anser2

Wildfowling is as easy or as hard as the wildfowler wants to make it , but what has changed has been the wildfowler. When I was a teenager I often used to cycle 10 miles from my parent's house to Kings Lynn marsh for the morning flight, followed by a tide flight and then curled up in a bin liner to sleep in a sheltered spot on the seawall until the evening followed by a 10 mile ride back. And do this for a week at a time. Today as an OAP at least I have a car to drive down for a flight on my N Norfolk marsh. But how many of today's young fowlers would cycle 20 miles a day for a flight. Very few I suspect. Today's many young fowlers want their shooting handed to them on a plate, to be shown the best spots , how to get to them. In contrast, I learned most of my wildfowling alone, watching the birds and learning the marsh. But the sport of wildfowling hs a problem. Many of today's young wildfowlers want instant success and if they do not get it move to another shooting sport, perhaps pigeon shooting or leave shooting altogether. And without those youngsters, the future of the sport is under threat. We need the numbers to influence BASC and stand up against bird protectionists. Of course, geese have always been an important part of wildfowling, but with the main quarry populations rapidly increasing they have lost much of the magic that used to surround them. In my teens, I might manage half a dozen pinks in a good season. Every shot at the great birds was remembered and successes treasured. Today too many shoot many times that in a single flight and regard geese as little more than a pest they have no respect for. As the older generation of fowlers pass on to the great marsh in the sky the morals of many of today's fowlers are, to say the least questionable. Many aspects of the sport have become better, better decoys, reliable ammunition, good guns, quality clothing the old timers could only dream of. Access to fowling grounds via a club is a little harder in England and Wales, but a fowlers mobility has improved greatly. However, with those improvements have come with a cost. My shooting rent and club fees is well over £500 a season, something I could not have afforded as a youngster when it cost me £7.00 to join my first club. I can remember knocking on the door of Kings Lynn club sectary one morning, asking to join, paying the fee and I was in. As simple as that. No waiting lists, interviews, probations or tests. Its a lot harder for youngsters today, but perhaps that's not a bad thing with a reduced quarry list and health and safety to bear in mind. But on the bright side 50 years ago many fowlers doubted the sport would still exist today, but at least in my area most of the local clubs have bulging memberships and some waiting lists and for the future, the sport looks like continuing for some time yet.

How did the EU put a stop to it? Several of my local farms grow both arable and keep livestock , cattle and sheep, but they are the exception. What has been happening for years is that East Anglia is more economical ground for growing arable crops ( richer soils ) as a whole while Western England and Wales is better ground ( poorer soils and wetter ) for grass and livestock farming. Nothing to do with the EU, simple farm economics.

Still ask and fill in the application form and send it in by post with a covering letter if needed about you not being in the country until August. I presume you have a shotgun cert. If not then there will be problems.

I would try to get into a club as soon as possible as many will have selected their new members by August. As for the dog, you say its 4 years old so it should show fairly quickly if its got a retrieving instinct. If It's had no shooting experience do not expact a perfectly behaved dog at that age , but as long as it retrieves birds , is happy to swim, and walks to heel on a lead it will be useful. As for the finer touches of a wildfowling it will soon pick them up once its in use , but be prepared to teather the dog between retrieves while you are shooting as its likely to run in , but then few wildfowling dogs don't. Do not hang about , get your application form in as soon as possible, and try to get to know a few members via meetings.

As its clear, you do not believe anything that you do not see with your own eyes I suggest you do an experiment yourself. Get your group of mallard and allow them access to small amounts to lead pellets ( do not force feed them ) and see how many you have alive. I spent hours , no more like days gathering dozen papers on lead poisoning in birds and posted the links on here . So if you cant be bothered to look for them that is your loss as I am not going to run through that again. As for the LAG I have never read their report or quoted from it. The whole report from start to finish was at fault with a bias input from the WWT and closed ears from the shooting community. Doomed before it even started. To compaire, the small amounts of lead found in potatoes with the amount of lead found in lead pellets is just plain stuped. Its a simple fact lead shot poisons birds and I challenge you to prove that wrong !!!!!

In the open countryside, I would not worry about them. The hedge will soon recover. I once saw a 80 acre oak wood defoliated , but the next year you would never have guessed it had happened.

Do a check on this site. I spent hours digging them out a few years ago and provided links.

She had all the basic training before i got her except water work. But I am putting that right now. She loves water until she gets out of her depth and then does the typical panic dog paddle until her feet touch bottom again. She just needs more experience in water. One good sign, she has made a bit of a hash of picking up a dummy in water about 2 feet deep, treading on it with her paws , but on her last 2 retrieves she put her head well under water and grabbed the dummy before it resurfaced. I usually have to teach a dog to pick up a dummy from underwater with a weighted dummy in shallow water, but this looks like being unnecessary with Sandy.

