Cocksure?

Dropping a hen on a cock day was once a near capital offence, but do the returns from leaving a large stock of hens repay the resources they demand? Adam Smith is not so sure

- Adam Smith

There was a time when you might have been sent home if you took out a hen on a cock day. There was a time when the pre-shoot meet in the stable yard, or wherever, was laced with dire warnings of instant excommunication from grim-faced keepers, who made plain beyond any risk of misunderstanding that it was to be cocks only. Heaven alone would offer protection from the dire consequences of poor quarry recognition.

There was a time when one noble peer of my experience, come the last day of the season, would sit on his balcony with brandy and binoculars. On that one dreadful, lip-biting day in his shooting season, when forced to accept the inevitable, His Grace would wait, daring any of the carefully selected ‘peasants’ within sight to take out one of his lady birds. It tended to make the day a bit fraught.

I would confidently say that then, as now, preserving hens as wild stock was a fruitless task. It may well have had benefit and merit, back before mega-intensive rearing and mothering broody hens became a thing of the past, to be replaced with various inanimate heat sources. These soulless radiators have taken away whatever caring instincts chicks might have learned from an attentive stepmother, until slowly, surely, and ever more noticeably, the basics became almost totally absent.

“Today’s hen pheasants are useless mothers,” one keeper said to me once. Pretty well versed in the craft since the 1930s, he’d watched things change within his lifetime and gave that accurate assessment to me back in the 70s. The art and ability has been bred out of them and, in my humble opinion, the best thing for any shoot to do is maximise release returns and get them in the bag and counted.