Delayed release dates pile pressure on shoots and game farmers

BASC’s recent legal victory against Natural England (NE) was a great morale boost for the shooting sector (News, 22 July), but NE is still insisting on precautionary licence conditions for gamebird release on or near Special Protection Areas (SPAs) that seem unjustifiable. In the past few years NE has insisted on delayed release dates for many licences, specifying that birds cannot be released before 1 September on some SPAs and 1 October on others. The October release date especially presents challenges to both the shoot and its game farmer.

Why a late hatch is a harder bird to rear

Although gamebirds will continue to lay beyond the end of the traditional season, later hatches present several complications, not least of which is the fall in egg and chick quality at the end of the season. At release pheasants, in particular, still have a fair bit of growing to do before they are mature and ready to fly over the Guns. In addition, The Code of Good Shooting Practice requires all birds to be released at least a month before shooting begins.

Realistically, then, a 1 October release date for pheasants means releasing birds that are likely to be 12 to 16 weeks old. This places a lot of additional pressure on the release pen, which will almost certainly have been designed around the needs of six- to 10-week-old birds. This is rather ironic, since the whole reason for the introduction of licensing release on or near protected sites – before it was hijacked in the name of bird flu – was to allay concerns over the potential for gamebirds to negatively impact the ecology and habitat of the area where they are released.

Older poults often seem slower to adapt and learn than younger birds and delayed release will also mean shooting might have to start later in the season to allow birds time to grow and acclimatise to the ground.

What the extra weeks do on the rearing field

Before the birds reach the shoot, however, they will have been kept on a rearing field for far longer than usual. At around eight weeks pheasants start to outgrow their bits, meaning that the traditional B bit will have to be replaced with a C bit, causing stress to the birds, not to mention the labour involved.

The birds will also require significantly more space as they grow. Although there will be space available at the end of the season on an almost empty rearing field, that ground will have had birds on it for much of the summer and may be pretty bare at a time when the birds should be getting used to woodlands and hedgerows. It may also have high parasite burdens, necessitating medical treatments that might otherwise not have been needed.

Where exactly is the bird flu risk coming from?

For the first time since 2021, all the evidence suggests that bird flu is not cycling through our wild bird population this summer. Since there has never been a recorded case of infected birds being released – in all cases of released gamebirds contracting bird flu, they have caught it from wild birds post-release – it is becoming increasingly difficult to see where the risk is coming from to justify Natural England’s position, even by its own questionable criteria.

What is certain, however, is that the next likely increase in bird flu activity will be in the autumn when migratory wildfowl start arriving on our shores, usually around mid-October. Precisely the time when naive young birds subject to a 1 October delayed release will still be milling around their release pen at high stocking densities.

Conversely, had those shoots released their birds in July, they would be adult, savvy and dispersed around the shoot by the beginning of October. They would present a comparatively tiny risk of contracting avian flu from wild birds, a much smaller risk of spreading it widely among themselves and thus present a much lower potential risk to other wild birds they might encounter.

For completeness, I should add that NE has recently withdrawn the 1 September release condition from licences on six SPAs. But the delayed release conditions on all other SPAs, including those for 1 October, remain in force.