Making it a moveable feast

By feeding with a combination of finesse and cunning, keepers can cater for their gamebirds, help wildlife to thrive and deter scavengers

In 1982, when I started as a trainee game adviser with the GWCT, we had a rule of thumb that it took about eight tons of food per 1,000 pheasant poults to feed through release, shooting and into late winter for those left.

Today, for most shoots, that figure has risen to about 10 tons. If you subtract the two tons of grower pellets that are needed to make sure the poults develop properly, there has been a 33% increase in wheat used.

I have no doubt that a part of this increase is what is needed to feed into the spring. GWCT research in the 1990s showed that the then conventional approach of feeding to the end of March left a hungry gap. A couple of extra months of food provision for the modest numbers left on the shoot means better survival to next season and better wild production because the hens are so much fitter.

It costs very little and is a duty under the terms of the Code of Good Shooting Practice, but it surely does not require that much extra wheat.

Wasteful

Feeding systems have moved on by leaps and bounds over the years and the modern keeper probably has significantly more birds in his charge compared with the 1980s. There has been a big shift to self-help feeders of one sort or another and even where the old system of scattering is still used, it is likely to be with a spinner on the back of a quad rather than by hand on a straw ride. So I’m going to dare to suggest that, on average, we are more wasteful than our grandfathers were.

Self-help feeders are great for allowing birds to feed whenever they want and they can significantly reduce the keeper’s workload, but designing a system where pheasants and partridges can feed but scavengers cannot is pretty hard.