Fowl is fair

For good sport and value for money a day on the ducks is difficult to beat, says Richard Faulks

Only £ 20 per bird in this day and age? Yes, it is still possible to have a “busy day” at a large country estate, or four country estates to be precise, if you contact Oliver Davies, headkeeper at a quartet of beautiful estates just 45 minutes to the west of Birmingham. Worcestershire has some beautifully contoured landscape and a long heritage of presenting sporting partridges and pheasants of a surprising quality, but when I joined a team of Guns in late September, duck was the species on offer.

With a choice of 15 duck drives spread over the four estates, Arley and Winwoods estates, Sodington Hall and Davenport House, Oliver has something for everyone. “Some people get the wrong idea about duck shooting,” he said. They think we all surround a pond trying to get some ducks off it to shoot at them. It’s all about presentation, I think, but you can be standing by a pond and all of a sudden ducks start appearing from all directions in the sky.” All the drives are pegged and the three drives shot that day looked just like pheasant or partridge drives with the pegs placed along the edges of woods and no ponds in sight, as they were either within the woodland or behind.

You may be wondering why Oliver can offer birds at £20 each rather than the £35 he charges for partridges and pheasants. The answer is fairly simple: ducks offer a far better return in terms of numbers than, say, pheasants. They expect to shoot around 60 per cent of the birds released to the ponds in early April, after six weeks of rearing from day-old chicks, whereas a return of 40 per cent on the pheasants would be a good year. There is no need for release pens or cover crops, you don’t need as many beaters to put on a duck day and finally, they are mainly shot in September and October and therefore need less feed.

Whistled up

The ducks are whistled up to a pond or wood before each drive and then flown back to another pond where the Guns are waiting. The estates don’t start shooting partridges until October when they can be shot with the pheasants. The ducks fill in the gap nicely and allow time for the weather to cool down a little and, in the late September sun, I can see the sense in that. With the temperature reaching 22°C, little wind and perfect blue skies, it would have been a disastrous day to try to shoot partridges. With ducks the conditions