Western Morning News (Saturday)
Managing the landscape for shooting and wildlife
Question marks are being asked of the game shooting world, thanks to legal challenges from antis and the impact of coronavirus. PHILIP BOWERN visits a Devon shoot where they think they have got the balance right and are looking forward to the new season
GAME shooting, by far the most significant country sport in the Westcountry, worth well in excess of £250million a year to the region, is facing a difficult season ahead.
Major shooting estates are expecting to welcome fewer visiting guns from the start of the season in September. Sportsmen and women have been reluctant to make bookings given the uncertainty created by coronavirus. Game farms have bred fewer pheasant and partridge poults and the year-on-year growth of a pasttime that some feared was getting just too big for comfort has undergone an externally imposed check on its seemingly relentless expansion.
But for some that may not be an entirely bad thing.
Michael Hockin and son Christian run the family Brownstone Manor shoot in South Devon with gamekeeper Simon Clegg.
Michael created the shoot – pheasants and some partridge – from scratch when he bought the farm almost 30 years ago. It is fair to say that without his passion for shooting the landscape would not look the way that it does today.
“When we came here the hedges were cut right back to almost nothing, there were no ponds and the ground had been very heavily grazed,” he remembers. Today, touring the undulating landscape the shoot is an oasis for wildlife.
That is thanks, in large part, to the planting of thousands of trees, the damning of streams to create ponds and the feeding of the pheasants and control of predators that would otherwise pose a risk to many threatened farmland and wild birds that thrive on the estate.
The work has been carried out to facilitate the shooting, making for an interesting and challenging sporting day for the guns that come to Brownstone for around 15 shooting days a year. But for the other 350 days of the year it is the wildlife, in particular the songbirds, including the threatened cirl bunting, that get the benefit of this landscape which – if it were farmed as hard as it once was – would struggle to support even a fraction of the numbers that it does as a shoot.
As some other shooting estates have grown and grown, putting on ever larger days with more birds shot, so Michael and Christian have worked to make Brownstone not bigger, but better. Michael says: “We are only ever going to put on a maximum of 17 days a season here and there is a limit to the number of pheasants we want to shoot. Our priority is to give those people who come to shoot here a great experience of the countryside, meeting people, feeling part of a team that works together to put birds in the bag, enjoying each other’s company and getting some exercise in the fresh air.”
So far, it is working. The shoot is not a money-making venture, but by selling some days every year, via the shoot booking website Guns On Pegs, Michael and Christian can cover their costs. Brownstone is also a hive of activity on shoot days through the autumn and winter, when beaters, pickers up and their dogs, along with the guns, gather ready for the day ahead. The social value of game shoots – always a ‘team sport’, Michael insists – is only now being properly recognised as experts consider the importance in maintaining good mental health through social interaction in often remote, rural communities. Both he and Christian believe that an involvement in shooting sports also helps people learn more about the countryside and how it works.
Keeper Simon is preparing for his second full season at Brownstone after a long career as a gamekeeper, including the management of some much larger commercially-run shoots.
And this season rather than buying in poults for release at six weeks, he is starting his own breeding and rearing operation that will, over time, replenish the stock of pheasants at Brownstone.
Gamekeeping is an ancient profession and, for some critics, the attention lavished on young birds and the protection they are given when at their most vulnerable contrasts inexplicably with the fact that many are destined to be shot. But, like farmer who breeds an animal for the slaughterhouse and, ultimately the table, so a gamekeeper is producing and presenting pheasants that will provide both a sporting challenge and a good meal. And that means getting them to the point of release, at around seven weeks of age, in a happy and
When we came here the hedges were cut back and the ground was heavily grazed
MICHAEL HOCKIN
Sometimes the smaller birds look like they aren’t doing so well – with care they catch up
SIMON CLEGG
healthy state so they can fend for themselves in open countryside when the time comes.
In his first year producing stock at Brownstone, Simon has been buying in day-old chicks and rearing them on for release. Pheasants are pretty hardy birds, well suited to the wooded, often damp and well-covered landscape of the shoot. But they start their lives under warming lamps in sheds, before getting a taste of the outdoors in beautifully constructed rearing pens with all they need to thrive on hand.
Simon fusses around his birds like a mother hen. He must watch for signs of disease, for feather pecking and other traits that can signal distress. For the ten or so weeks that the birds need regular attention he lives nearby and is on site every day, available 24 hours a day to tend to the birds. With the help of a trainee about to start on a game-keeping course at Duchy College, Stoke Climsland, daily life is a constant round of cleaning out drinkers, delivering food, checking birds for disease and planning the dates for release. And he keeps up pheasant feeding 365 days of the year.
Across the shoot cover crops – specifically planted to provide hiding places and food for pheasants, and a big help too for the rest of the wild bird population – are greening and growing. Feeders, to give the pheasants supplementary feed to that which they can glean naturally once released, will be strategically placed and release pens checked, to give the birds some protection from predators in the early weeks after they have been given their freedom.
Simon watches over the birds with care. “Sometimes the smaller ones look like they aren’t doing so well,” he said. “But it’s like when the little lads at school look like they’re struggling because they are surrounded by big boys...Once the big boys are gone, the little ones come into their own. It is like that with pheasants; once the bigger birds are moved out, those that were the same age, but were a bit behind, catch up.”
Simon is concerned that across the UK the stock of pheasant poults in the shooting seasons to come will be badly affected by the restrictions imposed by coronavirus.
“Game farms have not been breeding the stock that they would normally because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to sell it to shoots that are doing fewer days,” he said.
“That is going to lead to shortages ahead.”
He plans to catch up the hen birds at Brownstone left at the end of the season in February 2021 and start his own breeding programme, choosing the strongest hens to produce the best stock for next year.
Some other parts of the game shooting world are anxiously awaiting developments in coronavirus and the loosening of lockdown. They are also watching and wondering what changes might come from the government, under pressure from some campaigners who want to curtail or even ban shooting. Michael, Christian and Simon are watching those developments too. But they are comfortable that what they are doing at Brownstone works – as a shoot where they can entertain old friends and meet new ones, as a conservation project and as a traditional part of country life.