Our wildfowling club annual general meeting was held towards the end of August and I chose a route to the venue that took me past the club’s foreshore so I could take a look — or should that be a gander?
— to see if there were geese around. There were lots.
“Chester was a high-speed black streak, dashing to the car”
Before we dealt with the treasurer’s report, lease renewals and memberships, the talk was all about goose numbers and who would be out on 1 September. Exchanges with other fowlers form the very fabric of the build-up to the wildfowling season. Wildfowlers relish the countdown to the first, their equivalent of the Glorious Twelfth.
August for the wildfowler means checking duck decoys and repairing lines, a few days of pigeon shooting to sharpen up and reading the wildfowling edition of from cover to cover. It was from the pages of, which I read avidly while still at school, that I drew my inspiration to take up wildfowling.
