Playing catch up with Covid

It’s very frustrating but you can’t just start packing more shoot days in says Liam Bell

- Liam Bell

Trying to fit a quart into an pint pot is an adage, but worth remembering as we think about the practicalities of squeezing three months’ shooting into two.

In most cases, as in that idiom, they simply won’t fit. We can try and shove the missing days into the weeks we have left, but unless we have huge acreages at our disposal and enough drives to spread the shooting — and, importantly, allow others to rest between days — it won’t work.

Resting a drive is really important because it gives the birds time to draw back in. It won’t solely be the birds that were flushed out the last time it was driven, as they are constantly moving. It’s more a case of the birds that were driven out of it want to return, plus others will wander in from surrounding drives and a shoot’s colder, hungrier spots, as the last of the wild food is cleared up.

The movement of birds is easily followed if you have a marker bird, a white cock perhaps or a melanistic hen. The number of drives a particular bird visits is an eye-opener if you can follow its progress. There are territorial cocks that rarely leave a drive, but there plenty of others which drift between them, pleasing themselves. And it is these that will either fill up or desert a drive, depending on how secure they are feeling.

Disturbance

Birds will only put up with so much disturbance, and there is a finite number of times they can be driven. Overdo it, chase them too many times and they won’t come back.