The ‘do-it-yourself’ days of game rearing

I consider myself lucky that when I set out on my gamekeeping career, I worked under a gentleman who was pretty close to collecting his pension. When I say lucky, I am thinking about the fact I learned from someone who had little left to learn about rearing game using time-honoured methods. We are talking about the stuff that most young men nowadays will never have seen, only read about, either in old books or books written by elderly practitioners.

John Cameron taught me how to set up a row of sitting boxes, creating a scrape in the soil, exactly as a gamebird would, in every compartment. Following what seemed like hundreds of telephone calls, we