Private Thoughts from a Small Shoot E-Book

Laurence Catlow

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 317

Beschreibung

Set against the dramatic backdrop of the Pennines, Catlow's shooting diary records his year as an amateur pheasant rearer, gamekeeper, forester, dog-handler and all-round shooting enthusiast. But he also records his thoughts as he goes around his small shoot: his views on the right to roam, on why he loves the birds he shoots, his wine cellar, his other sporting interests. He airs his opinions on subjects as diverse as sport and the nanny state, game cookery, friendship, disobedient dogs and beloved hats. Interspersed with pheasant shooting are magical evenings duck flighting and expeditions rabbit shooting. He controls vermin such as mink, crows and foxes - all familiar activities to those who run small shoots. Catlow is shooting's most articulate exponent and this is an intelligent, funny and thought-provoking book.

Leseprobe

PRIVATE THOUGHTS FROM A SMALL SHOOT

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 July

Chapter 2 August

Chapter 3 September

Chapter 4 October

Chapter 5 November

Chapter 6 December

Chapter 7 January

Chapter 8 February

CHAPTER ONE

JULY

Right to roam; my beautiful pheasant shoot; Catlow the fisherman; shooting experience; appraising the dogs

Not long ago – it was early in June and the sun was shining – I spent the afternoon wandering round my little farm. There are just over fifty acres of it and, as far as I am concerned, it is the centre of the world, lying up there on the edge of the Pennines not far from a little village called Brough. There are just over fifty acres of it, with perhaps another thirty where I have permission to go exploring with my dogs and my gun; but it is those fifty acres that really matter to me. They are all mine, those fifty acres are; they are my kingdom, my pride and my joy; they are my pheasant shoot, and it does not bother me a fig that fifty acres are too few for anything but a very rough and ready sort of pheasant shoot. They are a place for me and for my dogs and for my friends; we are all perfectly content with a rough and ready sort of pheasant shoot; they are a private place and I rejoice that there is no right of way over a single square inch of any one of my fifty acres.

I do not want half the world tramping over my little kingdom. I want most people nowhere near it. I want to share it with just a few kindred spirits; and so when spirits not on the list suggest to me that this is an exclusive and selfish attitude, I suggest to them that they should grant me unconfined access to their gardens and their garages and their bedrooms. They always tell me that their garages and their gardens, not to mention their bedrooms, are a different matter altogether. I cannot see how; private property, it seems to me, is private property, whether or not it is enclosed by a neatly clipped privet hedge or thickly carpeted or sheltered from the elements by four walls and a slated roof. But I let the matter drop, happy to leave other men in unchallenged possession of their little kingdoms, as long as they, however grudgingly, are willing to leave me in freedom to enjoy the seclusion of my own.

I did not start these pages with the intention of announcing to the nation that, with very few exceptions, it is unwelcome on my fifty acres. I intended to celebrate rather than to exclude: to celebrate the loveliness of my fifty acres and to revel in their beauty. The other day they looked very beautiful indeed. The meadow was full of waving grass and the grass was full of bright flowers, of orchids and yellow rattle, of buttercups and tall daisies, of clover and red sorrel and purple splashes of bistort. I was walking along the edge of the meadow and, above me on the left, all the young ashes and oaks and hazels and wild cherries that I planted three years ago were waving their leaves above the tops of their tubes; and the aspen saplings, which sprang up everywhere on the Rise as soon as it was fenced off, the aspens were all swaying and shining in the breeze and the bright light.

At the top of the Rise there is an old hedge of holly and hazel, of ash and hawthorn; there is a ditch in the shadow of this hedge, choked with rushes and with rough grass. As I walked along the edge of the meadow the other day, looking up towards the line of the hedge, briefly my mind wandered away from summer, wandering off to frosty mornings in December and to the pheasants that, come next winter, will surely spring from the ditch where they love to hide, flying high over the meadow in search of shelter on Beck. Bank Sometimes they climb all the way and are fine birds when they cross the guns.

My beck is really called a sike. There are many sikes in this part of Cumbria and, should you be interested in such things, the dictionary tells me that the word is from the old Norse. My beck even has a name; it is called Powbrand Sike and it flows straight down the steep little valley that forms the heart of my shoot; then, when my valley begins to spread itself, the sike slants across the top of the meadow, dividing the flat land where the hay grows from the rough and rising ground on the southern side; it turns against a high bank, from the top of which an old oak leans way out over the water. Then the stream splits, forming a little island where a few straggling gorse bushes have decided to grow; then it turns again and flows over my boundary towards its junction with the Bela about a mile away.

