BACK PAGES:The Edwardian era's passion for hunting, shooting and fishing, especially the first two, can be difficult for many modern urban dwellers to understand. An anonymous writer, signing himself "Derry Quin", made a good stab at explaining the attractions of duck shooting in in 1928.
AN INTERESTING item in the forecast of the proposed new game laws is that mallards, widgeon and teal may be raised to the rank of game. These birds take such a high place in the affections of sportsmen that they will welcome any measure ensuring their decent protection.
Affection is, perhaps, a strange word to use in connection with killing. It is no mere figure of speech when one hears a shooting man say that he loves a duck or widgeon in flight, but it is not so much for the killing as for their high sporting qualities, their swiftness of flight, and, above all, for their natural wariness and uncontrollable wildness.
They can, and do, place themselves in a position of absolute safety so obvious that the gunner makes no attempt to follow. He can only match their mastery of him by patience and wit, knowing that there are certain duck habits which will bring him and them on terms again, provided that he can read the rules of nature and accept the conditions imposed.
Stalking and shooting (widgeon) on the water, or as they rise, on the rare occasions when this is possible, fail to give the same sense of keen satisfaction as when they are taken high overhead in fading light. Such wholesale methods as the decoy or punt gun are occupations, not sport. The latter may be excellent fun and high art for the man behind the cannon, but it is anathema to the shore shooter. Conditions are best for flighting widgeon when they are, humanly speaking, almost unbearable. If the moon smiles down on a peaceful world, the birds prefer its vicinity to that of our treacherous globe. If she is winking in and out behind tracing, fleecy clouds, and nature is tearing itself to pieces in fury, they hug the shelter of sand-hills or hedges, and then is the time when shore craft and bird lore pay the man who faces the turmoil.
If he has anticipated the correct line, which varies with the direction of the wind, or the place where birds have rested, he will be in position just about dusk or before dawn. The night shooter must have good sight and acute hearing; for it is often only the soft purring of wings that gives the birds away. It is an acquired art to recognise the direction from which the sound comes.
The night may be bitterly cold and stormy, but he cannot muffle up too much, without hindering freedom of swing or altering the pitch of his gun. A sheet of brown paper stuffed inside his shirt makes a warm chest-protector, and gloves without fingers are sometimes worn.
A hedge may give shelter if the line is overland, but usually his stand is on an open, windswept mud-bank, where the rising tide may menace retreat at any moment.
Propped against the storm, with eyelashes clotted with salt-laden spray, he stares into the gloom, waiting for that swiftly-moving blur that looks like a whiff of passing smoke, but which he knows to be a bunch of widgeon hurtling in from the sea. Half a dozen snap shots, a bird or two down in the soft mud, buried to their tail feathers, a hurried pick up, and a race against the rising tide – that is widgeon flighting as it is done in many parts of Ireland. There is no class of shooting that asks more of its followers, or repays with a greater sense of joy and pride if there is a single bird in the bag.
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