Roughing it for wild birds in wild places

At the heart of it, rough shooting is about getting out there and finding your own sport. Often that means wild birds — and you often end up in wild places. You could be shooting over spaniels or you could be shooting over pointers, or even a few old labradors and a terrier.

While the concept itself is simple, the appeal is delightfully hard to pin down. For me, it’s about understanding your quarry and even thinking like your quarry. To shoot well on a rough day, you need good fieldcraft, so you need to be able to read ground and understand where birds might flush from, and you need good knowledge of birds themselves. Was that a snipe or a jack snipe? Is that duck too high? What even is it? Needless to say, if you can’t tell a pintail from a teal, you need to go back