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 …

Pea-Shooters and Peacocks

The young peacocks on the roof of the old woodshed crowed loudly at my arrival. I feared for their safety; perched on an old, decrepit structure which is a disaster waiting to happen. They watched as I screwed the sound moderator onto the rifle and slid the bolt into place. I added a five-shot magazine …

Culling With Confidence

BSA Ultra SE .22 PCP Air Rifle I took my little BSA Ultra SE for a rare walk out last week. It’s been about nine months since she saw the light of day, locked securely away in the gun cabinet. The manometer showed the air cylinder was still fully charged. I’ve always refilled my PCP …

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, …

Caught Napping – Charlie Down

I met the Devil in the lane down to Garden Wood and he was as drunk as a skunk. Staggering around, his obviously blurred vision failed to pick out the approaching danger that I represented. Or perhaps he knew that my rifle didn’t have the requisite power to put him in my freezer? I was …

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 …

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 …

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 …