More Squirrel Hunting In The UK.

450 divided by 14 

We won a day's squirrel bashing in a charity auction. Months passed, various people dropped out, in the end it was the Ambulance Chasing Lawyer formerly known as 'Sailor', South Side D, and your pal SBW who made the trip to the west country. We took a fairly large number of cartridges with us. Thankfully.

What can I tell you; it wasn't quite the usual tale of incompetence but it wasn't the most cost effective carry-on either. SSD and myself were billeted in a local hostelry where the burgers were pretty good but we had to significantly mark them down on the fries. Half a dozen phat G&T's later the bed seemed comfortable enough. In the morning dehydrated by the evening's entertainments I awoke, stretched and gave myself a lovely dose of cramp. Once the tears had subsided I joined SSD for breakfast. Limping.

The ACL joined us for our repast then we set off to meet the keeper, a cheerful sort who, once the usual tall tales of game numbers were out of the way,  apologetically told us  'I've just taken over this estate it was the last guy who donated the day, totally happy for you to be here, but, small problem, my missus says there's water pissing though the ceiling so I'm going to leave you to it.' 

Regular readers will know that squirrel sniping has at one time and another been a preoccupation of mine, always conducted with pellet guns. SSD is a proven slayer of squirrels and instead of taking the crappy farmers gun approach that's seen me roundly mocked at more than one shoot, has made an investment. SSD has a licence for a tricked out tacticool shotgun that can hold many cartridges, ACL and I have cheapo semi-autos that are only allowed to hold three shells. Instead of disturbing the squirrel's Drey with a set of drain rods, SSD blatted away at them until they were either proven empty or the incumbents had been evicted into the arc of fire laid down by ACL and myself.  Within ten minutes of arrival we were right into it, then things slowed down for a couple of hours.  We trudged around taking it in turns to cynically decode the keeper's speech, now convinced the wood was shot out and we'd come an awful long way for three squirrels. We saw three Fallow and a Muntjac. We sat out a rain storm in a beaters lodge. 

Any day in the woods is better than a day at work. ACL doesn't seem to have grasped this and takes a string of calls about an electrical installation or rather the lack of one. It's hilarious. He's very good at withering sarcasm, but this doesn't seem to advance his cause. Which is also hilarious. 

The daylight is in short supply so we skip lunch and fuelled by chocolate give the densest area of woodland a blatting. The day springs to life and eleven more tree rabbits fall to the cloud of pellets.

In an honourable attempt to bring a timely end to a wounded squirrel SSD shoots at too close a range and the end of his shotgun opens up like a flower. It's a sobering moment and signals that's its time for burgers and home. 

More soon

Your pal 

SBW

  

Squirrel Hunting In The UK Pt1

Pests: Invasive and Domestic

"When the buffalo are gone, we will hunt mice,...for we are hunters, and we want our freedom."
Chief Sitting Bull: Warrior / Philosopher / Statesman

"When the nanny state tells us meat only comes in packets, I will hunt Tree Rabbits with a pellet gun. It's the way I roll”

SBW: Plumber / Philosopher / Blogger

Invasive, destructive and delicious Sciurus Carolinensis: the American Grey Squirrel, is a very common sight in the south of England and they've reached as far north as The Kingdom of Fife. As an invasive species in the UK there is no closed season - we can hunt them 365 days a year. While their antics in city parks are certainly amusing; they are a proper pest to the farming and forestry communities, a carrier of fatal disease to the native Red Squirrels, and a delicious source of free protein to me. Well when I say 'free' like so many pastimes you need a few bits and pieces to get going.

"Squirrel hunting is for the patient, 
and for the person easily entertained by observation"

James George

I thought they were vegetarian too! Pic found on Reddit 

The first thing you've got to hunt down is a place where you have permission to hunt. It took me a while to find a permission that was within reasonable traveling distance of my home and I still don't have a really near one.

They love that MDPE,  once they've had a good chew on this feeder, 

they'll eat the grain.

I had a permission where the family owned a nursery and squirrel damage was an easily defined cost. I’ve hunted them on a Pheasant shoot where they eat the Pheasant feeders first and then the feed, and they've vandalised the water supply. Maybe you could use MDPE as bait?

