Wild At Heart

Philip Reynolds profiles Ben Carter, whose job is everything associated with the great outdoors

- Ben Carter

Gone fishing. That’s what Ben Carter did. He went fishing and has never looked back. He is now in charge of wildlife management for estates in Somerset and Aberdeenshire. The journey to what he describes as “the dream job” has involved much hard work and personal sacrifice.

His distinct career path began when he graduated from Aberystwyth University with a degree in zoology. His time in Mid Wales was, along with studying, spent pursuing his love of the outdoors. Ben fished for sewin (sea-trout) and bass, he climbed at Llangorse and he even managed to ferret one day a week with his trusted terrier – not a common pastime of your regular undergraduate.

When the time came for him to leave Aberystwyth it was obvious that Ben was going to make a living that combined his skills and love of the great outdoors. It was a love fostered as a child in his native Yorkshire, though not altogether with his parents’ blessing at the time, but more of that later.

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Ben found “his calling”, as he puts it, from a job advert in our sister magazine, Shooting Times, which saw him head from Wales to Lincolnshire. It was for a freshwater fisherman – catching carp, roach, and bream and selling them on to a coarse fishery.

Nobody could accuse Ben Carter of lacking get up and go and it wasn’t long before he was working for himself, though maybe it wasn’t quite what he imagined doing: catching the invasive, prolific and voracious American signal crayfish from the rivers and lakes across the UK. As well as doing that public service – crayfish burrow and cause the collapse of riverbanks – it was also for a period a lucrative occupation. At the height of his productivity, Ben was catching 12,000 a week and selling them to fishmongers in Grimsby, who in turn sold them on, largely to the Loch Fyne restaurant chain.

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