Ding dong merrily on high

For Patrick Laurie, heading out to try to bag a duck for the Christmas table is as much of a tradition as putting a fairy atop the tree

- Patrick Laurie

The winter is marked by rituals and routines. Some of these are dictated by the sporting calendar, but others are much more personal.

I like to set aside an afternoon to shoot snipe in early September, just as the hills are beginning to fade away from their summer colours. I’m lucky that we always have good numbers of snipe on our hill and I’ve been observing this informal routine for 10 years. It’s become an important moment for me as the seasons begin to change and September wouldn’t feel right without it.

In the same way, the January full moon sends me out to flight woodcock in the gloaming, and that’s another tradition which I simply cannot overlook. I love the frost and the inevitable skirl of vixens in the birchwoods at a moment when the whole world seems to have died.

There is one tradition that I treasure above all others. I’ve made a habit of wildfowling around Christmas time since I was 16 years old, and hell would freeze over before I’d miss it. Living within sight of the Solway Coast, it’s inevitable that I should often head down for a duck or a goose in December and January, but my habit is specifically to go for a morning flight for wigeon, either on Christmas Eve or Boxing Day.

That’s become a hard-and-fast date in the diary, as unavoidable as Christmas itself. I’ve now looked forward to that morning for 20 consecutive years. Forget festive decorations or the scent of mulled wine; I judge the approach of Christmas by the rush and swirl of wigeon in the darkness.

Washed away