Organising the dates for the season is never straightforward. There is always a tendency to look at last year’s dates and adjust accordingly. This year however it seemed even more of a priority to give us the best chance of a great season.

It has been discussed many times over the last few years that we shoot the syndicate dates very close together, not giving the pheasants a chance to return and settle on the estate.

A recent article from the GWCT presented the data that to shoot a bird in January requires 4x as many birds to be put down than it requires to shoot the same number pre-New Year.

So with this in mind, we have ordered the poults to be delivered  as early as possible (last week of June) so that we can start shooting at the beginning of the season.

With that as the marker, we have then looked to space out the dates as well as the diary will allow. This provides us with 3 of our 4 core days pre-Christmas and our final core dates as soon after as possible.

Comments have been made about no shooting over the festive period.

Unfortunately, Christmas and New Year have fallen on Saturdays this year, which I have assumed would not be popular with many of the Saturday Syndicate guns (although maybe secretly desirable) and neither would shooting the preceding days of Christmas Eve and Hogmanay.

There is the potential to advance a Saturday to Thursday 30th which would give 2 weeks from the Thursday 16th shoot.

Alternatively, the Saturdays could shoot the 18th in leu of the Thursdays moving to the 30th and then the Thursdays also shooting the 8th Jan i.e. 2 shoot days in a row for each syndicate. This would also then require a decision of what to do with the 20th Jan which would become an ALL day and probably be best to move to the 22nd.

Candidly there are probably as many opinions as there are dates so if either option 1 or 2 generates a consensus then we can move these dates accordingly, but the earlier dates will stand as is. Feel free to discuss between yourselves on the WhatsApp group (message me with your mobile number if you want adding) and come back to me otherwise I will assume all dates stand as is.

Ducks

Pheasants

Saturdays

Oct 2nd

Nov 6th

Dec 4th

Jan 8th

Thursdays

Oct 21st

Nov 18th

Dec 16th

Jan 20th

Extras

Jan 29th

Feb 1st