We live in a surveillance society. You may well think that you deserve to be left unobserved in your own home, or on your own private property, but the plain fact is that all sorts of people have the means — lawful or otherwise — to watch us anywhere and at any time.

Sometimes the motives of the watchers are good, but the overall effect can be oppressive. Apparently, the UK has more state-funded CCTV cameras per head of population than any other country in the world. Wildlife protection agencies festoon certain localities with remote operating cameras. While these occasionally produce juicy footage to be used in court cases and shown on television, I have seen little evidence that they have any deterrent effect.

Yet, if the state can use surveillance devices on us, we can also use these same bits of kit for our own legitimate purposes. The small, battery-operated devices called game or trail cameras, and almost always manufactured in the US, can have a variety of benign uses. These cameras have heat-sensitive movement sensors triggering infrared flashes, and can be set to take either still or video pictures.

They are powered by batteries and can be left in position for weeks or even months. The images are captured on an SD card and can be downloaded complete with time, date and even moon phase. They were originally designed to enable hunters to monitor game paths and food plots.

I recall a television wildlife documentary which used trail cameras set to the video mode to capture startling images of tigers and snow leopards in localities where their presence had merely been suspected. I believe similar cameras, which light up the target area at night with infrared light from invisible or “black” LEDs, have been used to spot wildcats in Scotland.

I myself have a number of trail cameras, which I use for various purposes on my farm, including monitoring deer and badger activity. What always interests me is the amount of wildlife that these devices spot during the hours of darkness. It really is an eye-opener to see roe deer threading through the cars in the yard, with supposedly watchful dogs snoring in the kennel just a few feet away.

The intriguing thing is that when I bought a new trail camera recently (one with the “black” LED fl ash and about the size of a book), the chap behind thecounter told me that he estimated that 90 per cent of the trail cameras he sold were not used to watch wildlife, but to watch people. Especially in rural areas, it seems, trail cameras are being placed to cover outbuildings, pheasant pens, gateways, rides in woodland and the like. The aim is to capture photos of miscreants as they go about their nefarious business.

One gamekeeper I know used a trail camera to find out exactly when a group of illegal off-road motorbikers were using a particular track across a bit of lonely moorland. For a variety of reasons the resulting footage was not, in itself, deemed suitable for use in court, but the remote monitoring subsequently enabled two police officers to be in the right place at the right time to ambush the bikers on their next visit.

There is something slightly creepy about the thought of remote cameras being dotted about the countryside. However, the fact is that almost every piece of the surface of Britain — including homes and gardens — has been repeatedly photographed. This includes aerial photography by the Ordnance Survey, as well as satellite photography by a variety of commercial and state bodies. Not that there is anything new in this — great swathes of rural Britain were photographed by the RAF in the 1940s. More recently, there have been camera cars from Google Steetview prowling the suburbs, while the OS-sponsored Geograph website has resulted in trespass to obtain photos of rural homes and landscapes.

With all this state and commercial snooping going on, why shouldn’t we be able to turn the tables, just occasionally?

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Whenever I show signs of getting queasy about the cost of shooting, a friend of mine breezily dismisses such grubby considerations with the claim that “money is a renewable resource.” Well, it might be for him, but those of us earthlings who inhabit the real world of mortgages and the like have no option but to ration our precious dosh.

I don’t know what you reckon is the best value shooting, but my own shortlist would include bolting rabbits, decoying woodies (or, better still, roost-flighting them on a windy winter’s evening) and hind stalking on the open hill.

Some of the best shooting is the sort that you undertake with friends, and this includes deerstalking. By sharing a rifle on the hill, you get twice the stalking, even if only half the shots. And you get the companionship as well — and all this for not much more than half the cost.

Going on a shooting trip with a few friends may be a recipe for fun, but actually organising such an event is not. This may seem a rather churlish statement, but anybody who has been in the position of corralling a bunch of friends for a trip knows that it is about as easy as herding cats.

For years, I used to run an annual goose shooting foray to Scotland. Each season, as the geese came south from their sub-arctic breeding grounds, I would start to plan for my own migration in the opposite direction to meet them. I normally tried to book the party for three or four days in the fortnight before Christmas. There is something rather satisfying about bagging a goose or three for the festive time of year.

More onerous than expected

All shooting trips involve three different opportunities for enjoyment: it may be great fun looking forward to the event; the trip itself is almost bound to be fun; and then, of course, you have the retelling of deeds and the memory for evermore.

