Shooting Times & Country

Email your stories / shootingtimes@futurenet.com Hundreds of shoots face financial ruin and gamekeeper redundancies are stacking up following the change to general licence 43 (GL43) in late May. Introduced in 2021 following a legal challenge from Wil

Reports of birds dying because of bird flu are coming in from across the country. During the past few weeks, over 1,000 seabirds have washed up on the coast in Aberdeenshire. And just as ST went to press, an Irish conservation group said that the H5N

There’s a row going on in Dumfries and Galloway, one of Britain’s heartlands of duck shooting and a destination for wildfowlers from all over Britain. The owners of Eskdalemuir have apparently gone over the heads of the local council and asked the Sc

Mark Fitzer is the head gamekeeper on the famous Holkham estate in North Norfolk Well, it was dry when I last wrote in this column and, guess what, it’s still dry. Granted, we have had a bit of rain, probably enough to save our small seed mixes at le

Chris Rogers is a deer manager in East Anglia, CIC head measurer and NGO committee member At a time of plenty and the high cover that results, it is a relaxing part of the year for the deer. As discussed in last month’s diary entry, we switch on to t

As often as I can, but not often enough, I head up into the Cambrian mountains with my friend Dai, where we walk empty miles, catch trout from remote llyns and burn peat to warm our souls. Our base is a hut built well over 100 years ago by a club mad

Woodpigeon control has always been a complicated process at my local permission, as they tend to be a problem all over the farm. If I set up for a decoying session, all that happens is they move to another food source and without a team of Guns, prod

I‘ve been lucky enough over the years to have worked my spaniels in all sorts of different cover, ranging from thick laid bracken to the spaniel handler’s nightmare: standing maize. On more than one occasion, I have been asked what I consider to be t

A few months ago, I wrote about which of the six UK deer species I consider the most challenging to stalk. Sika came out on top. It got me thinking, however, about how a stalker can quantify challenging stalking. A six-hour drag off the hill is an ex

In a sense, what’s the point? Why go to a game fair? Why go to considerable effort to be hot and tired and end up spending more on the latest carbon fibre fishing reel than you spent on your car? You can get nearly everything from infrared scopes to

IT COMES AS A surprise to many people to learn that the biggest threat to a dog’s health in the countryside comes not from ticks, leptospirosis, adders or mad heifers but grass — or, to be more specific, grass seeds. There are around 10,000 species o

I am about to head north for my annual outing on a notable Scottish river. Reports reach me that there is precious little water and even fewer fish. Friends and family ask me why I am proposing to drive from one end of the country to the other in ord

The UK game market could hardly be described as healthy. Supply of feathered game outweighs demand, and as Stephen Crouch of the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA) confirmed, the UK does not have the processing power to cope with the number of

July is an interesting month for deer managers. While the roe deer are active, the daylight hours are long and the deer season really kicks off in Scotland, the downsides have got to be the dense cover and swarms of biting insects. All that aside, ma

It’s been a peculiar year so far; some seriously hot days have been followed by torrential downpours. It’s excellent for the crops mind, which seem to be thriving down our way. I am already seeing a lot of pigeons coming together, and with just a cou

I make no apology for the rather simple subject matter of my article this week, for I know that there are hundreds of our readers whose day is made if they can bring home a couple of pigeons for the larder. Owing to a badly cut foot, Don has been on

THE ULTIMATE SHOOTING QUIZ TEAM BILL HARRIMAN BASC’s head of firearms and global authority on guns MAT MANNING Airgunner and journalist from the West Country DIGGORY HADOKE Vintage gun expert, firearms dealer, author and journalist BRUCE POTT

I almost cheered when I read Rose Sutcliffe’s observations (Country Diary, 28 June) about rural connectivity and the Shared Rural Network project. The latter is a scheme using matched funding from the Government to cover 95% of the UK’s landmass with

She wove through the sparse stalks of bolting wheat on the field’s edge, nose pinned to the floor. The grass margin a few feet to our right had recently been cut, and on it, some way ahead, a young roebuck sauntered towards the big wood below the kee