Legendary wildfowl killer who blasted with 10ft gun

YOU CAN still sense the presence of the wonderfully named Snowden Slights in the Lower Derwent Valley, even though he died 102 years ago. Or at least that’s how it feels to me after reading the book which made him a British legend.

Snowden Slights, Wildfowler, by Sydney H. Smith, was published the year before he died in 1913 at the age of 83.

He was the “last of the Yorkshire Wildfowlers,” said his obituary in the Thirsk and District News, and in the decades since then he has become an almost mythological character thanks to the scale of the slaughter wreaked on birds which came within Slights’s gunsights.

In the village of East Cotting with last week, I walked down the lane where his old red-brick cottage still stands, now extended and modernised but still with the long garden in which he was photographed weaving baskets from willow stems cut from osier beds on the nearby Derwent.

Further along the lane is the river itself, where Slights directed his formidable collection of artillery at local bird life.

Prior to 1880, when the first law protecting wild birds was passed, he found that everything could earn him money.

He shot bitterns, dippers, kingfishers, fieldfares, skylarks and even rare spotted crakes, and sold them to taxidermists since stuffed birds were popular ornaments with the Victorian middle classes.

His main quarry, however, was the many thousands of ducks, geese and swans feeding on the Derwent Ings – flooded haymeadows – each autumn and winter.

Between 1890 and 1907, from his punt alone he shot 5,355 birds. Incredibly, he managed to kill 44 ducks with a single blast of lead shot. Another amazing feat was the bagging of 18 snipe – one of the most difficult birds to shoot because of its rapid zig-zag flight – with consecutive shots.

Of his 28 guns, the most fearsome was a giant 10ft-long muzzle loader. It weighed 140lb, blasted out 18 ounces of lead shot each time he pulled the trigger, kicked like a mule and was mounted horizontally on his punt.

He would lie flat on his stomach and stealthily propel the punt using two slender shafts of wood he called “creeping sticks” until he found wildfowl feeding at ground or water-level.

Stories of the hardships he was prepared to endure are a big part of the Snowden Slights legend.

After one day’s shooting his clothes were frozen onto him and he sat in front of his fire until he had thawed out.

Even worse, he fell into water one bitterly cold January day. Seeing a small flock of pochard he fired at them, but the recoil sent him tumbling backwards into the Derwent.

Later, his hard-frozen clothes had to be cut off by his friends.

I paid a visit to his grave in the nearby St. Mary’s Churchyard, where a single mallard is carved onto the headstone, and despite old Snowden dying long ago the bird looked like it was frantically trying to escape.