Where did you start your shooting career? I mean, did you have access to a bit of land where you could shoot? I was lucky enough to be brought up in the country, so I was able to walk out the door with my first shotgun (a single-barrelled 12-bore that had an unnerving habit of opening itself after each shot) and wander about with intent. Many of today’s youngsters, growing up in one of the most crowded countries in Europe, are not so fortunate.

Lack of ready access to land on which to go shooting must be one of the key factors limiting participation in the sport. Aware of this, BASC has been doing a lot of good work — not least in helping wildfowling clubs to buy or lease their marshes, and arranging various deerstalking schemes.

In the US, meanwhile, our shooting comrades do things on an altogether more ambitious scale that is wondrous to behold and gladdens the heart. Recently, the National Rifl e Association (NRA) and other prohunter groups have really got their teeth into the state-owned sector in a way which is simply beyond comprehension over here, cowed as we are by the massed ranks of politically correct protectionism. Can you imagine us demanding of public bodies such as Natural England, Scottish Natural Heritage and the Countryside Council for Wales to be allowed more access to shoot on state-owned land? Well, in the US, our sporting friends are doing just that.

A coalition of fieldsports groups, including the mighty NRA, Safari Club International and the US Sportsmen’s Alliance, is supporting a Bill in Congress to release millions of acres of public lands administered by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from continued management as single-purpose wilderness areas with little or no hunting.

Currently, approximately 43million acres of state-owned land across the US is being managed as wilderness area, even though the Forest Service and BLM have stated that many of these areas are not suitable for true wilderness designation. However, because of current law, this marginal land must be managed in a restrictive fashion. These restrictions limit motorised access, impede many forest management practices, and hinder the public’s ability to access and enjoy these lands.

Now, a new piece of legislation has been introduced to lift the restrictive management practices on these 43million acres. (Just to put this into perspective, the whole of the UK amounts to 60million acres, of which England accounts for 32million acres.) Supporters say that lifting the current restrictions would return these lands to multiple-use management, allowing hunters and other users better access to these areas through roads and paths that are already in place.

According to the NRA, protectionist management severely restricts hunter access in three ways: by failing to authorise roads and trails that would help disabled and elderly hunters; by stopping hunters from using vehicles for game retrieval; and by making areas virtually inaccessible due to the closure of existing roads and paths. (Again, just think how these sorts of lobbying lines would play in the UK. Fun, isn’t it?)

The NRA argues that allowing these lands to be managed for multiple uses opens them up to healthy forest management, better access for firefighting capabilities, and numerous recreational activities, such as hunting and fishing — all of which represent an economic benefit for local economies.

An NRA spokesman said: “Unlike the current ‘one-size-fits-all’ management of these lands, this Bill will allow local communities to determine whether multiple-use management is most appropriate and improve access for sportsmen.” Wonderful stuff. That’s the great thing about the Yanks — say what you like about their weak beer, but they are hell on wheels when it comes to defending freedom. Unlike us, they’ve not forgotten that public authorities are supposed to work for the people, and not the other way round.

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If you don’t release pheasants, but a neighbour does, are you ever justified in placing feeders on your own land? We all know that this sort of thing happens. I have always tended to have sympathy for the hardworking gamekeeper who sees the fruits of his labour walking across the boundary and then being bagged by all and sundry. It must be deeply frustrating for him.

In law, game belongs to whoever owns the land (or its game rights) on which the game happens to be found at the time. But, as we all know, being legally right is not always the same as being morally right.

I was thinking of a case where an estate complained bitterly about losing birds to a neighbouring farm. It was said that, every year, a host of feeders appeared around the perimeter of the farm in question at the start of the season. Later, the farm’s owner would invite a bunch of friends around for a day’s shooting — outrageous, you might say. Recently, however,I happened to hear another side of the same story, and it gave me pause for thought.

I was told that the owner of the farm in question has held a small shoot day every year for many decades. A few old friends conducted a walk-and-stand day, with the total bag — which included duck and wild grey partridges — seldom exceeding 50. Lunch was an important part of the occasion, and the whole event had an atmosphere of relaxed friendliness, rather than frenetic sport.

Some time ago, the neighbouring estate was purchased by an international businessman. He hired a team of keen young gamekeepers and began releasing vast numbers of pheasants and redlegs. In recent years, I am told, certain drives on this estate have come to sound like the artillery barrage at the start of the battle of El Alamein. The alleged size of the daily bags (not to mention the tips lavished on the keepers by wealthy overseas guests) has become the stuff of local folklore.

