A MAGICAL MOMENT

With his mind firmly on careful habitat management and sensible shooting, Alex Hatton talks us through his quest for that ultimate hunter’s dream… a right and left woodcock

- Alex Hatton

With the shooting season underway, and the hunter’s moon bringing in the woodcock, I was reminded of a once seemingly impossible quest a number of years ago… every woodcock hunter’s dream: the right and left. It’s never a quest you purposefully go on, but it is one that undoubtedly is in the back of your mind from the moment you first hear of the elusive ‘woodcock club’.

A number of years ago, I was very lucky to be invited to shoot in what I call ‘woodcock country’. In the early years, it was my first real experience of shooting over HPRs, and the idea of there being a handful of Guns aiming for a bag in the single figures, if we were lucky, but quality wild birds, excited me.

Annually, my invite came until this day came, which was a little different, as the shoot owner was giving it up. The dog handler, Karen, and I were to take it on next season and run it in much the same way, which was an exciting prospect.

In the preceding years, I had quickly come to love shooting over HPRs, particularly Large Munsterlanders; it changed my shooting and there certainly was a calmness about it compared to spaniels on ground like this. I duly took on a Munster puppy and increasingly my success in the field increased. On this shoot, the annual invite through the post would be welcome and over a decade I have enjoyed some great sport here, with more than a couple of opportunities of a left and right, the most recent being two years before this day, with a pair of birds coming out from some gorse right in front of me and going in opposite directions to each other. You know it’s an opportunity for something special, but inevitably the first drops to the shot and the pressure becomes too much to hold it together for the second, and I missed.