Total Bag – 46

• 42 Pheasants
• 2 Pigeon
• 1 Mallard
• 1 Jay

It was not the best weather all week, but the enthusiasm of both old and new guns for the first day of their Tulchan season was obvious. All guns cowered in their cars waiting for the rain to lessen, which it did and then stopped leaving us a dry and occasionally sunny day.

The Day Brief introduced the 3 news guns, covered the quarry for the day and drew numbers for pegs. It took the first two drives to understand the “Frank system” of numbers (2 teams rotating within their team), but I will return to this later.

As with the Thursdays, the traditional drives were approached with some experimentation.

The first drive had the guns standing for quite a while as the beating teams of Derek, Chalky, John, Ross and Dillan took up the plantation, Keillor Road and finally Sandy’s drive. The birds hadn’t read the script and ran past Sandy’s drive and were on their way to Drummick Drive, but Frank intercepted and turned them back. Interestingly very few birds flew across the road, turning back towards the Beeches Drive and away from the gun line.

The second drive was tackled in 2 stages: Firstly bringing up the wood from the Buchanty Road to the Weedy Field and then repositioning the gun line so they straddled from the field, the front of the pond and round to the gate at the bottom of the arm. For this second part of the drive the beating team pushed the beating line through the reeds and then rounded to push the line towards the standing guns. Unfortunately the flush point was right in front of the core guns and most birds were not high enough to take a sporting shot at.

For drive three Frank positioned the guns at the bottom of the arm and the beaters took it up the arm to produce a couple of birds that came back down and over the standing guns.

Lunch was enjoyable with the weather having dried off and the eating out the back of tail gates felt traditional and fun.

The Dell was the 4th drive of the day, but with Glenalmond not having shot yet this year, there were very few birds that came over the line.

The beaters then tried to bring in the birds behind Frank’s and present them to guns lined up along the fence in front of the Main Pond. All these guns were unfortunately bystanders as the birds flew low over the ride and across the pond. I suspect these birds were returning to the new pen that Derek has built in that area.

Finally, we moved up to the Boulders, Plantation and Drummick Drives. The process of beating one drive into the next was working, but unfortunately, some of the beaters positioned themselves too early between the Plantation and Drummick Drives and the handful of birds that had been pushed forward reversed their flight back towards the neighbouring farm.

It was a delight to be out and see familiar faces and meet some new ones. The morale remained high, but there was a sense of disappointment from the seasoned members that that bag size wasn’t the expected 60s and that we had worked quite hard for the numbers that we did achieve.

Let’s hope that the weather leading up to the next few days is dryer and that we get a bit of a cold snap to bring the birds closer to the estate again. Glenalmond is also due to start shooting soon and we will be able to help them return their birds across the water.

As mentioned earlier, the number system Frank tried to deploy was done with best intentions, but feedback from guns is that it didn’t really work. We will discuss employing a more traditional rotation of numbers: moving up 2 from 1 through to 12, with 1-8 being standing guns and 9-12 being walking/ back guns. If anyone has any other feedback or observations from either of the days shooting then please do let me know – armstrongnj@tulchanshoot.co.uk or in the comments section below.

One final thing I would like to note is the effort everyone is making to adhere to the COVID rules. Hopefully these will not constrict our shooting over the coming weeks, but it important that we adhere to whatever instructions that are issued. Given the experience of Saturday this did not impede the enjoyment of the day and I am thoroughly looking forward to the next day out.

Neil