Fieldcraft

I often ponder what is meant when we talk about fieldcraft and find it covers a multitude of skills, typically picked up over many years in the field. It occurs to me that new folk coming into stalking are hugely disadvantaged compared with, say, 40 years ago, when I was first starting out.

Most of my teenage years were spent wandering fields and hedgerows with my pride and joy — a .22 air rifle — in search of rabbits or anything else that I could shoot. Back then, that included sparrows and starlings. Today, that seems unthinkable, but both were considered pests.

Sparrows fed in hordes, stripping the ripening wheat next to my grandparents’