I am not advocating feeding mallard lead shot. However, it takes just one lead pellet to kill a duck, just one and I can say that from practical experience from keeping wild duck in captivity. My boss shot a squirrel from a branch over one of our ponds. Most of the pellets would have passed well over the duck pens and only a few that bounced off the branch would have found their way into the water below. Within days we had a number of sick ducks and all were dead in a week. An autopsy showed each had swallowed between one and three pellets. So any one who claims the risk is slight it talking rubbish. I know of a wet field where light shooting took place, mainly for snipe. Later it was decided to dig ponds for a wildfowl collections, but the project had to be abandoned due to poisoning of waterfowl from lead pellets. A similar thing happened in the early days of Slimbridge In the USA before lead was banned, it was estimated from sampling dead birds over 5% of duck died from lead poisoning. The Scotish situation is a farce. How can anyone prove any shot duck were shot over a dry field or a wetland. Unless you are watching the shooting taking place its impossible. Just because the land is not wet it does not mean lead pellets are not eaten by birds> Work done in the USA has shown a wide range of birds have died from lead pellet poisoning. LEAD PELLETS POSION. FULL STOP. But even more toxic than lead.

I do not know how many times I have posted this over the years, but lead shot poisons waterfowl. Full stop. If anyone does not believe this rase a few mallard this spring and scatter a few lead pellets in their pond and see how many you have alive after a month. I can tell you now. , None. All will be dead, poisoned by the lead.

First cuckoo in Norflok this spring on April 30th, house martins on the 20th and today a willow warbler building a nest in the garden nettle patch today. A first for the garden.

Saw my first House martins on April 20th and after the first swallow sighting on the 6th more on the 13th. 20th and almost daily for the last week. A light passage of swallows passing west along the N Norfolk coast yesterday for several hours. No big numbers yet though and yet to see a swift.

Gamebore already market felt wads for steel shells - Silver Steel-. Got a box , but never got around to using them. Saving them in case I am on a driven day with a duck drive. With the push to keep plastic out of the environment sooner or later, we will have to have them for wildfowling cartridges.

I am afraid that when you provide a feed for song birds , in turn you also provide a feed for the local raptors. It certainly livens up my garden when a sparowhawk visits , but another way of looking at it in an average year a blue tit fledges 10 young , without sparrowhawks those 12 birds would produce 120 young assuming there were equal numbers of males and females the following spring numbers would increase to 660 , and without winter losses and predation the original pair would produce around 3 million young in less than a decade. After year 6 old age would start to creep in. So Thank god for sparrowhawks or we would all be wading about knee deep in blue tits. I know this would never happen in the real world , but it does show the role of predators in keeping numbers down.

Adverts on TV must work or firms would not spend thousands of pounds , but its very, very rare they work on me. Or maybe they never cover products that have any interest for me, though being single I do use the products many housewives also use , food , cleaning products ect. If I am looking for something small adds in magazines are a far more effective way of catching my attention. What does annoy me a little is when an advert appears and at the end of it you have no idea what product it was supposed to be promoting? Seems a big waste of money and my time waiting for the program I am watching to come on.

Steve it hurts when you lose a dog and we all cope with in our own way. For me getting a new dog as soon as possible helps and its surprising how quickly I transfer my affections. I never forget the old girls and even now years later I greatly miss my old golden retriever, Penny , but a new dog eases things.. I have to confess I found it impossible to resist a few dummies with Sandy and she passed with flying colours. After a few single retrieves, I tried a couple of doubles and she again had no problems remembering where they fell and then I did something that perhaps I should not. I dropped 2 dummies side by side and we walked on for 100 yards before sending her. They were easy for her to see, but I wanted to see her reaction when confronted with 2 dummies as many dogs become confused with several birds down dashing from one to the other and making quite a hash of the retrieves. Sandy raced for the first and without hesitation picked it up ignoring the other dummy 3 feet away and dashed back and sat beside me offering the dummy to me. I took it from her and let her catch her breath for a moment and sent her for the second which again retrieved with no problems. Then back to the more mundane training of sit and stay. She switches into a higher gear when retrieving wanting to please me, holding the dummy high and she gives it to me, I do not take it from her. She then sits her ars* tight on the ground staring at my eyes as if to say " yes sir, was that right sir, what can I do next sir". Beginning to think I have a little cracker here. A few minor things need sorting. She does not like friends dogs getting too close to me , though accepts my old dog doing so and I can't trust her if there is food human or dog food within reach. She could eat for England and bolts her meals in seconds. But I guess that's a result from being a kennel dog where if she hesitates another dog will take her food. I introduced her to water too today , just paddling about in a few inches on a ford in the river. She splashed about and enjoyed it and once with no biding from me went out to the deeper water , where she had a few typical inexperienced dog paddles before turning back to shallow water . Yesterday I visited a friend and she mixed with his 12 month lab , but she seemed to have no idea what playing was and quickly returned to my side while my older dog Meg and my friend's dog had a whale of a time. Sandy after a quick sniff quickly returned to my side and watched from a distance seeming more interested in humans than other dogs. I cant take credit for much of her work as she was part trained when I bought her, but she is coping very with the new challenges I give her and most of the work needed is to smooth off a few rough edges and finish off her training with a bit of polish. Though she is going to need the experience of real wildfowling which I cant give her this time of year I am sure she will be useful when the season starts. I will be slowing things down for a while, back to the basic stuff for reinforcement sit, stay, heel, but only having had her for a week, I have stretched her and she has coped well.

