17 Summer Reflections and Season Beginnings: A Shooting Update

The sweltering heat of summer provides the backdrop for our seventh episode, where we pause to reflect on recent adventures and look ahead to the sporting calendar now unfolding before us. The timing couldn't be more significant—just four days after the Glorious Twelfth has ushered in the grouse season, with partridge and pheasant seasons standing ready in the wings for their September and October debuts.

Against this seasonal transition, I'm celebrating a personal milestone: harvesting my first fallow deer during a whistle-stop tour to southern England. Though the stalk itself was straightforward—more about patience in a high seat than challenging terrain—it represents another step toward completing my collection of British deer species. With only Chinese water deer remaining unchecked, plans are already forming for that final pursuit. This exchange of hunting opportunities extends both ways, as I prepare to host several visitors eager to experience their first Scottish deer stalks, embodying the belief that shared adventures create stronger bonds than solitary pursuits.

The countryside pulses with summer activity—the Scottish roebuck rut is tapering off after an active period, while harvest operations clear fields to create perfect conditions for predator control. Our pheasant rearing fields remain busy as birds move to their new homes, thankfully unaffected by the bird flu challenges plaguing many game farms. Our foresight in maintaining a closed flock with on-site incubation capabilities has proven invaluable, allowing us to continue operations while others dependent on French imports have struggled. Join us as we navigate this rich period between seasons, where every day brings new opportunities for those connected to the land and its rhythms.

Chapters

• 0:28 Welcome to Episode 7
• 1:23 Game Season Beginning
• 2:07 Fallow Deer Hunting Adventure
• 3:54 Pheasant Rearing Updates
• 4:46 Avoiding Bird Flu Impact

Transcript

Speaker 2: 0:28

Hello, hello and welcome to the Outdoor Gibbon Podcast, episode 7. Thought we might try just a bit of a recap in this podcast, looking back at what we've done so far what the future's going to hold.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Obviously, with it being the summer, it's been incredibly warm in this heat wave. Tying guests down has been a bit tricky. We do have them lined up for future podcasts, but at the moment it's uh, yeah, it's just one of those things getting everybody in the right place at the right time is never, never, easy, but we're getting there, slowly and uh, gradually building. So the significant date at the moment is that this podcast is released on the 16th of august 2022, which means that we're four days into the grouse season, kind of marks the start again of another shooting season. So it won't be long before the partridge season opens on the 1st of sept. September, and then followed closely after that by 1st of October, being the pheasant season, and that's it. That's the game season well and truly into full swing.

Speaker 2: 1:55

The roebuck rut in Scotland is was happening last week. It's just tailing off now slightly, but there's been lots of activity and lots of good bucks taken as well, so it's a busy time of year. Harvest is in full swing, which is clearing fields rapidly. This is now allowing us to to get onto stubble parks, uh, enabling us to uh to get onto those pesky foxes that are around the place. We're lucky we don't have that many, but they will be out and about and with a nicely cut field it's ideal to be able to get out there and and get them before they get anywhere near our pheasants.

Speaker 2: 2:34

So for those of you that follow me on social media may have seen that last week I was on a bit of a mission whistle stop tour down to the south of england. Um, I called in a swap hunt with two guys oxen, deer and has hunts and managed to bag my first fallow deer. Uh, it was a fallow cricket, it was a bit of an interesting stalk. It was more there it is. Uh, sneak around this field, get some hype by climbing up into a high seat, wait for him to pop back out again, take the shot, and that was it. But it's still a fallow and that marks another species off the list. So one species left to get, which is the Chinese water deer, and we hopefully will plan to visit the guys again at some point and potentially get that chinese water deer later in the year, if not next year.

Speaker 2: 3:32

On the flip side of that, I've got quite a few guys coming to visit to have a go at some scottish deer. So I think the two guys who are hunting with are coming up. There's also another chap going to be heading up to to have a go for his first stalk actually, so that should be quite exciting something to uh, to get some information on and build from there. And yeah, it's always good to share these things and at the end of the day, I think sharing the hunt is is more fun than just going out and sort of paying the privilege to shoot it. At the end of the day, there's a bit more camaraderie and banter to be to be had along the way.

Speaker 2: 4:11

As well as that, we've obviously been catching pheasants on the rearing field and getting those out to the new owners. So plenty, plenty going on there, lots of birds traveling away and around the place, so there's plenty of shooting around the northeast of scotland that hasn't been affected by the bird flu pandemic, luckily really, because we had the closed flock and able to incubate our own eggs on site, thus keeping everything in-house, and aren't reliant on the importation of eggs from France or any any chicks or dales from France.

Speaker 1: 4:46

© transcript Emily Beynon.