Tim posted
I understand that the day after a high bird shoot, the keepers are out again with their dogs to 'hoover up' the birds that were either missed or died later under some cover, often many hundreds of yards behind the gun line.
Tim, that does happen, but not just on "high bird" drives. On any shooting day there will be a team of pickers up each with multiple dogs who will be active well behind the line looking for winged birds and runners, and someone will be out the following day too. The keepers wouldn't usually make it a special job, just take close care as they are doing the normal rounds.
The numbers found on the day following, relative to the overall bag isn't in my experience a function of the quality of the shooting team, so much as the efficiency of the pickers up on the day of the shoot.
I used to organise the pickers up on several shoots, some of them the "high bird" variety and I'd take a wise old dog with me on the day following to look for the cripples precisely with the objective of seeing how well or poorly we'd done the day before. My impression was that if we'd done our job properly there were no more pricked birds from a "normal" day than on a high bird one.
It's quite rare to find a dead bird on these occasions; if you do it's usually under a tree where it's perched for a while and then expired.
Also interesting is the examination of those old cock birds that are shot by use of a .22 after the season proper closes. I dressed out twenty such off a really high bird Welsh shoot about ten days ago and found just one shotgun pellet; there might have been a couple more but all these birds were fine big fellows in prime nick. So the residual stock having been shot at for five months don't show a high incidence of non - fatal wounding.
Personally I find the high bird mania a bit distasteful (and big numbers too) but I suspect this is an old fashioned and uncommercial view.
Three old dogs, two with wisdom!
Eug