The other day the beck was full and clear, with wild roses bending over the water and spilling their white petals into the stream. Beck Bank is densely overgrown with hawthorns and brambles and impenetrable thickets of blackthorn. On the slope there are a few ashes and a few taller oaks; up on top, just over the fence that marks the limit of my land, rise three or four noble Scots pines and a line of tall, silver-trunked beeches.

Beck Bank is a problem. There is a small stand of Douglas firs at its lower and flatter end on the edge of the water, with a planting of larches at its eastern limit above the meadow gate. My pheasants love the Douglas firs and the larches and the tangled cover all over the slope. They also love to fly the wrong way when flushed, or to run out at the top corner in order to avoid being flushed at all. I have plans for the coming season, but I shall wait to explain them until the season has moved a little nearer. The other day there was a blackcap singing somewhere in the hawthorns on Beck Bank; there was a woodpecker drumming in the firs and a cock pheasant shouting from the edge of the larches.

I went through the meadow gate, past the hedge where we eat our sandwiches on shooting days, sitting there with perhaps a dozen pheasants and a few rabbits lying somewhere near us on the bank, with our dogs waiting to be rewarded for their work in the morning: for those four cocks that Austin’s Meg put over the guns back in the wood, for the runner that my Merlin brought in at last when we had all decided that it would never be found, for pheasants and rabbits flushed from spiky jungles of gorse, from dense and tearing clumps of thorns and brambles, from rush-choked ditches and from all those matted and tangled places in which my shoot abounds.

I went through the gate and walked along the bottom of the steep bank of gorse that rises on the left. The other day the bank was still yellow with flowers. It makes two little drives on pheasant days; one is called the Whins, the other the Gutter: a long, deep ditch, thick with gorse from top to bottom, that runs down to the sike from my northern boundary. Sometimes, especially during hard weather, they are productive little drives; there are also days when they do not put a single pheasant into the sky. There was one morning last season when the Gutter was full of birds, which rose into a bullying wind that swept them high over the sike. Not many of them fell.

I did not go up through the gorse the other day. I crossed the sike just in front of the patch of flat ground that is the best place for a standing gun when the dogs are busy on Beck Bank. It is right on the edge of the water, and it is the sound of water that you hear as you stand there waiting, until suddenly there is a pheasant above you in the sky and there is barely time for you to mount your gun. I crossed the sike, remembering the four birds I shot there on my November shoot last year; then I walked up the open ground of Pheasant Hill where, seeing a few primroses still in bloom, I forgot about last November and gave myself over to the pleasures of June. There were two buzzards soaring high above me, mewing and circling on their broad wings; they make me nervous when my pens are full of poults, but at all other times I enjoy their presence over my land. Owls often nest in the wood and sometimes a pair of sparrow hawks; owls and sparrow hawks have helped themselves to more of my poults than the buzzards have ever done.

The old pen is up the hill and just inside the trees. I went there to inspect the wire and decide how much of it needed replacing. The pen has been there for eight years now; it is on a slope, and the wire on the bottom side, as the weight of earth and stones and rotting leaves builds up behind it, is beginning to bulge and tear. Next year may be the time to rebuild it; this year I think an afternoon’s work, full of sweat and midges, will be enough to make it secure again.

After deciding this I sat in the sunshine above the pen and smoked for five minutes; I watched a red squirrel bound away from me through the trees; briefly I looked forward to those August days that will be spent watering and feeding birds, hanging hoppers and filling them, setting and checking my traps, lying in ambush for the crows that will start descending from the sky in black hordes to stuff themselves on my grain. There is plenty to be done at High Park in August; but it is always good to rest for a while at the end of another afternoon’s work, lying back in the sun and listening to the sound of gorse pods popping in the August heat.

I did not get round all my fifty acres the other day; I walked along my top ground above the wood, a long strip of open land between the edge of the trees and the boundary fence, rushy land with dense tangles of briars and haws and brambles. This is where my best pheasants rise. Merlin flushes them from the rushes and the brambles; some fly over the boundary fence and are crossing targets for my gun. These are just ordinary birds, but others swing to the right and fly over the steep sides of the wood, high over the sike where my friends are waiting with their boots in running water. They are fine fast birds and you must get onto them very quickly.

