When such weather as this comes, history is going to be made, history that will last a hardy honest small community a decade or more to discuss, and for the robust it is well worth joining in, but it is also worth paying for, and a good price too. It is true that by showing you around a wildfowler does not lose his own sport, or not all of it; but unless you are a good sportsman as well as a good shot, your joint bags will not equal that of an experienced fowler by himself, and consequently luxuries at zero and in a gale of snow have to be paid for on a basis far higher than ordinary keeper’s tips. That is, they have to if you want to come in for the cream of the sport.
The “Gaze” System
The “gaze” system of shooting is a Hampshire Avon equivalent for the shooting from tubs that has been practised for many years. The shooting from the latter is much more suitable for large marshes and open sheets of water, whereas the “gaze” is a brushwood or furze construction suitable for the river bank. But they are alike in this—that the shooting of many guns keeps the fowl upon the move, whether they ring round pools and marshes or follow the course of a stream. The habit of all fowl to prefer flying over water enables a duck “drive” (for these two methods are duck drives) to be successfully brought off without drivers. We have read of Mr. Abel Chapman’s success by the tub method in the Spanish marshes, and also of a royal son of King George III. and his want of success in shooting fowl from a tub on the Berkeley Castle haunts of the wild goose. At the latter other methods are now adopted, but the sport is not very great, although this is because of the difficulty of getting shots, and not because of any scarcity of fowl. Mr. Chapman had splendid sport in Spain, but the fowl there were greatly in excess of their numbers in England, and besides, they appear to have flown conveniently low. Much shooting by many guns generally makes the fowl mount very high, unless the shooters are very widely distributed, and really the great objection to wild wild-duck is that they take a mean advantage of the gun-maker, and often fly at heights no shot gun will reach them. But very much depends on the frequency with which they are disturbed, and unquestionably they have very pretty days of sport on the Hampshire rivers by means of these “gazes.” Where there are very many birds some will be certain to fly low enough to shoot, and they do not usually mount, in flying down a river, as they do in circling round a pool, to see whether a descent is safe. Probably this is because they believe themselves to be leaving danger behind when following the course of a river.
In making these “gazes” it is necessary that there should be protection from the sight of the fowl coming from both up and down the river, and also that the shelters should be so arranged as to enable shooters to get into them without flushing fowl close by. The way the shooting is arranged is for the manager to point out each man’s “gaze,” or hide, or butt, to him, and give him just long enough to get there a minute or two before shooting is to begin. Each gunner is requested not to fire until a certain time by the watch, which is fixed upon so as to allow the man with farthest to go to comfortably reach his “gaze” before time is up. Mr. Robert Hargreaves, who has done a good deal of this kind of shooting as well as most others, is of opinion that teal for the second barrel give the most difficult of all shooting. He describes the action of a company of teal as like the bursting of a bomb when they are shot at by the first barrel, so that for the next shot the game may be anywhere and going in any direction. This seems very admirable description, but it is only thanks to those “gazes” that the first shot is not just as difficult as the second. The teal seems to be the only bird that can set the laws of gravity wholly at defiance, and at the glint of a moving gun can shoot straight upwards, apparently at the same speed it was travelling forward before being frightened. Often the bird is by this means out of range by sheer altitude before the shooter has recovered from the intended allowance ahead that he expected to have to give, and began to swing for, before the teal converted themselves into living rockets, and thus disconcerted the shooter.
The beauty of this kind of duck shooting is that every species of duck has a different flight from its successor, that the shooter never knows what is coming, nor from what direction it will be. One never does see all the grouse that pass near enough for a shot, and then one is only watching one way; but in “gaze” shooting it is necessary to watch every way. This is essentially sport in which humanity in a double sense is the best policy. To shoot farther than you can kill is to wound duck that will possibly die out at sea, and it is also to send all the duck within hearing up one storey higher, and to spoil the sport of your fellows as a consequence.
The best sizes of shot for duck are probably No. 7 or 8 if reliance is to be placed upon hitting head or neck, or No. 4 if it is desired that body shots should kill. Probably No. 6 is the very worst size to use, because it has power enough to get through the breast feathers but not through the breast bone of a duck at a moderate range. No. 8 does not appear to the writer to do much damage to a coming duck unless it catches him in the head and neck, and then it is fatal, and that is all that can be said of No. 6, which has so much less chance of hitting the vitals. There is a very well developed horror of plastering, and that is the reason why No. 4 is very popular for wild duck. A choke bore and No. 4 shot are a good combination for this sport.
Flapper Shooting
Flapper shooting is killing wild duck before they have got their full powers of flight. Its sport consists in getting shots. Very good spaniels are wanted to make the flappers rise at all. They are very easy to kill, and even teal flushed before the sportsman are about as easy as a sitting mark. Indeed, to some people they are more easy, because a sitting mark is very often missed not only by pigeon shooters but also by platers of guns.
Encouraging the Fowl
It seems curious that wild fowl that spend most of their time in the water particularly dislike wind, but so it is, and in making teal pits or improving them, or in attracting fowl to a river, the more artificial shelter you can afford the fowl the more they will be attracted to your water. Near the coast this is generally well understood, and there, too, the roughness of the sea greatly influences the birds to seek peace and shelter inland; so that there are naturally good days and bad ones for shooting from the “gazes.” In a smooth sea and fine weather duck seem to prefer to go to bed, which they do in the daytime, on the sea. But in rough weather the majority will find out any quiet places on fresh water where the presence of other duck prove to them that there is safety. For this reason some half-tame wild duck are a great attraction to the really wild ones, but the former can be only kept at home by good feeding, for wing-clipped fowl are no attraction to the really wild birds. Home-bred birds appear not so much to attract as to go and fetch the wild ones, and this is the reason that wing-clipped birds will not do. On the “gaze” system 800 duck have been killed in four days’ shooting by a party. Mr. John Mills, of Bisterne, using an 8 and a 12 bore, has killed 130 fowl in a day from one “gaze,” and on one occasion 100 cartridges were shot away from one “gaze” in a few minutes, and the shooter ran out of cartridges and had to stop and look at the fowl for half an hour. He killed 60 duck, and thought he could have doubled his bag with another 100 cartridges. This was at Lord Manners’ place, Avon Tyrrell. In parts of Dorsetshire as well as Pembrokeshire a great deal of attention has been given to the formation of teal pits and the cultivation of wild wild-fowl, but the biggest bags made have fallen far short of those mentioned above, possibly because the fowl are generally taken in an ordinary day’s shooting of other game, and not in specially arranged big days.