Top Tip-Offs

The birds are out and things are hotting up on Deano’s patch, but with night vision and a thermal spotter at his disposal, he’s keeping pace with the influx of hungry carnivores

- Dean Harrison

Sometimes it’s the smallest tip-off that gets you a result. The keeper was away so my friend the farmer was feeding the birds. The pheasants were about 12 weeks old then and starting to wander well away from the release pens and into the covers.

As always we met up for a chat and I was filling him in on what I had shot at the other end of the shoot – or rather, how few I had got and that after shooting one about two weeks ago I had seen no further signs of a fox.

“That’s just what I was going to tell you,” said the farmer. “I picked up a dead bird yesterday but couldn’t see what had killed it. When I went back today it had gone.”

That didn’t surprise me. An old gamekeeper friend once told me, “you shoot one [fox] and two will come to the funeral,” but it’s a fact – all this ‘food’ walking

The Pu Quantum Lite compact and about will draw the foxes in. Usually, about three weeks after shooting one, another comes in, especially for us as we have unkeepered ground all around us. So I decided to sit up with my new toy, the Pulsar Quantum Lite XQ30V, on demo from Thomas Jacks, and see what showed up.

The wait

It was a lovely early autumn evening, getting dark just after 8pm. It was the first nice evening we’d had after three wet and windy ones, so I was looking forward to sitting up for a fox.