'The Burren' by U.A Fanthorpe

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Undomesticated. A great grey
Migrainous cramp of rock,
Squeezed, compressed and scoured
To treeless dryness, and in the air,
The noise of waters underground.

Bloody-minded sort of place, it looks,
Where old faiths shrivel, old names are defaced.
But out of these barren flags, this crazed landscape,
Jut the resilient heads of a melting-pot
Of flowers from the high and cold, the low and hot,
The wet, wet places. All at ease on this rockface.

Like finding love in someone disliked at first.

And the boy out shooting rabbits put his fingers
In a rocky crag, touched the smoothness
Of a king's gold breastplate left behind
At Gleninsheen. These flybynight findings
Wait within gunshot in unpromising places -
Gold breastplates, gentians, happiness-ever-after.
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From the poem 'Laertidean' by Peter Reading:

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Then we waded at low tide to Hilbre Island;/and we marvelled at scores of thousands of waders - /Sanderling, Knot, Oystercatcher, Redshank, Curlew and Dunlin;/and the giant gull of the north, the hyperborean Glaucous,/glided snow-mantled above the remains of the old lifeboat station;/and there suddenly stooped from a cloud the colour of Blanenau Ffestiniog slate/a Peregrine into a blizzard of wheeling Calidris Alba/and the falcon hit and we heard the thud and a handful of silven feathers/whorled in the wind and the great dark raptor rose with the dead meat locked in its talons;/and I said to my friend: 'We will mind this as long as we live.' (He is dead now.)

Norcal Cazadora

Surely there can't be anyone that reads about hunting on the net that doesn't read Norcal Cazadora? I mean, how could that be? So me sticking a link in here, 'hey, take a look at this' - that'd be redundant, wouldn't it? Of course it would. Saying that her latest post - a thoughtful review of Paul Shepard's 'The Tender Carnivore' - was well worth a read would be like putting a post-it note on the front door of the Guardian offices in London that read, 'passers-by might not have heard about it, but this place produces an interesting newspaper'.

'Rabbit à la Berlin' at the 8th Polish Film Festival

Screening at Kinoteka, the 8th Polish Film Festival at the Tricycle Theatre in London this year will be Bartek Konopka's Oscar-nominated documentary Rabbit à la Berlin. The film studies the after-effects of the fall of the Berlin Wall on the rabbit population that thrived in the no-go dead zone between the two halves of the city. The film uses their fate after the unification of Berlin to explore the challenges of living in the 'free world' that faced the citizens of Eastern Europe. The Guardian reviews the film here.
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Tags: Rabbit à la Berlin, film, Kinoteka

Sunday Hits and Misses

I spent another bright morning on Sunday at the Penkridge Air Rifle Club. There were several forty to fifty-yard shots that I particularly enjoyed since I've now got the beginnings of an idea about where the pellets from my - in effect - new .177 rifle will fall at this distance. It's very satisfying indeed to hear the pinging 'thwack!' as a tiny metal target fifty yards away flips back when your pellet goes home - a pleasure as well as a real confidence-builder.

On the way home I spent a happy few minutes peering over a fence at an improbable trio of Ostriches in a nearby farm. As they stalked around the field I wondered just how far those sturdy legs would kick a fox foolish enough to try its luck with one of these stilt-walking giants.

Cycling home, I startled a number of rabbits that had come out of the roadside hedges to take advantage of the suddenly spring-like afternoon sun and so, since I was to ride past the land where I have a permission, I decided to sit awhile behind the bars of a stile on the farm and see if I couldn't go home with the makings of a Sunday dinner.

Fifteen minutes later a rabbit popped out of the fence-line and, newly confident in the accuracy of my rifle, I took the shot. Another very resounding thwack! rang out, but one rather startlingly close at hand. Looking up I realised that while my scope had an uninterrupted view over the crossbars of the stile to the rabbit, the barrel of the rifle had not shared in this privileged elevation: the pellet had buried itself half-an-inch deep in the wood and the noise had frightened the rabbit away.
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Tags: Air rifle clubs, hunting, missing, air rifle

My new Weihrauch HW87-and-a-half

I got my rifle back from Tony the magic-fingered air-gun maestro at Sandwell Field Sports last weekend - and then promptly came down with a cold. So, this last week, instead of exploiting the vastly improved rifle out in the fields I've mainly been blowing my nose in front of the Playstation and eating a lot of oranges.

I did venture out briefly yesterday, though; I sat up against a fence and shot some pellets right across the whole 47-yard width of a field at a tiny target I'd stuck up on a post opposite.

Since I felt so ropey I only stuck around long enough to fire a very small group, but the results cheered me up a good deal.

These are the first four pellets that I fired on the day after staggering across a boggy field with a cold; a damn-near fifty-yard shot that resulted in a group a little more than one inch across. Not bad for the first few shots from a woozy bloke with an old springer, I thought.

Courtesy of Tony's workmanship my old .22 HW80K is now proudly sporting a spanking new barrel from an .177 HW95.

The barrel had previously been rather nattily inscribed in gold with the word "Mantis" and since I spend so much of my time in the fields asking the good Lord to help me shoot a bit better I wondered if I ought not risk a dodgy pun and dub it the Praying Mantis?

Well, no - that's pretty bad, isn't it? It's now a subtle amalgam of HW80 and HW95 so I reckon that has to make it an HW87-and-a-half. What do you think?
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Tags: HW80k, HW95, Weihrauch, air rifle, air gun, hunting

Comment to 'Fat of the Land' on ethics and hunting

Fat of the Land needs no recommendation from me, surely? It's one of a few 'real food' blog that stand in a class of their own. Recently, with his always-thoughtful writing and beautiful food photography, Langdon has been documenting his first steps into the world of small-game hunting. For us Hunter-Bloggers, this is very good news indeed.

Is it lazy of me to recycle comments that I've written on other people's blogs as posts on my own? Well, yes, I think it is.

I wrote in response to Langdon's post about his journey into the world of hunting:

Dear Langdon,

I'd say that there are positive dangers to feeling 'comfortable' around guns. 'Comfortable' is what you might reasonably expect to feel after a good meal with friends and a bottle of wine; the same state of mind in the field, however, might well get you or your friend seriously hurt or killed outright. So I think it's perfectly fine to be wide awake and a little nervous around any sort of firearm.

Hunters - I'd dare to say, based on my very slight experience - are people who hunt, not people who have a certain set of feelings about the tools that come with the discipline. Gun fetishists certainly do exist, though - as certainly as does a certain sensibility (among non-hunters by and large) that takes the words 'hunter' and 'gun-fetishist' to be two terms for the same thing. There may well be hunters who are gun fetishists but there's no reason to think that to use a particular tool is to by necessity make it an object of misguided worship.

We do use the same word - 'killing' - to refer to what we do when we deprive one of our fellow humans of their life and also for what we do when we take the life of an animal for the table: we kill them. But it's a mistake, I'd say, to imagine that because we use the same word we are therefore performing acts with the same grave ethical weight. To make this mistake and equate the taking of an animal life for food with the taking of a human life does damage I'd argue mainly to the infinite respect we owe to human life. We do a serious thing when we take the life of an animal for food, it's true; but (with the exception of those thankfully rare situations where a failure to act in this terrible way may do greater harm to others) we do an evil thing when we take the life of one of our fellow humans. If we can't distinguish between 'serious' and 'evil' then, I'd say, it's our fellow humans that we stand to harm the most.

Thanks for your good writing and the best of luck to you with the hunting.

HH

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Tags: fat of the land, guns, fetishists, killing, ethics, food, hunting, real food