Only Time Will Teal

An invitation to shoot a flight pond is always a delight but will they come in or will Patrick Galbraith have a wasted journey to Scotland?

When our grandfathers were boys, Britain was a liquid landscape. In the paintings of artists such as Constable and in the poetry of Keats and Wordsworth, ponds and lakes feature as focal points of the rural idyll. After World War II, however, in an effort to boost agricultural productivity and farm our way out of rationing, wetlands were systematically drained.

According to recent figures published by the GWCT, more than 60 per cent of British agricultural land has now been drained.

Sadly, I don’t have the time nor resources to undertake a study that would prove it, but I suspect the vast majority of ponds and splashes dug out post-1945 have been constructed by those who want to flight a few ducks. People I have shot with north of the Border this season have collectively built nine ponds in the past five years.

One of those is Gary Bruce, a plain-speaking Fifer who spends his season chasing wildfowl across the country. A fortnight before I was due to head up to flight his pond near Loch Leven, I received a slightly panicked phone call. Gary reported that the birds didn’t seem to be behaving like they normally do and he simply couldn’t work out why.

The road to Fife from Dumfriesshire is a dull one and as I tore up the M74 past Abington, with blustery September showers turning the bleak hills grey, I couldn’t help thinking that we might be in for a cheerless duck-free evening. On arrival, though, Gary was looking chirpy. He explained that they’d solved the problem. For the first time, they’d splashed out on some automatic feeders rather than feeding by hand.

Initially, they set the timer for 9.30am. Unfortunately, the canny ducks had worked this out and were fluttering in for brunch at mid-morning before disappearing off elsewhere. Accordingly, when Tommy Gray, a keen local Shot, turned up each night to stand a few fields away and count the birds, there appeared to be precious little activity.