Our love affair with quarry

As the Twelfth approaches – and the inevitable media assault – Editor Jonathan Young says that it is now more important than ever that we champion our wildlife

GROUSE loaders are hardened to dealing with odd types but I sensed an eyebrow twitch when mine watched me collect the nearest bird after the first drive of the season, give it a long sniff and inhale the summer scent of fresh-cut hay and scrubbed skies. It’s a smell they share with pigeon shot over stubbles and a fortune awaits those who can bottle it – perhaps as Chanel No 5 Shot?

I completed my pick up while my loader collected the grouse behind with his old yellow labrador, one of those paddy-around, never-miss-a-bird hounds that you see so often in the North but seldom now in the South. Laying them carefully on the turftopped butt, I wished, as ever, that I could paint and capture a grouse in its glory – the scarlet eyebrows, feathered feet and mahogany body flecked with white.

Grouse are famously glamorous, explaining how often they’re depicted in country house oils and bronzes, but many other quarry species have a hold on our hearts, each with a unique beauty. Who would unhesitatingly award Paris’ golden apple if forced to choose between the morning-coat elegance of the woodpigeon over the bold greens of the teal, the creams and bars of the snipe above the autumn russets of the woodcock or a pheasant’s oriental pomp in preference to the country tweed tones of the homely English partridge?

All deserve a moment’s pause for silent admiration, a gentle smoothing of displaced feathers, a little of the time we gave so readily when we were young and every bird shot was a prize and locked in our mind’s vault.

We know such admiration for our quarry is incomprehensible to many. How, they ask, can we love something we seek to kill? But that is a modern question for which there’s an ancient answer, first drawn in red ochre in dark caves, then stylised in pharaonic tombs and finding living expression every time we set forth with rod, gun and hound. To love, as a hunter, is not to destroy but to cherish the wild above the tame and to be a part of it, not a spectator with no stake other than a viewpoint. Wildlife programmes and reserves allow easy experience of nature and are to be applauded. But they have not created the extraordinary diversity and wealth of species that this country is privileged to enjoy and they never will. That is down to us, who expend our own sweat and money: the fishermen who fight pollution of our rivers; the hunting folk who manage spinney and hedgerow; the shooting aficionados who spend billions annually on habitat creation and controlling opportunistic predators that, left unchecked, would obliterate the species so beloved by armchair ‘conservationists’.

This to us is a truism, that those who love their quarry species with passion will do everything possible to nurture them and the other species that share their habitat. Yet every year the Twelfth is not marked by celebrating the incredible fact that the UK has 75% of the world’s heather uplands – and therefore a far rarer environment than rainforest – but by orchestrated clamour against the grouse shooting that pays for the preservation and maintenance of them.

This annual attack has become ever more aggressive and it would be easy to become dispirited by the unwillingness of the national and social media ever to put wildlife before the easy opportunity to belittle us and our real conservation efforts. But if we cease defending what we do with utmost rigour and break our contract with the wild, we know what happens next. The Langholm Project demonstrated that all too clearly.

So, we cannot give up and thankfully we have an array of countryside organisations to promote our cause. Yet paying membership fees is not enough. We have to champion our wildlife individually whenever possible and it has to be done in the quiet British way, without abuse and rancour.

Search Google for game recipes and The Fieldõs collection will always be on the first page along with others from the BBC and Jamie Oliver, digital proof that eating game is no longer considered the preserve of tweedy types. As I’m lucky enough to fish and shoot fairly often, those coming to dinner now expect they’ll be eating something I’ve bagged. For many guests, it’ll be the only time they eat game and they’re polite enough to say they enjoy it. But they’re also interested in how and where it was shot, whether it’s grouse from a classic moor or pigeon taken on a dank afternoon in the roost woods. Some of the company can be ambivalent over fieldsports but always end up saying: “I have no problem if you eat what you shoot.” From there, it’s an easy conversational drift into the birds’ lifecycle and habitat and what we do to maintain the latter.

That’s why I’m hoping this season that some of those lucky enough to shoot will take a fresh view on the birds they kill and will take home all the game they can. Let’s have no more talk of the dead birds being an inconvenient by-product. Our quarry species must be respected both in life and death, and those who ever call them ‘targets’ should be made to realise they are doing our sport a shameful disservice.

This season will be different and perhaps better if we turn our minds back to when we were young and every bird mattered; when every bird was marked carefully; when we came home with some of the bag and prepared them ourselves for the table; when it was obvious that our passion for the quarry extended far beyond pulling the trigger.

Those who love their quarry species with passion will do everything to nuture them