Shooting Times & Country

On Monday, 27 February, the woodcock shooting season was debated in Parliament as a result of a petition from Wild Justice that garnered over 100,000 signatures. The petition called for a statutory change so that the season would start on 1 December,

Members of a community-owned company are to vote on a proposal to eradicate deer from their island. The island of South Uist was bought out in November 2006 by a community-controlled company called Stòras Uibhist. The company paid more than £4.5m to

Spring is showing signs of being just around the corner in the North York Moors. Snowdrops are carpeting the ground, the daffodils have come into bud and the lapwing and curlew have arrived from their winter grounds. These birds will be coming back f

It is an undeniable fact that deer numbers are increasing. It is also a less well-published fact that they are being very well managed on estates and farms and in private and Government-owned woodland throughout most of the UK. I should add, though,

At the Little Oakley and District Wildfowlers, we have our annual meeting in February. It’s a chance to review the season and put plans in place for the summer. Post-holders are re-elected and beer is sampled. For me, the highlight of this get-togeth

Buck, my labrador, is almost one year old. He’s getting a bit braver, a bit bolder and just a little bit cheeky. He’s getting to the age where he’s pushing boundaries — but this is good, as this is where the ‘real’ training begins. A dog has to do wr

Name Britain’s five greatest wildfowlers. Now there’s a challenge, for there have over the history of the sport been countless innovators, plenty who have worked tirelessly for fowling’s future at both local and national level, many who have inspired

The east coast is the place to be in February if you want to see armies of migratory birds. Over the estuary, goldeneye, plover and knot have been massing in huge numbers. Brents are counted by the thousand. And best of all have been the wigeon and t

It is no secret that crossbreed dogs have absolutely rocketed in popularity since the very first labrador was crossed with a poodle in 1989. The litter was bred because a blind woman required a guide dog, but her husband was allergic to long-haired d

I crept along the dark corridors of the stately house following a long Turkish runner, once vibrant with the colours of a distant land but now threadbare and sinking into the dark oak of the floorboards. Though the furniture was grand by everyday sta

February fill-dyke did not live up to its name this year. As I write, in the closing days of the month, we have had less than 6mm of rain over the past five weeks. The beck that runs through our farm has already stopped flowing and even the River Wav

As the shooting season draws to a close, salmon fishing begins across many of our rivers. For those enthusiastic or mad enough — depending on how you see it — to brave the icy waters of January and February, the goal is to land the prized and increas

Choke isn’t what it used to be. While the measurement of it has stayed the same, much has changed since 1931, when Major Sir Gerald Burrard wrote The Modern Shotgun and laid down the law with evidence of how to get the best out of a shotgun and shot

Spring is around the corner — I’m sitting here writing this looking at snowdrops, and daffodils are beginning to make an appearance in the garden. What I’ve actually been concentrating on in the garden, though, is not pretty flowers — I’ve been watch

Although a shotgun is usually my tool of choice for dealing with crop-raiding pigeons, it can be done with an airgun. Out on open fields, these birds can sometimes be persuaded to land among, or at least close to, a decoy pattern, but it doesn’t alwa

IT IS A QUESTION that, until a decade or so ago, would have been easy to answer simply by looking at the classified advertisements for dogs in the back of Shooting Times. The rise of the internet led to the death of the classified ads we all used to

It is that time of year when the shooting season is over and there is a hidden bounty lurking in the bottom of your freezer — quite often unlabelled or unidentified. I tend to break down my pheasant carcasses and separate the breasts from the legs. B

Shooting hares in large numbers is by no means the choice of everyone, but no one will deny the need for restricting their numbers in the interests of agriculture. Certainly, February hare shoots are avoided by many who during the season are only too

Shoots across the country are finding it more and more difficult to make ends meet. The issues in recent years have been compounded on top of one another, from energy and feed cost increases through to the ongoing bird flu outbreak. Scale and increas