Your best location?

[Gutty Boots]

Ok, so we've had what's your favourite quarry species, so here's the next question. Where is your best or most favoured location for 'fowling?

 

I don't mean give away exact locations, just estuaries/ bays/ marshes/ strips of shoreline etc.

 

If for one reason or another you only shoot an area local to you, where would you most like to sample a flight & why: most varied bag, harshest weather anticipated, scenery, fowling history & so on...........

[.philmypower.]

My permission consists of flash fields, flight lines, dykes and stubble. I would one day love to go on to the marsh to shoot, I intend to join a club next season. Love being up early and watching the place come to life.

Geese are what get me going, never been on the pink but heard its fantastic. Only got into wildfowling this year but I'm hooked and intend to peruse it even more next season as I'm an a DIY pheasant shoot this year

[silver pigeon 3]

My favourite marshes on the club grounds are probably the 2 least shot, they are not the most productive by far but it is almost guaranteed that you will be on your own. Sometimes a few hours just out on your own with the dog watching the world wake up is worth more putting a few birds in the bag. I always prize a bird taken from these marshes above ones from an "easier" marsh.

 

I really intend on getting about a bit more later this season and next, and have had a very kind offer from another member on here to help me to do just that.

 

My long term ambition is to get myself up to Scotland and bag a foreshore pinkfoot.

[anser2]

It has to be coastal wildfowling that steals the show for me. the wide skys , pounding waves on the sands , fast running tides surging up the creeks and the wealth of bird life than is found there. I am lucky living on the East Coast almost anything can turn up on the saltings . I have seen sea eagles several times , power puffs of snow buntings as you walk back after flight , all sorts of small warblers on migration and in more recent years little egrets and now spoonbills make a regular apearance. These with a suporting cast of curlews , redshanks , shielducks and brents and of course thousands of gulls add so much interest to a flight before your intended quarry apears.

 

If i had to chose one place its a very large creek on the N Norfolk coast some 300 yards across. It cuts through the saltmarsh with wide sandy skirts that catch the evening sun as it twists its way out to the open sands and the goose roost. My favoured stand is a sharp bend in the creek with a wide pool beside it. On a windy day as the tide starts to run some days the wigeon will pour into the pool sometimes in company with a few pintail to get out of the wind and the shooting can be good , but more often its just an odd bunch or two. But more than the shooting its the blend of marsh , sea , sands and sky at flight that make it such a magic place to flight. A bird or two in the bag are just a bonus.

 

It I had to make a second choice it would be a return to my teenage years that i discovered when joining a new wildfowling club a few years ago. They had taken the lease on a river in Broadland where i started my wildfowling way back in the 1960s. It was so good to return to the same river , the same stand of reeds and watch the sun slowly burn the fog off the river revealing a tassel of dew covered reed heads catching the first rays of the rising sun and dimmly away down stream still hidden in the mist mallard were quacking , just as they had done way back in my teens.

Edited October 2, 2012 by anser2

[tomquin]

Easy one for me. Nigg bay on the cromarty firth. Fowling there is great. I live in Inverness now but i was raised in Invergodon and first introduced to wildfowling on Nigg bay. I regularly make the trip along there because i just love it there. So many memories. Also its the coldest place i have ever been.