Food Grouse 2022

Alex, I think the only thing we can be sure of is that it can't be as bad as 2021! Estates will have been completing their counts in the last couple of weeks but finding out what these are is a little difficult.
It shouldn't be a bumper year as many moors shouldn't be shot over as they'll need two years to recover from the catastrophic losses suffered last year. I would think it should be an average season and so supply into the game dealers will be steady throughout the coming months.
Hope to have a day over pointers at Drumochter (where my avatar photo was taken) but as these are "sweeping up" days it all depends how the driven days go.
On a separate shooting issue our syndicate has cancelled all of our driven pheasant shooting for the coming season as avian flu has decimated the supply of pheasant chicks. Is there no end to the impact of these viruses?
 
Is it already grouse-moaning season again? time flies as fast as the grouse itself. I do quite fancy one since you mention it.
Something must be done about pheasants. 50 years ago they were a more expensive delicacy than grouse. They are of varying degrees of horridness now, and it seems the English partridge is permanently banished from the table.
 
So far, I’ve been very fortunate with my syndicate days (largely pheasant) and my other days. For the syndicate, we cancelled any let days and consolidated a few days so that we ended up with the same number of birds per day. No grouse days this year but can’t wait for my partridge day!
 
Something must be done about pheasants. 50 years ago they were a more expensive delicacy than grouse. They are of varying degrees of horridness now, and it seems the English partridge is permanently banished from the table.

All down to the pursuit of big number days by shooting groups - 10s of millions of pheasants are deliberately released every year with gamekeepers then feeding them in semi controlled environments to ensure they survive/thrive.

I say this - I particpate with a syndicate, but we limit at about 60-80 bird days for 10 guns, which seems more than sufficient.
 
I've not heard or seen any grouse behind my house this year and in a normal year I would expect to. As has been mentioned is no great surprise given the difficulties of last year.

The supply issues with pheasants are a blessing as it will give the land and wildlife a bit of relief from the pressure of what is effectively intensive pheasant farming. The additional birds released last year to compensate for the lack of grouse was really too much - last year I shot about 250 within 50m of the house just to try and stop them destroying my garden. They have no value when dead (literally - last I heard the game dealer won't pay for them but takes them for free) - I suspect the lack of value reduces the motivation to get them to the end consumer in top condition.
 
Our regular grouse supplier was for many years our longstanding local butcher Morley's. Sadly they went under last week, beleaguered by lockdown and impossible trading conditions.

Good to hear the encouraging reports above and here's hoping for a steady supply throughout the season.

and it seems the English partridge is permanently banished from the table.

Thom, unless I am missing something the partridge has seemed relatively easy to procure over the last couple of years. I'd assumed the ones I've been buying are English. Is this not the case?
 
Thom, unless I am missing something the partridge has seemed relatively easy to procure over the last couple of years. I'd assumed the ones I've been buying are English. Is this not the case?
I think Tom is referring to the grey legged partridge which has virtually disappeared. The ones you buy are red legged. And @Thom Blach - have you ever eaten a grey legged partridge, and if so, how did you get hold of it?
 
I’ve only eaten grey legged partridge once that I remember, about 30 years ago. It was prepared by Pierre Koffmann, a passable cook for a once in a lifetime experience. As fine as woodcock.

Managed to get some decent pheasants last year from our local butcher but at some point during the same timeframe they generally became even more unappetising than farmed fish. However my mother remembered dealing with some intensively reared specimens in Vancouver that were jacketed with half an inch of noisome fat, as long ago as the late 70s.
 
I think Tom is referring to the grey legged partridge which has virtually disappeared. The ones you buy are red legged. And @Thom Blach - have you ever eaten a grey legged partridge, and if so, how did you get hold of it?
Plenty, and my immediate reaction was to think that it wasn't even that long ago that they were not too difficult to obtain from the excellent game specialists that used to exist even if quite reasonably much more expensively than the red-legged partridge, which is nice but a pale shadow of its cousin. I suppose that on mature reflection it must have been about fifteen or twenty years ago that they became more or less unobtainable.
 
I suppose that on mature reflection it must have been about fifteen or twenty years ago that they became more or less unobtainable.
Indeed. I have certainly never seen them available. And it might be a little uncomfortable morally to eat something that is now so rare in the wild. It seems that the post 40s changes in wheat and cereal production (winter sowing and the high use of pesticides and herbicides) were highly injurious to the species.
 
On the subject of grey partridges we have a reasonable population on the ground where our syndicate shoots. We do not shoot them and the last time I saw them there must have been 30/40 birds in a single covey.

We have greys in the farmland around our house and my spaniel lifted 15-20 birds from our front garden when we returned from holiday last week. Again, I wouldn’t shoot these. The population has definitely grown over the last 10 years.

Commercial pheasant shoots are the scourge of modern shooting. Undertaking what is little more than a licensed massacre of intensively reared birds – I would include some commercial duck shoots in the same category.

We get our pheasants from a farmer 5 miles from our shoot and normally put down around 1000 - 1500 birds and have 8 shooting days in the season. Bird Flu has intervened this season and we are not interested in sourcing birds from further afield – we try to keep it local.

