoot the birds once. They selected wisely. As often happens early in the season, some of the pheasants weren’t fully tailed so they were left alone to be harvested when fully grown. This should only take a

week or two. The partridge flew well and we saw numerous birds, as I hoped. Hollow Back drive was exceptional. Full of birds and they went well. There must have been over 500 pheasants in the drive. There was a big flush of birds as we entered the cover crop and I thought that all of the birds had gone in one lump. But plenty more followed as we slowly walked the cover through. I think it was the best the drive has ever gone.

The new drive Goss Top was shot for the first time and it will need a tweak or two. There were a large number of good birds in there, but the pheasant seemed to flush from one point and channel down the middle of the line back to the home wood rather than spreading down the line. And some of the partridge flew along the front of the line rather than curling and heading down hill, which was unexpected. But until you’ve tried it, you just don’t know what they’ll do. I’m going to move the pegs on the end of the line closer to the cover next time and have one of the Guns walk up to his peg with the beaters along a hedgerow to try to pick up a few of the birds going back. I’ll position the flags differently to try to persuade the partridge to turn and fly over the Guns. I will also experiment with pushing the L-shaped cover plot from both ends to get the birds to flush further from the wood so that they spread out more by the time they reach the line. We’ll see how that goes next time.

It can’t all go exactly to plan and I did get one complaint. A Gun said that “it was difficult choosing a bird as there were too many in the air at one time”. That’s the kind of complaint I like to receive. I know it will steadily get better for the Gun after each shoot day throughout the season.

I’m planning to rest a couple of the big drives next time and we didn’t touch two of the feature drives, so, going forward, I’m pretty happy with the way things are.

“there was a big flush of birds as we entered the cover crop and i thought that all of them had gone in one lump”