I wandered into the wood itself, where willow warblers and wrens and chaffinches were singing away. My wood has a name as well as my sike; it is called Brogden’s Plantation, and I have no idea who Brogden was or if it was he who planted it. To my eyes it does not look like a plantation at all, but like a little remnant of the wild wood; it is mostly hazel and birch, with a few oaks and ashes and dead elms down by the water. It was coppiced once and I should like to coppice it again; but there are sheep in the wood until August and, although they avoid the steeper parts – which means most of it – and although they browse mostly on the edges, you cannot coppice a wood where sheep roam. I cannot afford to fence off the wood and so the sheep will stay until I have turned into a rich man. Given the presence of the sheep there is a surprising amount of cover in Brogden’s Plantation.

As I walked through my wood the other day I saw a brood of pheasants scampering ahead of me to take shelter in the rushes. I counted seven or eight of them and wondered how many would survive into the coming winter. Reaching my eastern boundary I went down along the rickety fence, through the hazels and the birches, down to the sike and the deep shadows at the bottom of the slope. I began to follow the stream back though the wood, squelching through the marshy land in the narrow bottom, skirting the rotting trunks of fallen elms, watching a few rabbits running ahead of me and a pigeon or two clattering from the trees.

Down in the bottom of the wood in high summer, down there by the sike, it is always damp and green and full of shadows; there are ferns on the edge of the water and there is moss on the fallen trunks and branches and on all the rotting stumps; but even in high summer I never walk there beneath the dense cover of the leaves without thinking of the same place in pheasant time, in November and, better still, in December and January, when all the trees are bare except for those clusters of shrivelled brown leaves hanging from the branches of oaks, and for those polished and pointed green leaves on the hollies, except for these and the twining masses of ivy round so many of the birches; and though it may be June with a hot sun shining above the leaves, I think of frost sharp on the winter air and deep in the cold ground, I think of pheasants crouching in piles of brash and in the dense thickets of gorse that extend along the edge of the trees on top of the valley’s northern slope; my mind’s eye sees dogs hunting up and down the slope, with guns waiting on the edge of the sike, until all at once the first pheasant comes gliding silently over the trees. This little drive is called North Bank and it is, I think, the most dependable drive on my little shoot.

I did not go up to the high ground of my faraway, up above the gorse to the rushes where the rabbits squat. Occasionally we find a hare there as well, but, although I love the rich flavour of their flesh, hares are now a rare presence on my ground and they are no longer shot. I left the Ten Acre unvisited and the Middle Pasture below it and the Stackhole beyond; they are all rushy fields and they are always worth a walk on shooting days; rabbits are their usual contribution to the bag, but there is often a pheasant or two and sometimes a woodcock, with more rarely a snipe from the marshy ground in the Stackhole below the spring.

I did not even go up to the New Pen in the fenced-off strip above the Whins, although mention of it reminds me of a December pheasant that rose from the edge of the wire and kept rising until he had flown over four standing guns, too high and too fast for all four of them; and the sun was shining on him as he flew and it was very beautiful to see. Last season was the first with the New Pen; but already I have learned from experience and I shall be surprised if, during the coming season, I cannot exploit its presence more successfully. After the first shoot or two I think the strip to which it belongs will be better driven with walking guns ten yards below the fence rather than with standing guns waiting down below the gorse on the edge of the sike.

I left the New Pen unvisited and came back down to the sike through a gap in the gorse, seeing at once that the rides we cut two or three years ago now need clearing again, and that both the Whins and the Gutter would benefit from more brutal and extensive assault with loppers and strimmers and saws. They would still hold plenty of birds and, with more gaps and clearings in the gorse, I fancy our dogs would manage to put more of them onto the wing. I did not promise to get it all done this summer, though I told myself that it would be a good idea to make a start. The rides, at least, must be made easily passable again. Next Lent, I decided, would be the time for a really savage attack; for gorse, as you probably know – unless you set fire to it and burn it to the ground – gorse resists any attempt to take back even a portion of the land it has claimed for itself; it resents all efforts at control or management; it pricks and pierces the man who would hack it down; it scratches and tears him, so that every yard, every foot of progress exacts its sharp price of suffering and pain; and it leaves its spikes in gloves and stockings and flesh, waiting there to wound the enemy when he thinks the day’s struggle is at last over; there is something penitential about time spent in intimate contact with gorse; it is an ideal activity for Lent.

