October .. Last Orders

Of all the months in the British hunting year, October has to be my favourite by a country mile. With the turn of colour on the leaves Mother Nature sweeps her soft paintbrush across forest and wood to create one last glorious, rustic canvas before drawing in her lungs and exhaling .. to blow them all away with her gales, like a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. The last of the harvest is underway and the mechanical monsters that can suck up a barley or maize field overnight are fed and watered, retiring to the barns for the winter. Their little cousins are out there now and the furrow is turning. The air at morn or dusk is full of rook, jackdaw and gull .. the ploughs disciples .. either going to communion or returning from it. Around wood, meadow, bank and hedgerow Autumns other crops are ripening .. some gifted with nourishment, others with poison and peril. Of the former, even the lush blackberry that looks tempting to the tongue is now fermenting or harbouring maggots. Best left to the birds. The flush of berries .. holly, sloe, mistletoe, yew, rowan .. will once again bring conjecture among us amateur weather forecasters. Does bounty mean fearful weather or fair? In my experience, it depends who's eating it and how much they're 'caching' .. but for now, that will remain my secret, thank-you!

 

 

Poison and peril? Well, the Fall's other crop bursts forth now in all its various guises. This is fungi time .. when the spores become polypores. The brackets, the toadstools, the mushrooms, the puffballs .. in so many shapes and sizes. Living organisms of great beauty or ugly fascination, so often passed by. Next time you see a display of fungus .. in any form .. stop and study it for a moment. Consider the miracle of nature that allowed its design and its purpose. If I consider any of my outdoor time 'inept' it is in not being able to remember the names of all but the most common of these wonderful organisms. A cardinal sin and one I hope to repair before I get too much older. For among these fungi is a rich source of foragers food which I have never had the confidence to harvest. And true wild harvest it is.

       

The game shooter is abroad, grinning from ear to ear and trying to keep the over-eager cocker at heel. A lucky sort will have already enjoyed a month at the Frenchmen or our own Grey partridges .. yet would have been cleaning the barrels with vigour on the last day of September ready for the high birds and the drawn cover. Ready for the captains lecture, the peg-draw, the shooting lunch, the sloe gin, the brace for the larder .. and hopefully the beaters tip. The sharper shooters will have a design on that prized right and left (or a pin-tail for the cap) from that rocket of a bird .. the woodcock. I step near these avian ninjas so often on my permissions and admire any gun that could achieve a pair, such is their speed. Out near the water-margins those hardy fowl-gunners are now crouching in dawns first glimmer with ears cocked to the breeze listening for the whistling and piping and honking of incoming opportunity. Skeins of Pinkfoot and Greylag pepper the horizon of my beloved Broadland and fill the morning sky with pattern and sound. The harder the weather, the greater the prize. Fair meat, hard won. True, true hunting .. where terrain, time, tide and elements give the quarry more than fair law.

 

Around me in the forest, the stalkers are trying to tidy up on the roebucks before the winter purdah prevails and they turn their attention to the does. The creeping muntjac will, of course, remain fair game all year and keep the freezer topped up. So as the high pheasant flies overhead and I follow it in mockery of the shotgun shooter with my barrel, giving lead and whispering 'bang' .. don't think I'm unhappy. When the teal whistle down the twilight dyke and I pretend, with my airgun, that I am punt-gunning with a four-bore .. trust me, they fell stone dead. When I'm hunkered at the woods edge, after a magpie chasing crane flies on the pasture, and a roebuck steps into the clearing just twenty yards away? I may, just may .. place my crosshair on it's heart with my safety catch engaged and imagine 'boom!'. Yet, consider this. I could do all this. Nothing impedes me. I simply choose not to .. for now.

Not for me, though, any of the above. As dawns swirling mists dampen the floor I will be patrolling the wood and field margin with my humble little popgun and enjoying my sport largely unseen and unheard. No slapping of hands or crossing of palms. No 'seasons'. I will perhaps lay a net along the woods edge near the stubbles and float out a decoy or two .. for I love a wood-pigeon breast or two in my Sunday hotpot. I will be trimming out those little nest-pirates, the grey squirrels, with a vengeance this year for they have robbed me blind. Yes .. blind I may have well been for not ever seeing a red squirrel in the flesh. I have always had a solid purpose for culling greys, in pursuit of songbird protection. Now, however, having seen those little red pixies dancing on the boughs in Cumbria I am massively jealous and hold the loss of the red squirrel to Norfolk directly accountable to the grey. Who knows, I might even eat grey squirrel for the first time this Fall? If I like the taste, then it's definitely in trouble around here. The rats will be heading back from hedgerow to farm now and will need my attention. The airgun, with a red-filtered lamp on top, is the perfect antidote to a rodent attack on a grain store .. and good sport too. And the rabbits. Always the rabbits. Recovering now from last years dearth and little myxomatosis about. As the foliage retreats, dawn and dusk move closer together, so the opportunities to fill the freezer increase.

