A green and pheasant land

You can't have everything, I suppose. But I see from the Game Conservancy Trust report on why pheasants are good for woods that you get a better class of bramble in a pheasanty sort of wood than in a non-pheasanty wood.

This is, as usual, one of those double-edged swords, or what I have now wittily dubbed a Catch .22.

On the one hand, if you want to encourage a pheasant to hang about in your wood it has to be made as comfortable and commodious as possible; a little bit of bracken here perhaps, a few piles of brushwood brashings there, a swampy ditch and wavy grasses over there. But to achieve this a little light must be shed on the forest floor to encourage growth, which means thinning out trees. Consequently, along come the brambles as well.

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With the exception of rank gorse of the sort which grows along tumbledown stone dykes, there is nothing more discouraging to a beater or walking gun than a burgeoning bramble patch.

You can always tell, as a gun listening for the telltale croaking flight of a cock pheasant, when part of the line is having trouble with brambles in a wood, or has run into some appalling thicket. The regular tapping of beaters' sticks interspersed with the squeal of chastised spaniels being hauled off rabbits subsides into a series of shouts culminating in strangled calls to hold hard on the left, right or centre.

Then everything comes to a halt. A period of rather lacklustre stationary tapping and clacking follows; then the "How are you doing?" on left or right, an incomprehensible reply and finally the "On we go" and the rhythm of the drive resumes; with the occasional ringing boing of stick on tin pheasant feeder. I have always felt old 45-gallon oil drums have the best tone. The modern blue plastic drum feeder makes a very unsatisfactory thonk.

This latest bit of Game Conservancy work on the benefits for flora and fauna of managing woodland for pheasant shooting tells us what we probably all know but could never prove; the quality of flora and fauna in a woodland managed for shooting is better than in a woodland which is not.

It has already been established that shooting in general is good for trees because if you want a good pheasant shoot, or even a pretty ropey old knockabout pheasant shoot, you still need trees and some of us are lucky enough to have friends who spend their entire lives dreaming about new plantations and high birds.

But this new work shows that once you have the trees and spend time making sure the birds are well fed and watered and there is room for them to poke about, scuttle around and take off strongly, you attain a blessed state of "biodiversification", a sort of Scottish Natural Heritage nirvana in which warblers warble, larks ascend and descend in alarming profusion, blackcaps bicker, likely lichens harbour hosts of nice nibbly things for the burgeoning wildlife and choruses of squirrels (red), voles and baby bunnies exalt the laird and all his works.

It is great to know all this for certain; to be able argue with absolute certainty, backed by scientific research, that killing pheasants is good for the countryside. Ideally, I would like my Game Conservancy subscriptions spent on research into bird and animal disease rather than something which seems perfectly self evident. But that is the way of it.

In order to convince the politicians that shooting is "a good thing" we have to spend a great deal of money proving something we can all see. But if we must prove grass in a pheasant covert grows greener than grass in another sort of wood, then that is the price worth paying for a very companionable pastime in the open air.

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Now that farming is in such a state - although you can never really tell with farmers - the time has come, I tell them, to plant trees and turn the entire countryside into a pheasant shoot. After all, it's good for the countryside.