Hunter's paradox

A nine-year-old shows wisdom beyond his years while helping to check the trap line in our new series about encouraging youngsters to get involved in fieldsports

- RICHARD NEGUS

At Flea Barn from spring and through early summer, Ed Nesling and I run a trapping line. Half-a dozen New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) 150 traps, a Perdix double squirrel and four Larsen traps. Each day when I got home, my son Charlie would watch over my shoulder as I noted the tally of pests accounted for in my computer’s calendar. For weeks he had plagued me, asking to tag along when I do my rounds, and I finally acquiesced.

I had no qualms about his reaction to dead things; he is a child of the countryside after all. But I had reservations about what his reaction would be to seeing a live corvid in a Larsen or a squirrel squarely nailed by a trap.

Wild West

Charlie’s oversized bush hat tipped over his eyes as we bounced off the concrete track and parked up on the headland. Pushing it on to the back of his head like a juvenile Wild West SIM gunslinger, he gazed intently through the windscreen.

“What are you thinking?” I asked him. “I’m excited to see what we catch,” he replied. He paused, then, “Look!” he said pointing off to the right, “Buzzard?” I peered in the direction of his finger and sure enough a pair of buzzards rode the thermals. “Good boy, correct,” I reassured him.

We have daily played this game of car-bound birding since I first drove him to school five years ago. We got out of the truck; I clutched a pair of thick gloves, Charlie carried a plastic bucket full of peanuts. We wandered to a thick double hedge — more a line of trees, the hawthorns and maples had grown so well in the strong Suffolk clay.