 

 

I love October. This is the month when Mother Nature shouts 'Last orders!' and we all rush to her well-stocked bar.   

copyright Ian Barnett Oct 2013

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Spidered !

The clatter and crash of wheels and cogs turning ceased as soon as I saw the open view across the morning stubbles. There was nothing wrong with the X-Trail. The noise was in my head, the turmoil of yet another poor nights sleep. Before I'd left, the digital weather station in the kitchen told me that (at just 6.30am) it was 17C and the humidity was a staggering 90%. A legacy of last nights rainfall .. and the reason for my insomnia. Stepping out now onto the cropped barley fields, the moisture hung as a spectral, golden mist. The ghost of dawn battling against the ascending orb of the sun. There would be only one winner in this skirmish today and, looking at my panting lurcher, I knew we needed to take our patrol at a gentle pace. This is a glorious time of day to be out with a gun, or a rod, or a dog. The cusp between night and day sees a flurry of activity as the wild creatures change shift. Old Charlie stole back to his den, padding alongside the hedgerow, to do whatever foxes do during the heat of a summers day. The barn owl made her last sweep around the meadow margins at the same time as the sparrow-hawk lifted off to start his hunting, one birds suppertime vole being the others breakfast. Brimstones danced around the purple loosestrife already, the butterfly worlds earliest risers using that huge proboscis to drink from the deep flowers. Far out on the stubble the rooks were feeding on and around the huge, cylindrical bales. The harvest mites are plentiful but the birds have to work for their meal .. chasing the little chiggers here and there. Over near the pine coverts, a doe is browsing with her faun following closely. She has an air of ambiguity around her, even though she has sensed my presence. Perhaps she knows my feeble little rifle poses no threat? Or perhaps she knows it's nowhere near November 1st yet?

So we set off, my hound and I, to cross the shorn field and stalk the sixteen acre wood for grey squirrels. It should be simple, shouldn't it? To cross a stubble field? Not for Mr Barnett, who stops to examine everything of interest. The tortoiseshell butterfly caterpillars munching on weeds. Their striped and hairy bodies warn the passing jay or rook that their flavour could be perilous. The badgers prints in the loamy soil, showing where Brock has hoovered up those huge black slugs and done the farmer a service last night. The mysterious jelly fungus on the fallen branch beneath the lone maple that stands in the field. It needs photographing, to enable identification, so out comes the camera. The lurcher glances at me with that air of frustration. We're meant to be hunting, boss!  Eventually we reach the wood and the dog slips in along the track and lies on his belly on cool, damp grass. I understand his relief. I'm already melting but rather than undo another button on my shirt, I do an extra one up. We're now in tick territory and in this weather they will be abundant, clinging to the ferns and briar leaves, waiting for a mammalian host. We move quietly through the forest, helped by a sumptuous damp layer of leaf mulch drenched by last nights deluge. There are only the windfall twigs to avoid and the dog cracks one before I do. My chance to return the icy stare and he glances back over his shoulder with a doleful apology. Back to the work in hand and the lurcher finds the enemy first, his radar dish ears zoning in on the scrabble of tiny paws. His nose points to a trunk some thirty yards off and I see the flick of a bottle brush tail snake around the slender bole until just its tip remains. Then even that withdraws. That 'look' again, from the hound. I had obviously been neglectful in my duty. When the grey appears on a branch, squatting, my rifle is slung back over my shoulder and I'm wiping sweat from my spectacles with a lens cloth. The panting lurcher is looking at me as though I'm 'gone out'. I feel like handing him the rifle and saying "Go on! You feckin' shoot it!" We move on. As we near the end of the path, about to emerge into the fields again, the dog stops .. bristling. I stop and scan the woods edge, then spot it. It's laid up, neck craned, watching me. I reach for the camera but that simple movement puts the young red stag to flight. A handsome sapling and one I'm sure I'll meet again. Dylan crawls under the bottom rail of the steel gate and I drop my rifle, safety catch on, against the gatepost. The game-bag is lowered gently to the other side and I clamber quietly over. As I recover the the rifle and shoulder the bag I note that the dog is transfixed on something, right paw dangling in a mark. I kneel alongside him, away from the gate now, and there is a rabbit just twenty yards away .. frozen. It's seen the dog and now, me. I raise the gun, sight up through the scope and all I see is a fugue, a blur. I pull my eye away to check the lens (which is clear) but that's enough movement to make the coney bolt. Dylan starts to lunge but I call him off quickly. "Nooo!" I'm still puzzled and, checking the safety is on, turn the gun around to look at the front lens of the scope. I nearly drop the gun. Sitting, legs akimbo across the 40mm lens, is a nursery web spider, which must have dropped into the lens as I crossed the gate. I flicked the little beastie out with a straw husk and sat back against the gate for a while. The lurcher came to lie alongside me in the shade. Jeez .. that rabbit was blessed. Saved by a spider, of all things.  But that's how Mother Nature rolls, doesn't she? I didn't shoot a damn thing this morning, but it didn't matter. Why? Because I will remember, to my dying day, the rabbit that was saved by a spider.

