Sporting Life: hand-feeding, whistled poults and Albert’s bicycle

I can quite honestly say that, despite the odd – and inevitable – hiccup, I thoroughly enjoyed my many years of gamekeeping. Now I equally enjoy the days when I either host a shoot or am simply part of the beating team.

Beating is, I must admit, far less stressful than hosting – and there is the added bonus of having ample opportunity to talk to others who make up the line between drives and at lunchtime. As some of the team are, or have been at some time, gamekeepers, it’s perfectly natural that much of the conversation tends to be centred on the job – and, in some instances, how it has changed over the years.

As each season passes – and no matter how hard we try not to – we increasingly begin to sound like old men bemoaning modern life when we find ourselves uttering phrases such as “It wasn’t like that in our day.” But, truth to tell, it wasn’t.

Why I fed by hand rather than by quad bike

At all the places I’ve worked, the majority of my feeds were – by choice – done by hand rather than via an ATV or quad bike. Waterproof – and squirrel-proof – corn bins were strategically placed and periodically filled either by bags unloaded from the back of my pick-up when the ground conditions allowed, or from a tractor and trailer when things got too soggy underfoot.

Varying farming practice meant that at this time of year it was necessary to work out a practical pedestrian route from wood to wood and/or from cover crop to cover crop in order to efficiently hand-feed birds that had, in the early days of their release, hopefully become used to being summoned by a whistle.

The art of getting poults to answer a whistle

There was quite an art to that as well. Give too much and the poults lose interest, and getting them responsive to the whistle would take that much longer. The sooner you could gain a little control over their movements, so much the better.

As summer moved into early autumn, freshly strawed rides might – along with some judicious whistling – help encourage pheasants to the areas where they were wanted on a shooting day. Alongside dogging-in, it was also a good way of dissuading birds from wandering. As long as spreading straw on the rides didn’t coincide with a prolonged period of rain and leave it all soggy, it engaged them for longer as they scratched about in search of their feed.

Canvas Post Office bags and a friendly postman

For many of us, the favoured method of transporting feed and scattering it down the rides was by using one of the old-fashioned canvas Post Office delivery bags. They were waterproof, durable and perfect for the job. From talking to keepers on a shooting day, it seems that many of us must have known a friendly postman.

Walking with such a bag hanging over your shoulder was relatively easy. That wasn’t the case when, as a teenage keeper’s assistant in Yorkshire, I was sometimes allowed the use of headkeeper Albert’s old bicycle. Balancing while weighed down by a full bag of wheat took the acrobatic skills of a circus performer.

On one well-remembered occasion, on a cold winter’s morning with ice on the estate driveway, I cycled – Post Office bag newly loaded – past Albert’s lodge-gate home where he happened to be standing smoking his pipe. As I attempted to halt, my tyres slid, I slipped and, in slow motion, ended up flat on my back at his feet.

I looked up as he looked down. Quietly assessing the scene laid out before him, he eventually removed the pipe from between his lips and said, with typical dry Yorkshire humour: “Eeh lad, but tha’s got a reet rare way of getting off thi’ bike.”

Jeremy Hobson was a gamekeeper for over 30 years; regularly hunts and occasionally fishes – and is the author of over 30 fieldsports and country-based books.