Going beyond the wall

At season’s end wildfowl are at their most plentiful below the high tide mark, but this doesn’t mean the shooting is easy, says Richard Negus

- Richard Negus

In February there is a place of wonderment where only wildfowl and wildfowlers venture. It is a place of salty isolation, beautiful yet stark in equal measure, sometimes dangerous and occasionally deadly. This watery and wintry Asgard of which I write is the foreshore below the high tide mark.

At season’s end, while inland shooters are cleaning their guns to put away, the coastal fowler still has 20 days in which to enjoy his sport, if he is prepared to venture over the sea wall. With winter barely arriving until January these days, the tail end of the season is the time when wildfowl are in their greatest profusion on the foreshore. North-easterly winds, snow and sleet force them down to shootable heights. Many inland flight ponds that had been a guaranteed source of food have now ceased providing their bounty. Farmland is similarly less attractive; most of the sugar beet has been harvested, stubbles are frozen, food is scarce.

While there may be more fowl about and conditions conducive for sport, this doesn’t mean shooting below the high tide mark is easy.

The birds are at their wiliest. Many of the migratory geese and duck have been shot at before and this knowledge is rarely forgotten. They now recognise that danger can lurk below as well as above. Decoys that may have fooled them in earlier months are shunned. Flightlines and feeding spots, discovered by careful reconnaissance, are only accessible by adventurous and lengthy wading. For all that, the true foreshore is a magical place at any time of the year but in these last few weeks there is truly no place like it.