It’s been a funny old summer in so many ways. Many things have come together on my little Dorset rough shoot in a way that I had long hoped for, but not really expected.
With harvest all but over, I have been cruising the stubbles and, lo and behold, we have some wild game. Indeed, I think we can look back on our best wild-bird breeding season in quite a few years.
I had a suspicion that we would record a better than average year for pheasants quite a while ago, when we started seeing decent broods on the tracks and in other little open areas back in June. These were mostly about three weeks old, indicating a late-May hatch from first clutches laid in April.
A horrid, wet winter had turned rapidly into a fine, warm spring and lockdown had given me a bit of extra time to set about my spring predation control programme.
Since then, the weather has been a bit more variable, but overall the warm and dry conditions prevailed, with just enough rain to keep things growing. If it gets too hot and dry, the vital chick-food insects can be scarce and hungry chicks never do well. So right on cue, we started to see a brood or two of partridges as well. I don’t quite know if we will have a shootable surplus yet, but I have a hunch that we might be able to allow ourselves to harvest a brace or two.
Reversal of fortune
When I first took on the shoot jointly with my great friend Charles Nodder in the spring of 1997, I rashly suggested that we could turn around the fortunes of the small grey partridge population in this little corner of north-east Dorset. We never really did, but our success was in not losing them completely when all around the numbers have been falling.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 02, 2020 من Shooting Times & Country.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
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هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة September 02, 2020 من Shooting Times & Country.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
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