The book is finished, but a few copywrite permission complications with a couple of small sections taken from some of my magazine articles, house hunting and a lot of other things going on in my life at the moment its taken a back seat. I will aim to get it to market by Christmas.

Thanks Marshman, good to be back. It is my old problem with Pigeon Watch where it will not accept my password and will not let me change it for months and then suddenly all works again. Do not be surprised if I vanish again in a few weeks. I will be down your way this week , my house hunting goes on. It is proving hard to find a place suitable for me and the dogs, close to a town , but still in the countryside and not too far from my shooting.

I nearly did not post this after reading about Steves recent loss , but the cycle continues and in time you look forward to a new dog and new adventures to come. My old black lab Meg will be 13 years old this coming season and most wildfowling will be beyond her soon , though she will have the odd easy day in a pigeon hide . Two years ago I got a rescue black lab Pip, and I had high hopes for her. Alas before I got her previous owner had let her run riot with almost no discipline or borders. She was the most magnificent looking black lab I have ever seen , but she was never going to make the grade as a gun dog and was almost uncontrollable at times. Unable to trust her to be free if there were other dogs about. For most of her walks I had to keep her on a lead when walking her. I had to watch her as if my attention wandered she had the habit of pulling very hard and on 3 occasions pulling me over once damaging my shoulder so badly that took months to recover and even now I have the odd twinge of pain from it. I persevered with her for 2 years but despite both her parents being working dogs it was clear she would never make the grade as a gundog and much as I loved her she was going to have to go. before she did me some permanent damage. A friends daughter with 2 teenage sons took her off me and as she settled into a new home she has prospered. It was hard to see her go as I got very attached to her over the last 2 years. Pip had always been a very dominant dog and totally dominated Meg. Almost as soon as Pip left Meg came out of her shell and i have never seen her as happy as she has been over the last month. A new season was coming in 5 months and with Meg being semi-retired I had no time to train up a pup. For months i have been scouring the ads for a local lab bitch over a year old , but very little suitable has come up and any bitches that were gone almost as soon as the Ad came up. At last a 20 month old fox red bitch , part trained was advertised 50 miles away and yesterday I drove over and had a good look at her. She walked to heel well and did a number of retrieves and though her price was well into 4 figures ( she has a super pedigree with 25 field champions ) There are only a handful of ancestors who have not been FTCs). I decided to have her and so Sandy has come into my life. I have only had her 24 hours , but already she is transferring her affections to me and I can trust her to walk to heel off the lead. Meg seems to be getting along much better with Sandy that she did with Pip , though its early days. Megs trouble is that through her life she has always been at the bottom of the peck order with other dogs and will not stand up for herself. I will give Sandy a few weeks before we set about finishing her training, but with luck it looks as though I have stumbled onto a little cracker and she will with be my last shooting partner for the next decade by which time I may have hung up my guns for good. Old age catches up with us all in time.

Curlew were very good eating and I must have eaten 100s of them back in the 60s\70s and never had a bad one. We used to casserole them slowly on a low heat. Stacks of meat on them too , more than a wigeon and they tasted a lot better than many a foreshore wigon.

Rewulf , my children grew up in the 1980s\90s , but my daughter maintains the same rules about TVs and internet today as I did for her and her 3 children are from 8 - 16. If they want to use the internet an adult has to be in the same room. None are allowed mobile phones and indeed apart from a work phone ( I no longer have after retirement ), I do not use mobiles even today. What you do not have you do not miss. Its all down to the parent taking time with their children and putting up with the TV programs for a time each evening and putting off watching adult programs until the kids are in bed. In my family, the living room was for family life and the bedroom was for sleep. You keep the kids within a fair set of rules and they accept boundaries, but that works both ways. If something is promised to the kids such as a day out then it is honored even if it is cup final day. The kids come first no matter what, but when you lay down the law then thats it, with no ifs and buts.

Kids under 15 are too young to go on the internet or have a PC or TV in their own room. They become isolated in their own computer\TV world and distanced from family life. My kids from the age of 10 had access to a computer and internet at home in our living room. At all times we as parents could just look up and see what they were watching or who they were in contact with. We never had any issues from people they were in contact with or what they watched.

Its a bit late , but I have not been able to log on for several months. 3 swallows hawking over Stiffkey Fen pools, N Norfolk Coast on the 6th in heavy mist. No martins for me yet though a friend saw some sand martins 2 days ago on the coast at Holkham.

I use both. A rucksack is ideal if you are carrying a lot of gear ( decoys, seat ect), but a game bag is great for a short wander out onto when marsh when you do not have much to carry.

Yet again, but I keep getting the same trouble with Pigeon watch where it will not recognize my password , nor a new password for months and then suddenly all starts to work again. But I have kept tabs on the threads on here and its good to see that this is still the best forum on the Web.