When our sport took off

Not all that long ago, shooting sitting ducks and roosting pheasants was the order of the day, so what changed, wonders Ian Saberton

Until well into the 17th century, it was the practice of sportsmen to fire at stationary game, whether from natural cover or from artificial hides copying some natural feature such as a tree or hedge.

Of the practice then prevailing, Claude Gauchet's poem Le Plaisir des Champs (Paris, 1583) describes several examples. Partridges are shot on the snow; wild duck on the water; a roe deer is shot standing; a litter of wild boar, sheltering with a sow, is fired on; and a fox making off with a leveret is shot, but only when it stops to shoulder its prey better. As for those sporting artists of the period, Stradanus, who died in 1605, and his contemporary Hans Bol, always depict the shooter firing at stationary game.

Examples of artificial hides were included in Richard Blome's The Gentleman's Recreation, first published in 1686, though Blome himself at that point was a convert to shooting flying birds.

Interestingly, commenting on artificial hides, Blome noted that game-birds were suspicious of "these dead engines, which carry not the shape of a living creature." Blome observed that the unnatural movements would likely cause concern and fear in gamebirds. In his opinion, the least impractical of these hides were the artificial stalking horse and the wonderfully named cocking cloth in crowing time.

Made of painted canvas stuffed with straw, the horse was fitted with a spike for sticking in the ground as the sportsman advanced towards the prey. The cocking cloth was for use in pheasant shooting. Consisting of a canvas hide constructed like a present-day kite, it was about a yard square except that it had a hole cut in it through which the muzzle of a short gun could be thrust. The sportsman simply held the canvas in front and, according to Brome, the pheasants "at crowing time will let you come near them and the cocks will be so bold as to fly at it".