HOW HIGH IS THAT BIRD?
Most mammalian predators have two forward-facing eyes. This gives them binocular vision. This ability to focus on an object with both eyes and produce in the brain a single image from two independent light sources your eyes, allows them to make a judgement. For a cheetah stalking through the grass savannah into a herd of gazelle, it is a judgement of timing and distance. Launch too soon and her hunt will be unsuccessful. Too many poorly judged hunts in a row and the tipping point on the graph of survival is passed and weakness and death will follow. Game shooters face the same dilemma but without the tightrope of our survival. For us, the judgement is an ethical one. Is the bird we are about to shoot a sporting shot or is the shot unethical?
A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION
For many of us the answer is found in a moral code we were taught as youngsters but we should never lose sight of the fact that we are the lucky ones in that respect. We are fortunate to have or to have had, a family mentor to bring us into the sport of shooting. If that is the case then a New Year’s resolution worth considering would be to try to bring someone into the sport who has not had that opportunity. One of the first things we learn is that a shot too close is unsporting because it spoils the meat for the table. How many of us actively consider whether a shot out of range is also unsporting because the risk of wounding becomes too great for it to be an ethical choice. Should both my children wish to progress from air rifles to live quarry shooting (and I make no assumptions) I will know they will have graduated into ethical sportsmen when they pass up a shot because it is out of their effective range. To do that will take practice, an accurate judgement of distance, and a conscience. But how do we achieve that? How do we know if we are accurate with our judgement of distance?
THE BIGGEST LIES
It has been said that the biggest lies are told after the hunt, before sex, and during elections. How many times have you heard someone congratulate another gun because of their brilliant shot at range that folded the hen pheasant, and it is almost always a hen. The distance becomes an ego auction: ‘it must have been 50 yards away’, ‘60’ bids another, ‘might even have been 70’ (new bidder). During the debrief in the pub extra yardage might be found until numbers get lost and it is generally agreed to be the best bird of the day’; ‘that season’ bids another; ‘ever on this shoot’ (new bidder). If the guns on a driven day are spaced evenly and at least a good 35 yards apart, one of the signs of a properly run shoot, then a 70-yard pheasant is two guns down from you and if you shoot at it someone should be having a word with you about basic etiquette. Standard British pylons of which there are 88,000 in the UK, are 55 yards high. Very few birds on most game shoots fly at 70 yards, and even when they are presented on some self-styled ‘extreme’ shoots there are very few game shots who can kill them consistently and therefore ethically. Lots of pickers-up behind a team of guns does not, in my book, make it an ethical shot. We have a problem in shooting and the tumour has grown over time. The cult of high bird shooting has been promoted by sporting media types powerfully and subtly employing all the psychological techniques used by marketing agencies retained by industries looking to shift product. It has its own language: when someone refers to a ‘bath bird’ they refer to the one bird they remember when they lay back in their bath in the evening. Having seen some of the pile of spent cases posted on Instagram it is not churlish to suggest that this might be the only bird they killed cleanly on the day.
A SKILL TO MASTER
The ethical judgement of range is not an easy skill to master but you should practice it and test yourself. For each of us in different parts of the country with different topography, the test will be a different one. I am most familiar with the habitat in which I chase my meals in East Anglia. At this point, there will be some people in the lumpier parts of the country who will scoff and say that there never will be a bird on the edge of range in East Anglia. They are people who will never have shot wild Fen pheasants or sat in the salty gloom on a foreshore listening to whistling wigeon or trying to pick out teal in the half-light. The most basic tool in our arsenal for range judging when using a shotgun are the trees we are generally surrounded by.
THE CHALLENGE
As you walk the dog this Sunday, I challenge you to try an experiment. Pick out the five tallest trees you can find and try to assess their height. Once you are confident in your assessment for each tree make a note of the number. Writing it down is important. It avoids the cognitive bias that is part of human nature that makes us try to avoid irreversible decisions. For this experiment, you will, of course, need the right answer at the end. If you have a smartphone there is an App that can help you – yes, there is an App for everything. The Swedish designed App ‘Arboreal’ is what you need. When you download it you will give 5 free measurements of the trees you have selected. To measure with the App, you walk up to the trunk of the tree and take a photo on your phone. This geo-locates the trunk. Then you walk away from the tree until you can see the top of it and take another photo of the base where it meets the ground. This gives you a distance from your original point. From the same position, you then take a third photo of the top of the tree. The App then does the trigonometry that you biffed off at school because you were, like me, looking out of the window wondering whether you would be allowed to decoy the freshly drilled field on Saturday. If when you get the results you are more than 25% out with your original estimates, then you need to practice more and spend the £8 to have unlimited access to the App. You can measure with a friend without a phone by using a walking stick and holding your thumb on the base and the tip at the top of the tree. With the stick held horizontally with your thumb on the base, you guide your friend to the tip of the stick in your sightline. Then pace out from friend to tree having first measured one of your strides. It is effective if less accurate. What may surprise you is that most fully mature oak trees are no more than 25 yards high. This makes a true 40-yard pheasant a very good bird indeed. On a marsh or in the Fens trees are in short supply and your tree-honed skills may be redundant. In these situations, you must rely on the relative size of your quarry in relation to your position. This can only come from experience which is one of the reasons that the shooting can seem so difficult. It is also the reason that most wildfowling clubs insist on mentors for new members and can invoke disciplinary procedures on repeat offenders gunning at geese (and it’s almost always geese) beyond the effective range of a shotgun and certainly beyond the ability of most people. Geese are deceptive for two reasons. Firstly: they are big and our desire for ‘just one shot after all this work’ that morning combined with the fact that we assume they are closer than they are, makes ethical decision making much more difficult. Secondly: many of us don’t see them on the wing enough in our daily lives to practice the judgement of their range. Practice avoids poor decision making. This is more important than ever under the many telescopes on the sea wall.
