Walk on the wild side

Wild bird shooting, whether driven or walked-up, is growing in popularity among sporting connoisseurs, says Richard Negus

- Richard Negus

Have you ever discovered that you have become fashionable by accident? Wildfowlers shared this experience a few years ago when metropolitan young men intentionally started sporting beards and looking unkempt.

A game shooter’s garb, no longer ancient and malodorous, is now ‘cottagecore’, according to The Guardian’s fashion correspondent Priya Elan, who describes the look as a “romanticised ideal of masculinity”. Reared driven shooting has been en vogue for more than a century. The Edwardians, the bright young things of the 1920s, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, David Beckham, Wills and Kate – for generations the place for the ‘in crowd’ to be seen was at covert-side.

The antithesis to all this glamour has been rough shooting, walked up or driven days where the bag is made up by native wild game, waders and wildfowl. To achieve a bag at all requires hard toil by the Guns and even more labour from keepers and landowners. Habitat provision and nurture, along with pest control, are everything. Every egg laid, every brood, every chick that grows from bee-sized fluffball to poult and then to adulthood is an example of triumph over adversity.

Weather is a threat. Cover crops can fail, leaving broods at the mercy of avian predators. An inopportune downpour will kill chicks if a marauding badger hasn’t got there first. There are no certainties here, and therefore it is harder to sell to a public weaned on buying their shooting on a price-per-bird basis.

Despite these perceived negatives, British Guns are reawakening to the delights of wilder, rougher shooting and this suggests that a number are even starting to view reared driven birds as passé.