All of the birds we shoot are either taken by the guns or supplied free of charge to two local restaurants. Nothing goes to waste – I wish I could say the same for commercial shoots.

We will not have any formal shoot days this season but we will be doing some walked up shooting and it’ll be interesting to see the condition and flavour of the “wild” pheasants that we will undoubtedly encounter.
 
Very rarely see grey legs and certainly never shoot them. Duke of Norfolk has made it his life’s work to develop a population of them on his estates at Arundel and Angmering.

Re commercial shooting, it’s a business that provides employment and sustains a lot of other businesses in the countryside. I don’t see why it’s the “scourge of modern shooting” at all. Just because someone dislikes it doesn’t make it “wrong” per se, let alone the scourge!
 
Is it already grouse-moaning season again? time flies as fast as the grouse itself. I do quite fancy one since you mention it.
Something must be done about pheasants. 50 years ago they were a more expensive delicacy than grouse. They are of varying degrees of horridness now, and it seems the English partridge is permanently banished from the table.
I agree with the poor quality of birds at the beginning of the season, but generally find those shot in the new year, which have been running around for a while, a much better eating.
 
Is it already grouse-moaning season again? time flies as fast as the grouse itself. I do quite fancy one since you mention it.
Something must be done about pheasants. 50 years ago they were a more expensive delicacy than grouse. They are of varying degrees of horridness now, and it seems the English partridge is permanently banished from the table.
I do wonder what (recent) roadkill pheasant would be like. If they're so cheap, it would seem a false economy!
 
Surely it's time to abolish the intensive rearing of pheasants and partridges? no one actually needs to go shooting and given the popularity of grouse shooting at unimaginable prices could not charges simply be increased to make up for the reduction in the number of birds?
Pheasant ought to be at least as great a treat as grouse but no one could claim that for it now.
 
It’s not like it’s inexpensive. I pay £300 a day for a decidedly low quality shoot at essentially mates rates because my best friend is the land owner. I dare someone to volunteer what they pay for a 300+ bird day.

I do think commercial shoots are not a good thing. The sporting joy of a brace shot with a light gun on a cold, walked up morning with your friend, sharing a hip flask, stretching your dogs and returning to the warm fire, easing into some claret and arguing how to cook the things that clearly need hanging, fighting over a cigar, concluded by roast beef sandwiches and leaving the birds for the weekend is up there with the very best activities in life. I enjoy this way beyond the organised days, but I guess it’s an experience of total privilege and very difficult to recreate.
 
It’s not like it’s inexpensive. I pay £300 a day for a decidedly low quality shoot at essentially mates rates because my best friend is the land owner. I dare someone to volunteer what they pay for a 300+ bird day.

I do think commercial shoots are not a good thing. The sporting joy of a brace shot with a light gun on a cold, walked up morning with your friend, sharing a hip flask, stretching your dogs and returning to the warm fire, easing into some claret and arguing how to cook the things that clearly need hanging, fighting over a cigar, concluded by roast beef sandwiches and leaving the birds for the weekend is up there with the very best activities in life. I enjoy this way beyond the organised days, but I guess it’s an experience of total privilege and very difficult to recreate.
It’s easy to put a price on any day based on price per bird shot of c. £50-60 inc VAT. For a 300 bird day, that's £15-18k and divide by 9 or 10 for a price per gun.

As a general rule, it’s pretty obnoxious to tell people that what they are enjoying doing should be banned because you don’t like it. No one needs to do lots of things and banning anything that isn’t necessary as defined by some arbitrary people is clearly ridiculous. Adding that the other reason to do so is so that a tiny group of even more privileged people can enjoy wild pheasant and partridge is really the icing on a very very tall cake. “Stuff the thousands of people who’s jobs depend on this industry, I want my wild pheasant/partridge and I’ll scweam and scweam until I get it”…
 
It’s easy to put a price on any day based on price per bird shot of c. £50-60 inc VAT. For a 300 bird day, that's £15-18k and divide by 9 or 10 for a price per gun.

As a general rule, it’s pretty obnoxious to tell people that what they are enjoying doing should be banned because you don’t like it. No one needs to do lots of things and banning anything that isn’t necessary as defined by some arbitrary people is clearly ridiculous. Adding that the other reason to do so is so that a tiny group of even more privileged people can enjoy wild pheasant and partridge is really the icing on a very very tall cake. “Stuff the thousands of people who’s jobs depend on this industry, I want my wild pheasant/partridge and I’ll scweam and scweam until I get it”…
I would imagine most of the detractors of intensively farmed game shoots are more concerned by the ecological impact of breeding millions of birds a year in a very unnatural way, the same way that many of us would criticise intense meat farming in general - it's no different. At the end of the day it's idealogical. Plenty of people think intense commercial farming is totally unjustified due to its impact on the environment, jobs or not. I doubt many of us would call them obnoxious for thinking, saying or acting upon it.

As for your final point, I was pretty clear that the experience I describe is one of total priviledge, and I was sceptical as to whether it was even worthwhile sharing because of that. I guess that scepticism was warranted, but ultimately it was a share of "less can definitely be more".
 
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