The sky’s an over-arching azure blue, a brilliant sun is slowly thawing the overnight frost and a brace of plump pheasants, the last of the season, hang in the lumber shed waiting to be plucked.
As wonderful as some days were, my now-fading memories of the shooting season are, I have to confess, like the curate’s egg, partly good and partly bad. While I can only base my judgment on the brace of shoots where I pick-up and occasionally shoot, they did offer a pleasing contrast. The larger is a 1,000-acre shoot, which normally shows bags of 50 to 70 birds, the other a small DIY shoot of some 350 acres with modest bags of 20 or so birds – and each shoot is efficiently keepered on a part-time basis. While the larger of the two shoots opened the season with a modest bag of 37 pheasants on a day of persistent driving rain, the smaller shoot, a week before, produced an astonishing bag of 53 pheasants, six of which I could claim!
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