Shooting & fishing: Introducing shooting to a younger generation

Published on Monday 23 January 2012 00:00

A 15 - YEAR OLD cousin appeared the other day to stay with his grandmother who has a few hundred acres of charming woods, fields and scrub with nice boggy bits for snipe and pheasants.

None of the rest of the boy’s family has ever shown much interest in shooting even though they are dead keen on rambling and scrambling o’er hill and dale. Having made their lives in the cities his parents and siblings have grown up with other interests. Sneaking about ditches and hedges in pursuit of a wayward pigeon or transient fox is just not something that particularly amuses them. But Jamie is naturally interested.

We have had a few sessions with clay pigeons and safety training, and with a bit of coaching he will be bitten, which is exactly what we want for the future, if I am to be thoroughly selfish.

He could have a very good shoot on granny’s farm and I for one will be only too happy to assist in its creation and accept any invitations that come my way.

So we took him out to see if we could flush anything from the mill below his grandmother’s farm house. This is essentially a long strip of wood and scrub running on either side of their burn past the old mill and through the now overgrown mill lade. It is perfect wild pheasant territory, although none had been seen in the previous week.

The only difficulty is that there is a little glebe field of stubble and wood in a strategic spot just next to the road which belongs to the church – a blessed sanctuary into which disturbed birds have been known to scuttle, (of course a dog might mistakenly stray, with just the right amount of encouragement, but it’s astonishing how many eyes there are in an apparently empty landscape).

Jamie was armed with a light and enviable Spanish-made AyA 28 bore which had belonged to his grandfather; bought after he found a 12 bore too heavy to carry all day. We sent Jamie ahead about 60 yards in the open grass field on the left of the mill strip; the direction in which, theoretically any birds should fly if they hadn’t already nipped back into the glebe. And sure enough, within a couple of minutes three birds tore out of the undergrowth, flushed out by Crumpet, the cocker.

There were two gratifying pops from the 28, although we couldn’t see, only hear. Nothing had been shot but there was a great deal of excited talk about exactly what had happened and where the birds had flown, and if only he’d been a bit further out in the field. And so on. We then crept up on the Dutch barn where he quite stylishly shot one of the feral flushing pigeons. I think we have the boy.

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gregg ewing

Sunday, February 19, 2012 at 05:38 PM

The best days of my youth were spent hunting pheasants with my Dad and his English setters in Pennsylvania. The pheasants are scarce in Chester County now, but I still have my memories. Anyone who thinks it is about killing is sadly misguided.

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panayiotis

Monday, January 30, 2012 at 05:03 AM

Killing animals or birds for recreation - No, that is not a good thing to do.

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Peripatetic Pensioner

Monday, January 23, 2012 at 01:24 AM

If you want to teach him to kill things, why not just get him a part time job at a local abattoir?

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