Fishing and Shooting

I don't actually have anything much against rooks, although my neighbours get very fed up with their turnip-seedling pulling activity. And like people, rooks can be tiresome when they get together in any great number and make a terrible noise. (They are quite clever. If four people go into a hide and three come out, they know there's something going on – or so it is said).

It's now years since I last had a go at them, so the occasional cull seems to work, or it just moves them on until the collective memory fades and they move back in. Bird people say culling doesn't make any difference – a species will just breed back to what the land can support. But in between I'd prefer not to be woken by birds at 4am.

This time I am using the old BSA single shot .22 with the "Made in China" sight. Crumpet, the cocker spaniel sits beside me, paws up on the window sill, and I leave the front door ajar so when one drops out of the tree she zaps straight downstairs to retrieve it. Unfortunately she has been trained, after a fashion, to bring birds back to me so she comes hurtling into the house and upstairs with bloodied rooks. I don't think trying to train her to drop rooks in the drive will work. It will just confuse her.

The last time we had a rook cull we actually used a rook rifle, built for the very purpose of shooting rooks. It was very old, didn't belong to us and the owner was running out of ammunition and didn't seem to be able to get any more. I suggested self loading but that wasn't deemed of much interest and the bullet cases had to come from Australia.

The rifle, which had an octagonal barrel, was made by Gibbs of Bristol and the size on the bullet box was 0.297-0.300in which seemed rather vague for safety, but it worked astonishingly well over rudimentary leaf sights, and made a fantastic bang, which is always very gratifying. (The travel writer Peter Fleming, brother of Ian, took a rook rifle with him for protection and food to Brazil and China in the 1930s).

When we fired at an old cock pheasant on the lawn at the end of January a great streak of flame came out of the barrel. I think the ammo was very old. In the end we used up all the bullets on the rooks and handed it back to the owner, who, to my horror handed it over to the Bobbies because he couldn't buy the ammo any more.

The Bobbies promptly chopped it up and dumped it in the sea, which, considering the price of scrap at the time, seemed a wasted opportunity for the ratepayer to get his or her own back.

This article was first published in the Scotsman, May 8, 2010