 

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Over Population .. A View From The Inside

Driving to work early this morning I witnessed a sight I have never seen before, despite my decade and a half working and living in the Norfolk Broads. In the distance the flock of large birds beat across the horizon from right to left and I assumed it was skein of geese. My road took me straight towards them and as I approached the bridge over the narrows at Filby Broad, they passed right over me just thirty feet above the X-Trail. I tried to count them, staggered by the number. It was a flock of cormorants, at least eighty strong, heading north towards the large open Broads of Hickling and Barton, no doubt. While used to seeing six to a dozen in the air together .. or gathered on bare lightning-struck trees along the rivers, I have never seen this amount at one time. I understand that a gathering of cormorants is called a colony or flight. Though I would venture another name. A trawl of cormorants. For the collective threat to the fish stocks on Norfolks waterways of this number of birds is considerable, though I doubt catastrophic. 

 

The problem for Phalacrocorax Carbo, a problem which it will never know or understand, is that (like the badger) its continued success as a species also nurtures a growing campaign of antipathy from the genus which can both protect it .. or subdue it. The view from homo sapiens, as always, is subjective. If you love wildlife that hunts efficiently, you'll love cormorants. It doesn't mean though, that you wouldn't control them if asked to. Let me qualify 'subjective'. If those eighty birds I saw this morning landed around the perimeter of Hickling Broad and spread themselves out to fish economically, no-one would give a hoot. Yet if just a quarter of that 'trawl' landed around a shallow, half-acre private fishery where fee paying anglers have struggled to sustain a sporting stock .. there will be calls for culls. Understandably. For this bird can dive to 10 metres and eat 2lb of fish stock a day. Now, let's take 'subjective' a little further? If you are the avian equivalent of a mink (and while soaring across the waterways of Norfolk) you see the choice between sitting on a dead branch, waiting for a passing perch .. or splashing down in an enclosed lake brimming with trout .. what would you do? From my perspective, the bird is just doing what it has evolved to do and equally the angler has just as much right to intervene as the gamekeeper does to stop the fox stealing his poults. Or the arable farmer requesting a cull on wood pigeons. It shouldn't need special licensing. The law should be simple. If the bird has chosen to feed from privately stocked water, it should forfeit its protection.

From cormorants to badgers, where a similar situation exists. The current  media attention surrounding potential badger culling due to the spread of bovine TB is mainly vested in the public perception that Brock the Badger is the ursine, father-like figure portrayed in those old fifties style books and cartoons. Like the cormorant mentioned earlier, which used to be slaughtered indiscriminately by our fore-fathers, modern wildlife legislation has drawn a cloak of protection around the badger which will only ever end in disaster. Before I make my case, let me state something clearly. I love to see badgers, as I love to see all British wildlife. Four years ago I was invited to undertake grey squirrel control with my air rifles on a wonderful 1000 acre old-money estate close to my home in Norfolk. Much of my Wildanglia blog is reported from there and the wildlife I have been able to photograph there has been pure privilege. In that first autumn, exploring the estate, I counted four badger setts. One was the largest I (personally) had ever seen. Last weekend, on a deliberate survey of the estate undertaken due to the amount of badger droppings I've encountered recently, I recorded fifteen distinctively different colonies. That largest sett has doubled in size. There are even small setts under the Hall, in the garden escarpment. The estate farms two cattle herds, yet there isn't a move among the estate staff to remove the incumbent badgers. So why are the badgers annoying me?  Because they are trashing the surrounding landscape with their delving and foraging. 

The estate rides are littered with badger scat .. unusual for a creature that tidies up after itself like a domestic cat (digging a scoop). Hare and rabbit runs have become wide paths. The low under-carriage of meles meles swiftly erodes the vegetation. Their paw prints are abundant around the muddy pools. Most of all though, it is their bullish hooliganism that I resent. The total disregard for habitat. They push over the pheasant feeders, uproot spring bulbs and bulldoze the newly planted saplings to get at the roots and sprigs. Old Brock (and his progeny) can vacuum a partridge nest in seconds. They will dig out a rabbit stop in minutes, devouring the kits .. though perhaps that's a bonus? They are clean animals, for sure. Someone asked me, only today, if I can scent badgers. I can't .. unlike the rank musk of fox which I can smell a hundred yards off. The badger is so meticulous in its domestic housekeeping that I have often recovered the bones and skulls of its dead dragged from the sett along with the old nesting materials. My concern on this estate is for the Old Hall itself. The tunnelling around here lends me to believe that I will motor up the drive one day to find that the whole structure has sunk into the surrounding escarpment. 

