Reared with a rural attitude to hunting and shooting

CELEBRITY FANS:PETER CUNNINGHAM Novelist, 63, Shooting

What do you shoot?Woodcock.

When?I shoot in season, effectively from November until the end of January. Even though you're allowed shoot from September 1st, because of breeding and other considerations, the woodcock are only in Ireland for that short space of time.

When did you start shooting?As a kid; my father gave me a gun when I was about 15. I learned to shoot pigeons and things where we used to live down by the river in Waterford, also with a friend out in Passage East we used to shoot the evening flight of pigeons and some duck.

I grew up with a rural attitude, I suppose, to hunting and shooting.

Is shooting a sport?I very definitely think it is a sport. If five or six of us go out on a day if we got three, four, five woodcock, that would be a good day. The woodcocks are the canniest birds. They live in a loop of continual migration, an arc, if you can imagine the map. They start in Poland in the summer, make their way to Scandinavia, down through the UK and the west of Ireland . . . into France and northern Spain, then continuing back to Poland.

They live in woods, as their name suggests. They’re a largish, bulky bird with short legs, and a long, tapering bill. They’re largely nocturnal. They spend most of their day in dense cover. They navigate astrally, by the stars.

What do you do with them?We eat them. They are the most sublime table bird. When you shoot them, you hang them for a few days, pluck and roast them. There's no fat on these birds. They're the healthiest of all foods.

There’s no reason to suggest the shooting of them depletes their population. Their population is more endangered by forestry depletion and urbanisation.

What's the attraction with shooting woodcock?It's a very equal contest. That might sound odd – you've got a gun, the little bird hasn't got a gun. The woodcock are so elusive. They're so difficult to find.

You could compare it to, if you like, the sport of driven pheasant, in which the pheasant is reared and released and driven out over the heads of gunmen. That is not a very equal contest. You cannot rear woodcock. They’re completely wild birds.

Then there’s a big physical challenge because we go out at nine in the morning. We’d go all day over very demanding terrain – woods, hills – in search of these birds. When you do flush them out, they’re so difficult to shoot because they’re very wily – they dodge and dart. They present one of the most demanding challenges in shooting sport.

What safety precautions do you take?Half a dozen people with guns is about the maximum you can feel comfortable with because what you're doing is surrounding copses of woods and then somebody's going in to beat out the woodcock. One of the obvious dangers is that everybody would shoot each other because you're standing in a circle. You've got to have experienced "guns" who really know what they're doing.

When you’re swinging a gun, you never swing it through a place where another person is standing. You have to be continually aware of where the other person stands. Often, you’re shooting at eye level.

Do you have a favourite gun?I still have the same gun. It cost about £65 when it was bought back in God knows when. I've never bought a gun; my father bought me this gun. It's a Spanish gun. It's called an AyA – Aguirre y Aranzabal. It's a middle of the road, a Ford Escort, of a gun. The barrels are side by side whereas in many guns nowadays, like Winchesters, the barrels are under and over so if you bring the gun to your shoulder, with my gun, you're looking down at two parallel barrels pointing outwards. There's an awful lot of looking after guns – you oil them and clean them.

Have you had any hair-raising experiences?I've often had experiences where I've been lost, at 5.30pm on a winter's evening, in pre-mobile phone days, out in vast expanses of heath, having to walk towards very distant lights.

Why would you inculcate a young person in shooting?It would bring them in contact with nature, in its purest sense. It would open their minds to all sorts of things in a way many people might assume is politically incorrect, and to help them understand the old traditions.

• Peter Cunningham's new novel, Capital Sins, is published by New Island.