Keeper’s diary
A successful drive will have to evolve as the season progresses to remain productive, says Adam Cope
One thing you can be sure of is that over the course of a season your drives will change and evolve. Cover plots will become bare through use, birds will learn to know what’s coming and find different ways of evading the Guns. Changes in the weather, along with crop changes in the surrounding fields, will move the birds around your land. Any shoot will encounter some or all of these changes, so you have to adapt to them day to day. Good feedback from the Guns and beaters is really important to help me spot when the behaviour of the birds is different from the last time the drive was shot. It is no good blundering on and expecting things to get better if a drive has changed — they won’t. You have to change the way you beat the drive or where the Guns stand to ‘roll with the punches’.
At the end of each drive I’ll ask the beaters, stops and pickers-up how they thought things went — I rarely get to see clearly as I’m usually in a wood or cover crop. Were there any differences from the last shoot? Did all of the Guns get birds over them? Chat with the Guns, too. All the information is invaluable and helps to paint a picture of developments.
Learning process
A good example of the learning process is Goss drive. At the beginning of the season Goss was a fairly straightforward drive, where we pushed the birds to the corner of the holding wood and flew them out to the Guns. The birds would cross the line and head down the hill. Pretty standard stuff, but it worked well. As the season progressed and we’d shot that drive four times, more and more birds had worked out that heading down the hill was a bad idea and started to curl back down the side of the wood or back over the beaters into the wood.
It was time for a rethink. First, I moved the pegs for the Guns to a riding in the wood along the side of the release pen and placed a couple of pegs along the side of the wood. This put them about 75 yards back from the end of the wood but in the wood. Next, the beaters had to be briefed. It is never easy changing a drive — everybody gets used to their shoot-day routine and it is easier to leave drives as they are — but the shooting will suffer if you do. We planned that we’d gently push the birds down the wood and past the Guns’ pegs to their usual flushing point. Obviously the Guns couldn’t be on their pegs at this point. They had to be kept waiting quietly outside the wood. When I signalled, they were to move to their allotted peg after the birds had passed by. It’s never easy keeping Guns quiet but if they moved too early or late, the drive would be ruined.
Good radio communication is vital. To get a better spread of birds along the edge of the wood, I lifted the wire along the sides of the release pen. This meant that the birds could simply walk under the wire rather than having to pass around the pen, and it’s easy to put back in place ready for next season. This would spread the birds out more evenly along the length of the wood, ensuring that all the Guns got some shooting.
Finally, I briefed a couple of the beaters to go out into the field where the Guns would usually stand and use flags to deter the birds from going that way. Luckily, I have a great team of experienced beaters and they understand the pitfalls of getting the timing wrong or making too much noise, causing the birds to flush too early. The drive worked a treat and the birds flew back to the line. But who knows about how it will work the next few times, though?
Second-guess
Top Goss is another drive that I’ve been working on and I think I’ve finally managed to get it working well. I’ve talked about this drive before when I was planning and allowed to extend the cover crop that runs
“on goss, more and more birds had worked out that heading down the hill was a bad idea”
The Seeland Kraft jacket and trousers that I have on trial are still going strong after four months of continuous use, though I’ve managed to rip one of the pockets on a door handle, which is annoying. They have held up well beating through thick undergrowth and brambles and have never leaked. Several of the beaters have now bought the same kit after seeing how well it performs. from the wood, to make it into an L-shape. The original idea was to squeeze the birds to the corner of the L and fly them back to the wood. As often happens, however, the birds didn’t like my plan and either flew back over the beaters or squeezed out to the side. Never try to second-guess a gamebird. The birds simply didn’t want to fly back to the wood from that point. Moving the pegs out into the field and pushing the birds all the way to the end of the L-shape, about 300m away from the wood, seems to have cured things. Now they spread well and head for the wood. ‘Evolution not revolution’ seems to be the way forward.
From the beginning of the new year, I start to feed the woods heavily again. Later in the season, the woods become more important as the covers are now threadbare and the woods offer the best shelter. I find that hand feeding works best around here.
There are two reasons for this: first, the deer and badgers play havoc with the standing feeders and Manolas, knocking them over and pushing the tops off; second, spreading the food out means that the birds have to spend more time scratching around to get a crop full, rather than quickly gorging themselves at a feeder and then wandering off. I also tend to feed towards the centre of the woods. With the colder weather, it just seems to be where the birds want to be, and if they’re happy and holding well, I’m also happy.