Laying good foundations

Choosing ex-layers over poults proves to be a masterstroke for Jamie Tusting’s small shoot

- Jamie Tusting

When my brothers and I took over the shoot on our parents’ farm six years ago, the learning curve was a steep one and every season since that initiation we have tweaked and tinkered to try to improve things. I should be very clear that from the outset, the aim was to have a low input, low output shoot, allowing us to run a few small days each season in which, if we shot 30 in a day, we’d go home happy.

With all of us leading hectic lives and juggling full-time jobs alongside shoot management, the goal was always to get through the season with as little hassle as possible.

Many of our adjustments have therefore been aimed at improving output without increasing input. Automatic feeders in the covers, for example, negated the need to be on-site to spin or hand-feed in the areas we wanted the birds to be and proved to be a great addition. Our experiment with partridges last season, though, fell flat on its face.

This season presented perhaps the biggest change we have made to the shoot in the time we have been involved when, more by chance than by design, we swapped our usual eight-week-old poults for year-old ex-layers. Hugo, a good friend of my brother Joe, runs a game farm in the West Country and, having shot with us a few years on the bounce, offered them to us as a lower-maintenance option to poults. Given our openness to fiddling with our game plan each year, we replied with a delighted ‘yes’. A couple of months later, Hugo arrived with the birds.

Rearing fields