I have been involved with game shooting all of my life. I started by beating on pheasant shoots as a youngster and have shot in Germany and the UK for both small and large game.

My main shooting is in a small rough shooting syndicate in Moray. We shoot on a large area of arable farmland and forestry and enjoy ourselves very much with a modest bag which is always enough to keep our freezers stocked with wholesome free range meat.

Rough shooting. Rough shooting is informal shooting where a few hunters get together and hunt for small game by "walking up" which means walking through likely spots using dogs to hunt for and flush game. Alternatively they may cooperate by having some of their number move through some cover while the others wait outside to shoot game that is flushed out.     

Gundogs. As in all types of hunting, dogs play an important role.  In rough shooting dogs are vital to retrieve shot game.  Labrador retrievers and  springer spaniels are the main breeds but many others will be encountered.  Continental breeds are starting to be used to an increasing extent but still form a very small proportion of the working dog population in this country.

Dogs will find and retrieve  game where people will not; wounded birds, birds in deep cover, retrieving from water or across water.

The picture to the left is of my Labrador retriever Dusk.  She is no longer with me after 7 good years, dying of cancer last year at 13 years old.  My new dog is shown below.  She is called Dolly and is 2½ just now and shaping up really well.

Working dogs and watching them work is always an enjoyable and rewarding part of a shooting day.  I am also a member of the Grampian Gundog Club which meets to train our dogs over the summer.  The members are able to use the experience of the more expert members to improve their dogs' training.  Check our new website. It is a bit bare at the moment but we hope to develop it over the coming months with pictures and reports of our events.

Shooting Syndicates

Most shooters in this country shoot in syndicates.  A syndicate is just a group of shooters (known as "guns") who club together to rent the shooting rights on some land and have a number of shooting days during the season.  During the off-season the guns will work on the shoot, improving access to the cover, building rearing pens for pheasants, looking after the young birds before they are released onto the shoot and putting out supplementary feeding.  A control program is also carried out to reduce the number of predators such as foxes, stoats, weasels and crows and other agricultural pests such as rabbits and pigeons on the shoot.  This benefits the syndicate by reducing losses of quarry species but also spills over to the wild bird population, reducing their predation.  In addition it provides a pest control service for the farmers on the syndicate's ground.

In my own syndicate we have built two small pens for our pheasants, releasing 200 birds.  The pens protect the birds from predators (both avian and ground predators) during their most vulnerable stage.  While in the pen they learn to roost out of harm's way and by the time they are released in late August they can fend for themselves.  They then have about 10 weeks to mature before any shooting activity starts.  Pens are a vital tool in increasing the harvestable surplus that the syndicate will attempt to shoot over the open season.

We have improved access to the cover on the shoot, opening it up to give ourselves access but also to provide sunning areas for the birds. We have placed hopper feeders throughout the ground which provide an additional food source to the birds both wild and released.

We plan to shoot on 8 days through the season, and hope to have a bag of a dozen or so birds on each day.

Wildfowl

Wildfowl such as ducks and geese are also attracted to the kind of agricultural land that syndicates operate on, mostly attracted to wet areas where they can find insects and worms in the mud.  Our syndicate is no exception and we put supplementary feeding in several of these areas and flight ducks and geese every few weeks.

Deer

The syndicate also has the right to hunt deer and several guns (or more correctly"rifles") in the syndicate stalk roe deer

on our ground.

The roe are quite numerous and I managed to photograph this one in late May this year.

  Game Shooting Associations

The main association for shooting in Britain is the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC). BASC is the largest shooting organization in Britain and represents our interests to law makers and police forces as well as contributing to research, education and training. By no means all shooters in the country are members but it is essential that BASC is as strong as possible in light of the challenge of proposed over-restrictive legislation. All quarry shooters should join and support BASC.

The other organization in Britain for shooting and all other field sports is the Countryside Alliance. The Alliance organized the enormously successful Countryside March in 1999. I was proud to be amongst the 300,000 country people who marched through London on that day. I was back in London for the Countryside March on 22 September 2002, going through the counting gate at around the 200,000 mark.

On a dreary wet day in Edinburgh I marched with the Gamekeepers of Scotland in the Gamekeeper's March.

I was back again for the March on the Mound on 16 December 2001 protesting against the dog's breakfast of an apology for legislation that has become the "Protection of Wild Mammals Act".

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Updated: 6 June 2007