A rough shoot to remember

Our annual Boxing Day shoot turned out to be two shoots and neither of them on Boxing Day. But such is the nature of Boxing Day shoots; pretty random. This year found me and Waffle (Waffle and I?) trying to organise a bemused collection of youngish guns, mainly visiting cousins, and march them in the right direction in search of the odd pheasant.

Our big excitement of the day was a huge field of uncut barley behind the house (the combine is still drunkenly stuck in autumn mud) and the huge numbers of pheasants it has attracted, mainly from the new big shoot two miles upriver.

So we walked in line down the uncut barley field towards the shelter belt at the bottom. En route both Alf, (second in command) and I shot pigeons, picked by Waffle, and we put up three pheasants in the barley which the two girls popped off at at huge range. Rather surprisingly everyone had remembered their instructions and the line swung, or rather meandered, to the bottom left corner of the field to one end of the shelter belt.

The entire line of guns then managed to spread itself in ragged order across the field below with orders to get well ahead of the advancing beaters in the trees. Sure enough the birds that had earlier scuttled out of the barley into the trees emerged in a huge flush at the end of the shelter belt.

Typically none of the guns was far enough forward to get a decent shot, for which I suppose I have to take some, if not all, the blame. But, as Alf and I had cunningly reckoned, the birds at least flew downhill towards the natural shelter of the wooded burn.

So we started at the bottom of the burn and worked our way up through three quarters of a mile of scrub and bog. The operation was a triumph in that everyone got a shot, and the neighbour’s 16-year-old shot his first pheasant. So, seven pheasants and two pigeons by the end of a short morning.

At which point Alf and I snuck off to another rellie’s ground, met my son who had been let off child minding duties for two hours, and executed as perfect a walked up operation as I have ever been involved in. Almost everything flew the way we planned or expected, even if much of it survived. Waffle found every bird she went to pick, most of which seemed to be black hen pheasants from the shoot up river. Bag: 15 pheasants. And my phone claimed we had walked 7km altogether. If we can put out a few strategically placed grain feeders to keep stray birds from upstream on our side of the hill, next season could be a rough shooting bonanza. n