Where there's muck...

Modern fowling is about sport and the joy of wild places but years ago, many gunners made a living from the marshes, says Graham Downing

- Graham Downing

Wildfowling today is a sport. We get up long before the crack of dawn, head out to the marshes and endure wind, cold and salt mud for the sheer thrill of outwitting a wild and supremely wary quarry. With luck and skill in equal proportions, we bring something back for the table.

But it has not always been so. For generations there were those who lived close to those prime estuaries and marshes into which tens of thousands of migratory duck and geese descended in the winter, who made a living from harvesting birds with powder and shot and selling them for hard cash. These were the market gunners, men who occupied their summers with longshore fishing, oyster dredging, eel catching or farm work, but who in the winter shot duck for a living, sometimes killing thousands of birds a year and despatching them to London’s Leadenhall market.

Fierce competition

From the time that serviceable shotguns became widely available at the beginning of the 19th century, it was natural for the marshman or longshoreman to seek to exploit the natural resource that arrived in autumn on his doorstep. In the mid-1800s there were many fowlers among the close-knit communities down Britain’s east and south coast estuaries — and in a few inshore wetlands too — who scraped a meagre living by supplying birds to local households and traders as and when a good bag was made. It was hard work and the competition among fowlers when the birds were ‘in’ was fierce.

Fowling for the market was no different from commercial fishing and while the harvest was modest and the birds continued to arrive in huge numbers, the impact was small.