marsh man

Would it have been any good if the op had used a humane trap and then let the mouse out away for his home ? , I would be afraid that once the repellent wore off then he might be having another mouse problem to deal with. MM

I buy exactly the same , 12 tins around £9.75 , mine have half a tin in the mornings with a calcian tablet mixed in , then three slices of chicken with a You Move tablet wrapped up in each slice , for his evening meal it is a bowl of Skinners Muesli and anything I have left , he is nearly ten and touch wood he haven't been to the vets since he had a health check when he was a puppy , mind you his front legs are getting a bit stiff , then so are mine

Two fishing books ( 1 ) The New A B C Of Fishing Edited by Colin Willock , Well illustrated with 357 pages ( 2 ) Fishing Impossible , Three fishing fanatics , Ten epic adventures . Cost £20.00 when bought. Both in nice condition and from a smoke free home £8.50 POSTED

We had the luxury of some perfects bits of paper that started off life as The News Of The World , these were hung up in the outdoor loo , for many years we never had an inside loo , this came later when the landlord bricked the outdoor doorway up , turned the pan around and cut a new doorway in the end of the kitchen , no more running down the backyard in the rain , the snow or when we got a flood warning , you could not imagine what difference it made to the six of us who were still living at home at the time .

I was a teenager in the 60s and in my 20s in the 70s , the 60s was decade we will never see the likes again , I remember me and a friend went to London on the train as my dad worked on the railway and somehow got some free return tickets , we were in a different world from our towns and cities in Norfolk , walking down Carnaby St and seeing the latest fashions was something else and the sights in the windows at Soho made you shake at the knees , we also went to London to see the man in Black , Johnie Cash with the Carter family and the Swinging Blue Jeans both live , now that will take you back a bit. .

A lovely way to spend an afternoon MM , nice lot of shooting and you don't do yourself an injury in lugging a load back .

You said in your last post that you doubt you will shoot any more Pigeons till you go on the rape , I take that will be rape stubble , if that was the case then please be careful in letting your dog run around if the rape stubble is fairly short , this will scratch or cut your dogs belly , I always used to take mine and apart from the odd scratch I more or less got away with it , then last year , I am not sure why but our rape stubble was lethal , the stalks were like Aluminum rods and would had cut my dog to bits , I was getting some off our Pea and the Barley stubble's so I left the rape alone to whoever wanted to shoot it and apart from the keeper who took his boy for one afternoon no one else wanted to go . MM

For a while when we were young we had a lot of powdered milk , this was in the White tins and called National Dried Milk , when things money wise were suppose to be better we had that thick , sweet ole Nestle's tin milk , the soap was carbolic , the cleaning powder was Vim and the washing powder was Daz. One thing I really miss from the past is walking up the English Partridge , at the time we had good numbers and we never dreamt there would be a day when you can walk all the marshes for mile after mile without seeing a single Grey Partridge , the days of walking onto a covey are unlikely to ever return . MM

Another decent bag in a few hours shooting , yes the spotted / mottled one is unusual but I have seen similar ones over the years , some with the odd White feather and others that have more White than Grey , only ever seen one pure White one and that was in the game dealers , what ever came of it ? , I haven't got a clue . Can you move the bag on , or is there no demand in your area ? MM

Brilliant and may you have many more , congrats to both of you

Or use a Flexicoy decoy as they are seamless and moulded into one decoy , they have stood the test of time and would still take some beating as far as a full body decoy go . MM

I am certainly no gun dog trainer and would not try telling other people what they are doing right or wrong but I have found since I had my first puppy in 1965 that every Lab puppy I have had since then and including the one I have got now have all been different in there ways in doing things , some will be easy to train and others will take a lot longer . I used to go training with two of my pups with our ex head keeper , he was brilliant with dogs and one year he won the English retriever championship , after we done the basics with sit and stay we would move on to dummy work , this would often involve throwing three or four around and over the dog, he would then go out and pick them up himself with just leaving the pup one to pick up , he was a great believer in only letting a young dog pick up what he couldn't pick up himself . I must admit that my first dog would run in but in those far off days I only shot duck and just about every bird I shot would had been a job to pick up over deep water or mud in and around our estuary , it wasn't till I started to shoot pigeons in a hide that I realised that running in could be fatal and then I concentrated on making sure the pup didn't move out of the hide until told , this was made a lot easier in leaving the easy ones that lay dead around the decoys and pick up yourself while the dog is sitting down nearby , if one had dropped well out then the dog get a retrieve , this way of training have worked out well for me and the only time they get a free hand is when the session is over and I have been shooting over a tall crop . We have all seen a dog try and run through a net and bring the hide down with the owner having to put a lead on and tie it to something man enough to stop him when he see a bird drop , this could have been avoided with it all starting in the pups early training , this is when prevention is better than cure come into play . MM