I sat down when I came back to the water, somewhat relieved that I had just postponed any serious gorse management for almost a year. I sat down, lit my pipe and enjoyed the feel of the summer sun and the sight of a clump of ragged robin, with pink flowers waving and straggling on their stalks above a patch of boggy ground. I rarely go to High Park without sitting for a few minutes and marvelling at the sequence of events that first brought me there and then, three or four years later, made me the owner of the place. It might so easily never have happened; I might have missed all the joy that has come to me from those fifty acres of rough ground. Sometimes I cannot believe that it was an accident; sometimes I feel sure that God always intended me to be a landowner; sometimes I fancy that, from all eternity, he has been planning High Park as the place that would some day turn into my little portion of heaven upon earth.

Sitting by the sike the other day, and marvelling all over again at the fact that the fields all round me were mine, sitting there and drifting between hope and memory and present contentment, sitting there with vague schemes of improvement, with pleasant memories of past seasons and with the immediate delight of the sights on every side of me, sitting there quietly and smoking, I felt – as I so often feel – all the power of the hold that High Park has taken on my heart in the course of the last ten years. And my inability to get you round fifty acres of land without stopping every few minutes to sit and smoke or stand and stare, without turning aside into a stream of memory and association and reflection, this incapacity of mine has helped me to realise all over again why I so love the place.

It is beyond doubt very beautiful, but there is so much more than beauty there; for I can never look at any part of it without seeing much more than my eyes are showing me; always there is some recollection from last winter or from five seasons ago, perhaps even from last week; and I walk every inch of it with plans for the future as well as with these memories from the past. Next year there are spruces and larches to plant on either side of the new pen; there will be Scots pines too for the strip that runs along the top of Middle Pasture; and the ditch that runs down its west side must sooner or later be fenced off and planted up and turned into another little drive.

At High Park, just as on the rivers that I have fished for so many years, there is a richness of association that I find nowhere else, not even in places that I have known much longer or in places where I spend more time. High Park is very special because I own it and am thus free to shape and change and to involve myself more deeply, more powerfully in its earth and in its landscape; but it seems to me, more generally, that a sportsman’s places, which seep out moods and images and memories, become in a very special way a part of himself, and continually they are enriching both themselves and the man who loves them with the growing deposit of experience. It is like the accumulation of leaf-mould beneath the trees. It is like this on the Eden and the Wharfe as well as at High Park. And in these places, in these sacred little corners of the world, we find a blend and an intensity of feelings that belongs to them alone; we find excitement and peace at the same time; often we feel a deep and thankful contentment; sometimes we are lost in praise; there are times when our pleasure in these places is exuberant; there are calmer and more thoughtful times. We share these places with our friends; we spend long hours in them by ourselves. They are the places where we go to disentangle ourselves from the clutter of our surrounding lives; we go to them to free and to find ourselves and we do this in the name of sport; but what we call sport is properly a sort of ritual of praise, a sort of reverent acknowledgment of the sustaining beauty and all the richness of the created world.

If, by the way, these thoughts seem to you to be windy and empty or tedious thoughts, then you will loathe this book, for it will be full of thoughts along similar lines, though there will be dogs in between, dogs and pheasants and ducks and rabbits and probably a few woodcock. There will be late summer at High Park, followed by the autumn and the winter and the sport that belongs to them. I have done a very poor job of introducing you to my little kingdom; you will get to know it much better in the months ahead, and some of you may know something of it already from earlier books and from my articles in Shooting Times. Meanwhile I had better attempt to introduce myself, although it is again possible that you may already have met me in earlier writings either as a trout fisher or as a shooting man.

If you have met the fisher you will know that he is not of the sort who fills his bag whenever he goes to the river, the sort who casts with unerring precision and delicacy, who sees and identifies the fly on the water, selects an appropriate and beautifully tied artificial from one of his well-ordered boxes, flicks it over the nose of an unsuspecting two-pounder, promptly brings up the two-pounder and then calmly drives home the hook, playing the trout thus attached to his line with an unruffled judgment and with a perfect application of pressure, until it admits that it has met its master, turns on its side and is drawn smoothly over the net. There are days when I return from the river feeling moderately pleased with myself; there are just as many days when I creep home with an empty bag; after losing the only trout I hooked because I caught my rod in an overhanging branch; after putting down fish after fish with bungled casts or a thoughtless choice of fly; after spending more time rescuing my flies from alders and willows than putting them onto the water; after failing to cope with a downstream wind; after falling in twice and tearing my waders on a rusty strand of barbed wire; after fishing, in short, like a man who has learned nothing since the day forty years ago when he first held a fly rod in his hand.

