Shotguns and Squirrels

The autumn wood can be a remarkable place. Not just for the display of rustic hues painting the leaf cover. The deciduous trees are fruiting, offering sustenance to birds, insects and mammals. Beech mast, hazel nuts, acorns, sweet chestnuts. I could add horse chestnut (conker) but the only animal that can peel that spikey kernel …

Mountains and Molehills

I hobbled around the Garden wood this morning, reflecting on a well crafted article in Shooting Times last week. Barry Stoffel’s piece was based on a series of conservations with ‘older generation’ countrysports enthusiasts. The main theme being that the older we get, the more we adjust our activities to compensate for changes in physical …

Snow Patrol – A Landscape Exposed

Chained to the ‘Work From Home’ laptop and watching three days of steady snowfall tore at my wilder mind. I wanted to be out there in wood and field exploring the virgin snow for track and trail. Come Saturday, I finally had the chance and with the sub-zero temperature supplemented by a bitter Easterly wind, …

Scent, Stalking and Sanity – Why I Shoot

It was just after sunrise when I pulled open the curtains and cranked open the vertical blinds. The frosted scene outside warmed my heart, for today I was guaranteed my first ‘pass-out’ for nearly three weeks. I mentioned in my last blog my lovely wife’s cancer diagnosis and the enforced shielding before her op. Thankfully …

In The Bleak Midwinter

We all know that climate change has truly screwed up our old concept of winter. I have enough decades behind me to recall my father having to go and rescue (on foot) my mother who had been trapped in a local school where she worked as a cleaner when I was ten years old. It …

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 …