So have many others , glad he is back in the fold and hopefully a video will be along shortly

Nice one , You can still have an enjoyable day without shooting big numbers , no doubt you would sooner shoot 50 good sporting Pigeons rather a 100 dropping on top of each other after each one is shot . After a wet Winter and early Spring you are now finding if the conditions are right for one farmer then it could be the same for his neighbour's so several fields are all drilled at the same time , a bit like when they start harvesting , nice write up and a respectable bag . MM

What a shame , it didn't deserve the melting pot but it's always the same , you have it ages and as soon as it go you find a person who is looking for one

Would you believe it I handed in a B S A ejector, 30 inch barrels with a pistol grip only a week or so ago at the local police station , it was a sound gun but needed a spring in the back trigger , I did put the f o c offer on the forum a few months back and no one wanted it , to late now but you could have had for nothing . MM

Evening Chris ... There is just something about hearing the first Cuckoo and seeing the first Swallow before the Summer kick off , within a day or so I normally see my first Swallow around the last week in April and that need to be a nice warm day , I do normally hear and see the Cuckoo throughout the Summer with spending a fair bit of time in the woods , the Bittern on the marsh have been on these marshes for the last three or four years so I imagine it would be the same one. The late Jim Vincent who used to be the warden on Hickling Broad had a photo in one of the books I had where he was holding a couple of very young Bitterns , this was at a time when they were nearly extinct where now they are still fairly rare but numbers are building up nicely , you will see one before long MM

It make you wonder just how many pubs were in the U K at it's peak , our town ( Yarmouth ) is not that big but one of the local books I have got said at one time there was a pub for every day of the year ( 365 ) when I started with a local building firm the boss used to tell us where the next job was on a particular road , at the time I played a lot of darts and if I didn't know the road I asked him what pub is near by and I knew straight away where the road roughly was , now I doubt if there is a pub for every week let alone a day

SOLD to hoggs ( Pete ) THANKS

P M now on it's way THANKS

Another nice bag on the drilling , I go along with old'un as far as letting a young dog pick up that many on her first day out , we all do things differently when it come to training a gun dog , they say you learn by your mistakes and that also apply to gun dog training , I took a young dog once in a bale hide in the middle of the field , he had been a few times before and I was just letting him pick the live ones up which he was getting good at , I fired at a Pigeon that must had caught a single pellet as it started to tower up in the sky and then fluttered down , I sent my young dog and just before he was going to pick it up the bloodx Pigeon took off , my dog had no more to do than try and catch it , he ran across the field just behind the Pigeon and what was bad training on my side I couldn't stop him , he ran towards the road and my heart came up to mouth , he crossed the road and this Pigeon hit a tall hedge and he finally got it , I was then crossing the field as quick as I could and when he came back to the road a car had stopped to let him across , I put my hand up to thank the lady , I put my young dog on it's slip lead and he never done no more retrieving for a week or two , now if I have got any doubt I tell the dog to sit and go and pick it up myself . MM

Cracking bag on drilled Peas , I would have to go back many , many years since I last got a three figure bag on Pea seed and I very much doubt I will ever do it again . You done well to stick the cold out , I went a little while this afternoon and I was well sheltered by a thick hedge , I went when the Norwich football started and I wasn't sorry when it finished as the cold was beginning to get through my extra jumper I stuck on , my dog enjoyed it as I let him pick the nine up , when I got back in my motor it was 6 degrees and then it started to rain , now sitting at home with the heating full on, roll on when the warmer weather come back . MM

Due to weight loss , three pairs of unused M + S trousers , Blue ones are 38 x 32 , Green are 38 x 31 and the Beige are 38 x 31 , all three are spotless and unused . £12.00 Collected , Posted £16.00

I can fully understand your reasons in giving up the shotgun side and just concentrating on the stalking side , we can both look back and say to ourselves we have had a very good run and all good things have to end at sometime , rather than pack up overnight I hope to have the odd flight this coming if and when I want to , as you say it is down to a combination of events and under normal circumstances if want something bad enough then you can normally find a way around these issues , in my case I now feel the cold and it's not that healthy keep getting cold and wet when you are past the mid seventies , then with failing eyesight it was getting difficult to see duck in bad light , then the last people who had a few fowl off me are now all sadly passed away and as you most likely know that my wife passed away in her sleep just before Christmas which I am still finding it hard to accept after 47 years of happily married life. I still enjoy a couple of hours Pigeon shooting and I did make every shoot we had on the estate last year , so I am still keeping active and I am at peace when I am in the countryside , but taking a gun is not as important as it once was and it's all down in doing whatever you are happy with and enjoying the amount of time we have got left , hopefully a few more years yet .

There was a nice photo of a Cuckoo in flight in our local paper this morning , mind you it don't look very happy , still far to cold around this way at the moment , the Swallows would be better off staying in Africa for a few more days until it warm up a bit