However, the brutal truth is that actually organising such a trip is never as much fun as it should have been. For a start, the task is always more onerous than you might have expected. Trying to co-ordinate dates alone is fraught with problems and last-minute changes. This is especially so if you are trying to co-ordinate with moon phases in the hope of some moon-flighting.

But the real bugbear, believe it or not, is the matter of trying to persuade people to enjoy themselves. By that, I mean getting them actually to come along in the first place. Oh yes, they are all for it when the subject is broached over a pint, some months before the event. They swear blind that, come the day, they will be there. But when you eventually contact them to say these are the dates and we need to confirm the booking… well, it’s very different then. All sorts of excuses and prevarications emerge. You, the organiser, who is trying to do them a favour, end up having to sell the trip to them in the manner of a timeshare salesman trying to get a signature out of a reluctant victim.

Why is this? It’s not necessarily the fact that a certain amount of money is involved (though this is a factor). It seems to be more to do with the fact that some people just don’t want to commit themselves if they can possibly avoid doing so. The result, all too often, is that the trip organiser ends up with frayed nerves — not to mention a plundered bank account. This last is an unfortunate but apparently inevitable consequence of having to pay for at least part of the trip at the time of booking, and then trying to recover the shared costs from the participants.

Frankly, the whole thing is a nightmare, and I stopped doing the actual organising of such trips many years ago. Nowadays, I generally rely on kind friends to do most of the organising for me. Naturally, I am truly grateful.

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"Here are a couple of empties you left behind,” said Gerry. What he really meant, of course, was: “Look, I’ve had to clean up your litter, you slob.” I couldn’t help bristling. The two empty shotgun cartridge cases in question were made of paper, I pointed out. We had been shooting under the moon and it can be very difficult in such circumstances to catch all your empties. The possibility of not retrieving every empty is one of the very reasons I prefer
paper cases. And I always try to use fibre wads, too. Most of my cartridges are biodegradable.

None of this cut any ice with Gerry. “They’re not fully biodegradable,” he said of my paper cases. “Look, the heads are brass. You shouldn’t be leaving such things on pasture where there is livestock.”

As it happens, I have four of the same spent paper cases rolling around in the open back of my pickup. Within a week, I noticed, their ostensibly brass heads were spotted with rust. I have now buried a couple of these cases in the soil, with the spot carefully marked, and I am going to monitor their deterioration. This is my own little version of a body farm. I am praying for the complete disintegration of the cases. When little more than rust and dust is left, I intend to scoop it into a small plastic evidence bag and post it to Gerry — together with a note telling him to put it in his pipe and smoke it. Ha!

A rogue plastic case

In the meantime, I am delighted to say that I caught Gerry out. He was using a semi-auto .410 to shoot pheasants (no, don’t ask...) and after I had sneakily searched where he had been standing, I found one of his empty cases. It was plastic, and not a lot bigger than the end of a pencil. Being dark green it was actually very hard to see, so perhaps one could forgive Gerry. If one was inclined to be forgiving, that is.

I marched over to him, holding the spent case as one might hold a used needle and syringe, and said: “Lucky I found this. It could have done real damage if a cow had eaten it.” I then loftily expounded on our responsibilities to the wider environment.

At the same time, this really has got me thinking about plastic. Most plastic is virtually indestructible. Some types are now labelled “photodegradable”, but this seems a bit of a cop-out, as far as I can tell, because it seems to mean no more than the wretched stuff will eventually break down into tiny pieces which will remain in the soil for ever more.

Furthermore, I have seen for myself that tree shelters, which are made
from this type of plastic, seem to remain intact for far longer than the
manufacturers claim.

There is some plastic that is supposed to be truly biodegradable, but there is a lot of controversy about the manufacturer’s claims and, given the timescales involved, nobody seem to be quite sure what the side effects might be.

What we can be sure of is that plastic is a serious form of pollution. I once saw a deeply depressing television documentary about the amount of plastic waste — chiefly bags — that is now floating around our oceans. These placky bags are everywhere — even in the Arctic — and they snare and strangle all sorts of wildlife. Even when marine plastic breaks down into tiny granules, it is concentred by ocean currents into zones of “plastic soup”, one of which is twice the size of Texas.

Back on land, most plastic waste is simply buried in landfill, where it remains for our children’s children’s children to worry about. Some is incinerated — in which case it releases all sorts of toxic fumes.

Which brings us back to shotgun ammunition. The more I think about it, the use of plastic for shotgun cartridges and wadding is pretty indefensible, isn’t it?

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