I am not an expert fisher and I am most certainly not an expert shot. My experience as a shooting man, moreover, is limited. Over the years I have done a bit of wildfowling, but only with small rewards and I confess that, in general, I found it cold and uncomfortable. I have never shot a goose, although I can remember the end of an inland flight when the moonlight was suddenly filled with honking; and then a skein of Canadas came low over the pond where we were crouching in the hope of a last duck or two. Geese can never have offered a shooter an easier target, but my surprise and excitement got the better of me and I went home at the end of it all with only a brace of mallard to hang in the shed where my game waits until it is time for me to get it ready for the freezer or the table.

Many of you will have killed more pigeon in a single day than I have managed in more than thirty years. My experience of partridges is small and I have no experience at all of shooting abroad. I love sitting in a grouse butt; unfortunately I do it so infrequently that, on those rare and grand occasions when I find myself peering out expectantly over the heather, I also find that I can hit very few of the birds that some instinct for self-preservation sends skimming over the heather in the direction of my gun. I am much more likely to shoot a duck as it flights into a grey pond on the edge of the darkness, but the ponds where I sit waiting for them, with old Merlin at my side, rarely bring in more than a dozen or so mallard and sometimes a few teal. Whenever I leave one of my ponds with as many as four duck in the bag I feel very happy indeed; and, incidentally, I think that flighting duck, although I do it on a very modest scale, is perhaps my favourite form of sport with the gun.

I suppose I kill twenty or thirty rabbits in the course of an average year. I probably miss as many as I kill, which is a pity because the taste of rabbit-flesh is something of which I never grow weary (it is, by the way, the perfect accompaniment for the subtle delights of Chinon from a good year). Most winters bring at least a handful of woodcock to my gun (only burgundy will do for woodcock, and it should be the best in your cellar); some winters bring a few snipe (burgundy again), but most shooting days are pheasant days, spent at High Park or on the land rented by my syndicate near Settle, with perhaps three or four guest days on somewhat grander shoots.

My own days are small days and it is a very rare day that discharges more than twenty cartridges from my gun; if half of those twenty shots bring a pheasant falling from the sky, I return home convinced that I am a mighty sportsman, and usually then I uncork something special to turn my dinner into a celebration; something special almost certainly means claret since, at the end of pheasant-days, I like to honour my quarry by eating it and by toasting both the splendour of its flight and the subtle richness of its flesh. It will, of course, be a pheasant from an earlier shoot: one that has hung in the shed for a week or ten days before being turned into food.

Occasionally I take a little practice with clay birds, but it has yet to teach me why, on some days in the field, I can hit pheasants with a fair degree of confidence, even high and curling ones, whereas on other days even undemanding birds fly on their way without a care in the world, serenely unaware that the recent sound of gunfire was, in the mind of the man standing below them with the gun, intended to be accompanied by their sudden descent from the sky. I should like to claim that I am an instinctive shot; but your instinctive shot is properly one whose instinct gets it consistently right. The truth is that I am something much less impressive; I am your inconsistent, your plain average shot, and there you more or less have it.

You will not, if you come shooting with me in this book, read of exploits to set beside those of Lords Ripon and Walsingham. There will be very few right-and-lefts (is this the correct from of the plural?) and you are unlikely to count up dead pheasants in hundreds at the end of a day’s sport. You will join a few friends, sitting under a hedge at midday, chewing a few sandwiches and pies, drinking a tot of whisky and discussing how a lunchtime bag of six birds can somehow be made to reach double figures in the course of the afternoon.

As well as my human friends you will often meet two dogs. They are both springers and one of them is the apple of his master’s eye. He is liver and white, big and long-backed, and at nine he is just beginning to show the first signs of age and stiffness. He is called Merlin and I have already mentioned him. He was fully trained when I bought him just under eight years ago and he is rather less than half trained now. He runs into shot, though usually only if the shot has found its target; sometimes he sets off in pursuit of a particularly tempting rabbit, and he often pegs pheasants that are slow to get onto the wing; but still, in spite of his years, he hunts all day and is eager for more at the end of it all; gorse is his speciality, and the thicker and sharper it is the more he likes it, plunging in wildly to flush out any pheasants that have gone on retreat into its darkest and densest corners. He is a great hunter, a great retriever and, as long as he has a lead round his neck, an exemplary peg dog.

Digger is the second of my spaniels, three years younger than Merlin, black and white with ears already greying. He is not a model spaniel and, though his name is Digger – more properly Digby – I often curse him as the Prince of Darkness or the Hound of Hell, especially when he disappears into the gorse and, deaf to the roaring of my voice and the shrieking of my whistle, starts flushing birds hundreds of yards away from the guns. There are times when I feel sure that I hate him and he never goes with me to other men’s shoots.

