Soup-Time Charlie

The first thing that struck me as I set off into the wood was the deafening silence. Standing for a while inside the treeline, I looked about, searching for movement. Any movement. The flick of a wren's tail? An agitated blackbird? There was nothing. No breeze, not a sound. It was the morning after the …

A Lockdown ‘Call To Arms’

By the third week of the new ‘lockdown’, I had stuck rigidly to the rules. My Twitter timeline (about as live and topical as you can get) described how even deer stalking was being curtailed by various corporate landowners. Concessions have been made for essential pest control. Grey squirrel and corvid control can hardly be …

Boxing Clever

Have you got as many weather ‘apps’ on your mobile phone as I have?  All of my half-a-dozen promised a morning of no rain. Loaded up for a session on the squirrels I hadn’t even got to the end of the road when I had to turn on the windscreen wipers. Not a deluge but …

The King’s New Throne

Half-way through my seventh decade, my infatuation with the great outdoors and hunting remains as fervent as it did in my first and second. The four-year-old who hunted snails in the garden gravitated through pond dipping, worm fishing, bird egg collecting, and lamping with lurchers. He emerged as a serious air-rifle hunter, with a book …

The Renegade: Tenkara, Rimfire and Reynard

Driving slowly along the concrete drive into my main shooting permission this morning, I felt like the prodigal son returned. A grey squirrel scampered from the grass margin and sprinted along the track in front of the motor. It’s presence annoyed me, sullying my reputation as ‘the squirrel man’ on this land. Yet I didn’t …

Foxing Without Foxes

The call came through in the middle of last week. A panicky voicemail left on my mobile  by one of the estate workers. The landowner had asked him to call me. "Ian, can you call me back. We have a fox problem and the peacocks have chicks. We need the foxes gone!" We're talking a …

FAC Air v Rimfire – An Expansion Of Opinion

It would seem from the level of activity on my website that the ubiquitous 'Google' is pointing anyone who is curious about upgrading from legal-limit air rifles to FAC towards my earlier articles on this blog. I suspect, too, that the various airgun forums are discussing my views. As a busy airgun writer some years …

FAC Air Rifle v Rimfire Rifle

Those who have bought my books and read the many hundreds of magazine articles I’ve supplied will know that I have always been a huge advocate of the legal limit (sub-12 ft/lb) air rifle as a hunting tool. It’s use for small vermin control and pot-hunting is limitless if used alongside solid fieldcraft and the …

A Good Day

I’m listening to the evensong of two cock blackbirds. Each trying to replicate the others call. A gorgeous sonic battle in which there will be no winner but the listener. This, on day when the grey storm clouds have circled but haven’t hovered overhead. A day when I chanced on a local landowner with ‘a …

The Owl and The Jackdaw

It was a splendid morning to be walking the wood with a gun and a camera. Predicted by the weather oracle to be the last day of Mediterranean warmth for a while, I was determined to get some miles under my belt. The rain has been long-awaited, particularly by my farming friends. Their concern was …