Many consider the Edwardian years in England to have been the halcyon age of driven shooting when enormous bags of wild birds were shot. The principles of establishing a driven shoot at that time remain largely unchanged. In the modern era, the late Sir Joseph Nickerson was considered one of the best game shots in Britain, certainly one of the most prolific, and in his book A Shooting Man's Creed, he explains the art of driving pheasants...
"The art of driving pheasants is to make them walk or run from where they want to be to some cover from which you can induce them to fly high over the guns. With game crops now being used on such a scale, their siting so that birds fly well out of them offers plenty of scope for imagination and is crucial to good sport".
"Even the reared pheasant soon becomes a sensitive and wary bird, and when it feels it is in danger its first instinct is to run and keep running; so it has to be made to fly which it would rather not do".
"In a wood that is being well beaten few of the birds will fly before their final emergence over the guns when they will still have all their flying strength. A pheasant is a bit like a lion: it can accelerate and move very fast over a few hundred yards but needs a rest before it can repeat the performance. So birds that have already flown during a drive through a long wood are likely to make poor targets. To discourage unnecessary flying there should be no frightening noises from the beaters. Only the tap of their sticks should be audible and dogs should not be on the line unless on leads".
"For the best results the birds must want to fly in the direction where you have placed the guns. For preference, this should be accomplished by beating them away from 'home', usually the wood where they were released and are fed, and then driving them back in that desirable direction".
"Surprisingly, in my experience a reared pheasant will often fly higher than a wild one if it sees a line of guns. The wild bird, being more wily, will slip out the side if it can, but if the reared bird is going back 'home' it will fly high and keep climbing on a direct path".
"The pheasant has extremely acute hearing, as witness the way thunder or a distant noise will set off the cock-birds crowing for miles around, often before it is audible to humans. Surely there is a lesson to be learned from that --- don't make unnecessary noise by talking or laughing during pheasant drives. While pheasants are obviously frightened by the sound of shooting, especially when they have heard it before, they will still fly over the guns if these are sited on the flight-path homewards".
"The main problem with pheasants as the season progresses is their tendency to flush, so the majority of the birds in a drive may fly over the guns in one or more clouds. When game-cover, like maize, has become very thin through weathering it is almost impossible to prevent flushing, which is why I prefer frost resistant kale as cover to drive birds from".
How true all this advice is today and at Totara Lodge Shoot we have created a traditional English driven shoot by simply replicating the details developed since Edwardian times.
"The number of birds we saw in steady even flushes on the last day of the season meant each gun had good to great shooting at each peg".