You will meet my friends’ dogs too, with their many virtues and their occasional failings; you will meet the boys who help me at High Park. They will be planting trees or mending pheasant pens or dragging sacks of wheat to inaccessible hoppers while I sit smoking down by the sike; sometimes they will be shooting with me as a reward for their help; they will probably be shooting straighter than their host. You will not, by the way, be expected to spend any time in my classroom and I promise never to start holding forth about my life as a schoolmaster. Three or four boys who love shooting will be virtually the only reminder that the author of this book earns his daily crust in front of a blackboard.

I cannot think of anything else to say as an introduction to the themes and the characters of this book, except perhaps to claim in its recommendation that it is very unlikely to make you feel jealous. If you read what follows you will almost certainly be able to tell yourself that you enjoy better sport than I do, and that you are a better amateur keeper, a better shot and a better dog-handler than at least one person in the world. I shall, of course, be very happy to receive letters of advice and sympathy, or even invitations to shoot famous marshes, coverts or moors. If you have read this book, then you will, at least, know more or less what to expect when I turn up.

CHAPTER TWO

AUGUST

Releasing poults; the first fortnight; August dreams and nightmares; leisurely summer duties; feather pecking; thoughts about hunting and the power of Mr Average

My shooting year starts in August. It does not start on the Glorious Twelfth, with me sitting somewhere high in the Pennine sunshine, sitting or leaning there with the contents of a box of cartridges laid out for easy access on the turf top of my butt, waiting there with my gun still broken and placed next to that line of neatly paired cartridges, sitting there in a hum of summer flies and waiting in that distinctive mood of nervous expectation that comes to all occasional grouse shooters at such times, sitting and waiting and surrounded by heather while, a long way in front of me, the drive is prepared and energetic young beaters and arthritic old flankers find their positions on the moor and then, with insistent bawling from the keepers to hold the line or move forward on the left or slow down on the right, they begin their advance towards the butts.

It may be that, some time in August, I shall form part of such a scene, but it will not be the start of my shooting year, which happens on the first of the month – or as near to it as the weather allows – with the arrival at High Park of one hundred and fifty pheasant poults. Much has already been done to prepare for their coming; food and water have been brought to the pens; wire has been checked and patched; the electric fences have been put in working order; drinkers and hoppers have been cleaned and filled. There will also have been jobs to do in earlier months of the year; gorse will have been hacked; trees will have been planted, new cover will have been cut and new fences may have excluded the sheep from another acre or two of my land. The arrival of my poults is not the beginning of my work; but it is an important occasion and it seems like a new beginning, seems like the start of my shooting year.

I buy my poults at eight weeks old and I have their flight feathers pulled. There is a reason for both the advanced age of my poults and their temporary inability to fly. In July, as soon as term ends, I spend a week or more trying to catch trout; then I head North and spend a fortnight staggering up and down Scottish mountains, raising my stick at any grouse that flush from the heather and invariably concluding that my aim was true. July is my holiday month. In August I devote myself to one hundred and fifty pheasant poults. I buy them at eight weeks – rather than the more usual six – because the beginning of August is a little late for release if you want your birds ready by early November. If you are buying only one hundred and fifty poults, the additional expense scarcely matters; you can justify it, anyway, by telling yourself that older birds are somewhat less likely to fall sick in the release pens; I also tell myself that I only have a month or five weeks for the main business of release; once term starts I can no longer be at High Park every day. But if all goes well and if, by the beginning of school, there are still almost one hundred and fifty pheasant poults in the vicinity of my pens, they will by then be thirteen weeks old and at least half capable of looking after themselves; and so I can open up the pens, if they are not already open; I can wish my poults well and, unless disaster strikes, which will almost certainly be in the shape of a fox, I can come out to check on their progress, to move and to fill hoppers and to harass crows, just two or three times a week. Disaster has passed me by in the last three or four seasons and I hope to God it will spare me again this year.

The smallness of my shoot is the reason for the pulled flight-feathers. I want my birds in the pens for their first three weeks at High Park, not fluttering over the wire and then hopping over my boundaries the day after their arrival. I want them to settle down, to grow used to their pens, learning to think of them as home and perhaps even falling half in love with them. The problem with this prolonged confinement is that it encourages feather-pecking, but the pens are big enough for it to remain a minor problem. I think the pulled flight-feathers are a good idea.