Sitting cheek-by-jowl with this giant shooting enterprise, the little residential farm found itself being swamped. The farm’s owner had, over the decades, carefully preserved a lot of cover, chiefly in the form of thorn bushes around a series of ancient carp ponds. He also managed his hedges for wildlife, and conserved the small stock of wild game. Once the neighbouring estate began releasing huge numbers of birds, it was inevitable that some of them would wander on to the farm.

Indeed, the transfer of birds may even have been exacerbated by the estate’s own stocking policy — locally, there is a deep-running suspicion that the estate is releasing more pheasants than its own ground can carry.

Under surveillance

There is no doubt that the farm’s owner did maintain a few feeders here and there — but then, he had always done so. He did not have much of a say in whether or not he wanted to host a lot of released pheasants on his land. In his view, a certain number were bound to arrive of their own accord, and would proceed to take advantage of his property and the work he had put in over the years. Given this, why shouldn’t he reap at least part of the reward?

Yes, the bag on his little shoot did go up, but not to anything extreme — it’s just not that sort of shoot. Even so, he found that his traditional day of shooting for a few friends on his own land attracted some unwelcome interest.

“We found we were being watched through binoculars by blokes in parked pickups,” said my informant, who had been a guest. “We guessed they were from the estate. If they had wanted to know what we were shooting, they could have simply asked, but I suppose they actually wanted us to know that we were being watched. It was all a bit creepy, really.”

The sad conclusion I draw from this is that there are always at least two sides to any story.

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I have an idea about a legal way of scaring raptors away from vulnerable gamebirds. It is based on the fact that a gamekeeper I know uses radios in his release pens to deter buzzards. He told me that the deterrent effect soon wears off, but in the period during which it still works, talk-based programmes are best. BBC Radio Four’s Today programme scares the hell out of raptors, apparently.

Anyway, my brilliant idea takes up this theme and develops it further. Instead of radios, why not MP3 or CD players? The ideal thing would be to play a ecording of somebody at the RSPB endlessly reciting the text from its latest Birdcrime report. That should do the trick (mind you, it might be rather too effective — is it an offence to bore a raptor to death?)

It’s not that I want to be flippant about a serious subject. And, to be fair to the RSPB, its recent media releases about raptor persecution have been much better at distinguishing between the law-abiding majority of gamekeepers and the small minority who step out of line. That is very welcome. But the tortuous lengths the charity goes to in order to wring media coverage out of the same old story, year after year, are remarkable. Why, even the BBC is beginning to ask a few sensible questions when it receives the annual propaganda handout.

Unhelpful statistics

This year, the RSPB’s “dodgy dossier” showed an 18 per cent decline in overall raptor persecution incidents in the last reporting period — not exactly helpful to the fund-raising efforts, eh? However, this unhelpful fact was not exactly highlighted, being casually dismissed with the line: the number of confirmed incidents was slightly below the average. Yeah, right.

I mentioned this to a senior RSPB official (whom I won’t name, because I didn’t warn him he might be quoted). He retorted that a decline in reported raptor persecution incidents didn’t necessarily mean a decline in raptor persecution. Have you got that? Pressed further, he explained that raptor crime was diffi cult to detect, and that the recorded figures were such a small proportion of the underlying reality that you couldn’t put much reliance on movements from one year to the next.

I’ll say. But consider this: if there had been an 18 per cent year-onyear rise in the number of raptor persecution incidents, do you think the RSPB would have exercised the same caution? Of course not. It would have screamed blue murder and milked it for every last drop of publicity.

A sense of faint desperation is evident in other parts of the RSPB’s handout. For example, we learn that North Yorkshire tops the national league of raptor poisoning, with a shameful 54 recorded incidents — ooh-er! Except, only a minority of those 54 incidents involved poison. Plus, only 10 of them were actually confi rmed anyway, and, in any case, the total figure was higher three years ago. In fact, overall poisoning incidents — at a total of 128 nationally — were considerably below their 2006 peak of 192.

But, back to North Yorkshire, where it seems you cannot walk your dog without being hit on the head by all the raptors that are falling out of the sky. Indeed, there are hardly any left, according to some lobbyists. Somehow, raptors observe a strict no-fly zone when they reach the county boundary. You can scan the sky for days without seeing a single bird with a hooked beak, apparently.

Mind you, illegal poisoning is no joke. Regular readers will know my strong opposition to this nefarious practice. And it seems that walking a dog in North Yorkshire really is a dangerous business. I say this because the detailed breakdown of the RSPB’s fi gures lists the case of a dog that was poisoned in the Yorkshire Dales after feeding on poisoned bait. That’s terrible, of course, but should it really have been listed as a “confirmed” raptor persecution incident when no raptor was actually killed?

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