Like those cormorants, common sense says that there should be recourse, within the law, to balance an over-population of any species if the intention is honest. After all .. that's what Mother Nature does to us.

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Simply, Hunting

Those who know me well will testify that in recent months I've taken some significant steps to 'simplify' what was becoming a ridiculously complex lifestyle. I needed to eradicate much of the pressure which contributed to my decline in health over the past year or so. I've downsized my job, reduced some extra-curricular activities and given up smoking. I've also made a point of avoiding commitments or 'obligations' to undertake anything I really don't want to do. On the shooting front, I withdrew from my FAC hunting project because I wasn't enjoying the outcomes. I've taken a further step, though. I've stripped back my hunting to a very basic level and, boy .. am I enjoying it again!
 

Purists would probably expect that if I was looking to make hunting simple again, I must have reverted to hunting with one of my old spring guns? Yet I confess I haven't gone that basic. My delight with my new PCP carbine (the BSA Ultra SE) is documented elsewhere but let me explain why I choose a PCP as my shooting tool rather than a springer. I do still own and shoot spring rifles to get my eye back in and to discipline myself when I get the shooters 'yips'. If my breathing is faltering, my trigger finger faltering or I find myself neglecting to 'follow-through', I use sessions with a springer as 'therapy'. But I can't remember the last time I hunted with one? Two, maybe three years back? Sure, springers have traits that imply 'simplicity'. No external air source needed, low maintenance and a relatively cheap purchase price. Compared to a PCP though, they are primitive hunting tools. I'm currently using one of the cheapest (and by that I mean least costly, no reflection on quality) PCPs on the market. There are several makes now available at around £400 (therefore close to the price of a top-end springer). The advantages this little carbine gives over a springer are numerous for the hunter. No recoil (less exposure to inaccuracy), less noise (no spring 'crack'), no scope creep (caused by the recoil of a spring gun). It has a multi-shot magazine so I can re-load quickly and innocuously (little movement needed, often a giveaway when hunting). A featherweight rifle that I can tote around in one hand yet with an onboard air cylinder that can give me 50 shots from a full charge .. ample for a walkabout hunting session.

'Simplicity' in my hunting means even more to me, though, than choice of rifle. Simple means leaving at home the usual accumulation of gadgets and contraptions such as hides, nets and decoys that I've gathered over the years. Simple means halving the size of the game-bag  I carry and taking out all the comfort-toys and gizmos like range-finders, spinners or binoculars. Just a sparsely filled bag with some rubber eggs, a bird call, secateurs, spare pellets and a knife. Simple. Forget the wet-gear or insect repellent. Get wet or get bitten. Simple. Add a water bottle if it's hot, a flask of soup if it's cold. Simple also means going back to my early days as an airgun 'scribe', leaving behind the DSLR camera and lenses. I'm hunting, not making a BBC wildlife documentary. Now I'm just packing a top-end 14MP compact camera.. which is a massive improvement on the little 3MP camera which got me started in writing.

'Simple' means going out into the field and wood when it suits me, when I want to, with no particular commission in mind, no fixed agenda. No deadline. No target quarry species. Just mooching along the hedgerow or stalking up the margin. Just as I did as a young boy with a catapult. Simple means speculation and adventure, not knowing what will show around the next corner. It means sitting for a while in the shade, watching the wild world pass by. Listening to the thump of the rabbits paw, the chuckle of the approaching magpie, the sonorous song of the wood-pigeon, the harsh 'chack' of the jackdaw. Simple is squatting on a tree-stump with half an eye along the nettle strangled margin, waiting for the flutter of a stinger-top that betrays the emerging coney. Simple is looking down the heat-shimmering mirage of the field margin as the days warmth evaporates from the earth, as the rabbits slope out to browse around the yellow-tipped ragwort and purple loosestrife. Simple is pulling that little carbine to my shoulder, dis-engaging the safety catch, sighting up my target through my basic Hawke Map 6 reticule, breathing out gently and slipping the trigger. Simple is not worrying how many you shot, nor how many more you need to shoot. Simple is knowing you'll miss some .. yet you'll shoot more in future because you did. Failure is natures most accomplished teacher. Simple is not worrying if what you're doing is enough to satisfy thousands of readers. It's knowing that you're there, doing what you're doing because you, yourself, want to. If you're enjoying it, it will work through in your writing and your readers will enjoy it too.
 

 I went hunting this morning. With a simple little rifle. Shot a couple of rabbits and three grey squirrels. So, so simply.

 Copyright Ian Barnett 2013

The full version of this article, with photos, can be read in Airgun Shooter, published by Blaze Publishing Ltd.

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