Why We Relish What The Winter Brings

As October begins and November teases with its bright promise of good sport, there is much to look forward to at High Park

You will be reading these words in October; I am writing them in the second week of September and wondering whether September is my favourite month of them all. There is so much to enjoy and so much to look forward to, though as I write I can already hear someone saying that September brings summer’s end, with the prospect of a brief autumn followed by a long dark winter full of rain and wind.

But we are shooting men and we know that winter, whatever else it will be full of, will also be full of sport with the gun. We are shooting men and women and we relish what winter brings. Others may moan about dank and dreary November but we approve of November because it will put those first pheasants over our heads. There is nothing at all wrong with November and I am already impatient for the seventh of the month, which brings our first day with the pheasants of High Park.

Meanwhile, I am enjoying September and all it has to offer. One of September’s less obvious recommendations is that, once it comes along, releasers of pheasants can begin to relax a little, telling themselves that they will almost certainly have birds enough for winter sport. Predation and disease, of course, can strike even in September. But if your poults have made it through August without the unwelcome interference of hooked beaks or sharp teeth; if they have struggled on through this summer’s weeks of endless rain without succumbing to coccidiosis or hexamita; then, now that they are spreading out over your ground, disease is much less likely to break out. Once the birds are roosting high in the trees, nocturnal hunters are less likely to spread mayhem through your coverts.