Where there’s muck...

Wildfowling today is a sport. We get up long before the crack of dawn, head out to the marshes and endure wind, cold and salt mud for the sheer thrill of outwitting a wild and supremely wary quarry. With luck and skill in equal proportions, we bring something back for the table.

But it has not always been so. For generations there were those who lived close to those prime estuaries and marshes into which tens of thousands of migratory duck and geese descended in the winter, who made a living from harvesting birds with powder and shot and selling them for hard cash. These were the market gunners, men who occupied their summers with longshore fishing, oyster dredging, eel catching or farm work, but who in the winter shot duck for a living, sometimes killing