When to shoot?

[Millomite]

We're trying to plan our shoot dates for the coming season. It's quite difficult on our shoot due to it being a small family syndicate with 8 guns. The major stumbling block is the rugby season. Five of us (3 beaters/2 guns) all play rugby for our town. This means that our shoot dates cannot fall on away game days as we set off to Lancs/Yorks at 9am. So we have all our shoots when we have a home game so we can finish up for 1pm.

 

We're still waiting for the fixtures to come out and are weighing up dates.

 

Is it 22 weeks when pheasants should be about feathered?

 

Scott

[David BASC]

There or there about, but it does depend a lot on other factors, stock, food, weather etc. On the shoot I beat on we have a couple of boundary days in October, mainly to push birds back, big check on vermin, also to see if the birds are moving out to where we think they should be!

 

This also gives us the opportunity to see how the birds a ‘feathering up’. We use the size of the tail as a guide, not just the fact the birds are in hard feather, i.e. we look to see if the birds have long, fully formed tails.

 

If they are looking good, and have long tails then we start driven shooting as early in November as possible, if they are looking a bit short in the tail we put our first driven day back a couple of weeks.

 

That’s how we do it, this may or may not help you though!

 

Best wishes

 

David

[al4x]

you can also get your guns to pick their birds and only shoot the better birds with tails. Theres nothing worse than shooting too early and hammering immature birds IMHO

 

We tend to mix partridge days with a few pheasants at the start of the season but you have to pick the pheasants very carefully