A moveable feast

To keep the drives full of birds, they must have food and water or they will wander — and they might not come back, warns Liam Bell

- Liam Bell

One of the most frustrating parts of early-season shooting is knowing you’ve done the work, knowing you’ve kept your birds fit, alive and fairly close to home, but being unable to get them into the drives in any number.

It is all well and good seeing them wandering about, but it is particularly infuriating when you are trying to concentrate them in the drives and they don’t really want to be there.

Late season, a combination of hunger and the need for shelter — when the weather gets colder and wetter — will pull them in anyway, but for the early days it is important that there are enough birds in the drives to reassure your fellow syndicate members that their subscriptions have been well spent.

Exercise restraint

The Guns will, of course, need to exercise restraint on these early days, or there is a very real risk that the birds will be over-shot and you will end up with precious little to shoot come January, when the birds are wilder, faster and stronger. And as day follows night, it will be the less-discerning Guns who shot more than their fair share in October and early November who will be complaining.

The biggest driver and biggest draw for both pheasants and partridges is food. We are never going to be able to compete with acorn-laden oak trees, or stubbles and weedy root crops in early autumn, but we can at least make sure the food we put out is good quality, that it is accessible and that it is where the birds will see it.