Below the sea wall - Tim Bonner on wildfowling

At the start of the wildfowling season we recall Countryside Alliance Chief Executive Tim Bonner's article "Below the Sea Wall" from late 2013:

There are no great books about game shooting. Plenty of authors have followed Sir Ralph Payne-Galwey's lead in 'High Pheasants in Theory and Practice' and lectured us on how to improve our shooting, or our shoot, but there is no literary tradition of works which really explain the essence of the sport.

By comparison with game shooting wildfowling is a minority activity. Comparatively few people venture below the sea wall in pursuit of ducks, geese and waders and prior to the First World War most were professionals hunting for the market or locals shooting for the pot. Yet wildfowling can boast a rich history of authors producing memorable works from the end of the 19th Century, and books like Peter Scott's 'Morning Fight' and BB's 'Dark Estuary' are some of the finest literature on any country sport. Then of course there are the wildfowling artists with the aforementioned high amongst them.

Why such a minority activity should have generated such artistic outpouring is not surprising for those of us who have experienced the world between the tides. Cynics might suggest that the lack of things to shoot at leave plenty of time for everything else, and it is true that the 'fowler often has the opportunity for contemplation. The real reason, however, is the beauty and the challenge of both the environment and the quarry.

Nearly everyone who has ever stood beside a flight pond waiting for the arrival of ducks and darkness has felt the first stirrings of the wildfowler. Even the homebred mallard of the shires have a wildness and unpredictability that lowland game species can rarely match, but the mystery of their arrival on a calm inland pond is multiplied a hundred, a thousand, times, by the experience of hunting migratory species like wigeon, teal and pintail in the shifting tidescape of an estuary.

The wigeon is generally accepted as the iconic duck of the estuary. The cock is a fabulous creation of browns, yellows, greys and white and his whistle carries proudly across the estuary. For me, however, the pintail is the most extraordinary and charismatic of all the ducks. As long as a mallard, but finer with an elongated neck, the cock has a white belly and throat below a dark chocolate head. As the season goes on his 'pin' tail lengthens until he reaches his full magnificent breeding plumage in January and February.

For many it is the great grey geese which arrive every autumn from their breeding grounds in Iceland and Greenland which draw them to the shore. Certainly there is no experience in shooting that creates the adrenaline of a skein of geese on the wing and heading in the general direction of your ambush in the grey light of morning. Many writers record the effects of 'goose fever' which include both insomnia and the complete loss of any ability to point a gun straight at its target. They also record the rare joy of a successful flight when the fowler returns to the sea wall with a heavy bag and a feeling of satisfaction that can never be replicated in more refined forms of shooting.

Last season was even more difficult than most. Biblical rains turned most of the country into an inland lake and wildfowl had such a choice of feeding and roosting grounds that there was hardly a quack or a whistle on the estuary. The weather remained wet and mild through to the end of January, but then in February winter suddenly arrived. Thankfully the season for ducks and geese is extended until 20th February below the seawall and there was just a chance that something could be salvaged from a long, largely fruitless season. First the boy and I had a nice little tide flight when he killed three teal with his 20 bore then, on a day so cold the sea was freezing, I had an extraordinary evening flight which ended with pintail and wigeon piling into my decoys unmolested as I stopped shooting out of mercy to the dog whose coat was turning white as the sea water froze on him. The image of twenty pintail locked on to the decoys as if they were on tracks before I took two drakes from the middle of them will be with me until I die, as will the feeling of contentment as I climbed the seawall with a heavy rucksack of decoys and ducks on my back.

Yes, wildfowling is difficult, but that is half the point of it. Every bird shot is a real achievement and on those few occasions in a season when the fowler reads weather, tides and quarry right, and shoots straight enough for his dog to retrieve the birds he connects with, the world is a very special place.