A vegetarian owns my main permission; she has a passion for woodland management and the squirrels and deer are inhibiting regrowth of her coppice. You just never know. Keep asking. The BASC website - the British Association for Shooting and Conservation -  has some useful pointers, and a template permission slip.

Once you’ve got somewhere to hunt you need a lethal weapon that can make a humane kill.

Catapult: If you're really well practised. Not I.

Shotgun: Very popular in the USA but you need a licence/certificate in the UK and due to the noise you may end up  hunting them one at a time.

.22LR rimfire rifle: Very  popular American squirrel calibre, as the bullets can easily travel on for miles not such a good idea shooting up into the trees here in the highly populated UK. So common sense safety rules pretty much limit you to shooting squirrels on the ground with rimfires. I find it hard enough to find them without limiting the search to terra-firma.
  

Fire Arms Certificate (FAC) Air Rifle:
Lots of cash, and paperwork for unproven benefit. I wouldn't bother.

.17HMR rifle bullets have a tendency to explode on contact so in some ways safer than the .22LR, but they can go even further so only applicable if you've got a lot of land to shoot over.    

My weapon of choice is the off-the-shelf air rifle (limited to 12ft/lbs); you don't need a licence so you can lend and borrow them, they are easily powerful and accurate enough to make a clean, humane kill on a Squirrel that never knew you were there. I'm a big fan of the Pre-Charged-Pneumatic school of air rifle design as they take very little practice to become accurate.

Due to the UK's firearms laws and high population density Air rifles have always been disproportionately popular here so there are loads, both new and secondhand, to choose from.  Well-known brands; English, German Czech, and Swedish, all very accurate and all pretty costly at £500 - £1,200+. There are even more brands (most quite accurate) of spring powered rifle from about a third of the cost and a middle ground where the rifles use a gas-ram system, [which is similar to the rebound dampers on a motorcycle's shocks,] to provide the puff. You pays your money, you takes your choice.
A special mention goes to the next air rifle I'm going to buy - The IMP which is a reengineered german rifle tweeked by Sandwell Fieldsports at just under £400 - look on youtube for reviews 

To keep things in perspective: Hubert Hubert of the Rabbit Stew blog regularly feeds himself with an air rifle that cost less than £100 S/H, and a second hand scope.

There are four main choices of calibre .177, .20, .22 and .25 (all % of an inch) the smaller ones fly straighter, the bigger ones land with more of a thump. All have to be pointed at the right spot to ensure a clean kill. Lots of great .22's available second hand, for the others you'd have to scout around a bit. Factor in the price of a service, it often makes a HOOJ difference. Buy the best you can afford and only cry once.

A word to the wise - it's YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to make sure your rifle doesn't exceed the 12ft/lbs limit, some second hand guns have been 'fettled' get a proper gun shop to test it for you on their chronograph (either free with purchases or about £2 and ask for a receipt).

Top-tip - once you've bought your gun give up reading air gun magazines - they are very good at convincing you that a new rifle is a 'must have' and your scope is crap.

Before Hunting: Four things you MUST remember.

RULE I: ALL GUNS ARE ALWAYS LOADED

RULE II: NEVER LET THE MUZZLE COVER ANYTHING YOU ARE NOT WILLING TO DESTROY

RULE III: KEEP YOUR FINGER OFF THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOUR SIGHTS ARE ON THE TARGET

RULE IV: BE SURE OF YOUR TARGET AND WHAT LIES BEYOND IT

"Safety is something that happens between your ears, not something you hold in your hands." 

Jeff Cooper

I’d add RULES V and VI:
V: FORGET THE 'AIR' BIT - IT’S A RIFLE THAT CAN KILL OR MAIM.

VI: THERE IS NO ACIDENTAL DISCHARGE - ONLY NEGLIGENT DISCHARGE

If you follow these simple rules, to the letter, every time, at least any accidents will not be of the gun kind and your safe practice will be a credit to you when you start stalking deer with a centre fire rifle. [you will].

Top Tip: Insurance

A very good idea, and it shows landowners that you’re serious. Offering the kind of reassurance that gets permission. The best deal I've found is from The Scottish Association For Country Sports you're covered for just about everything and its less than half the price I used to pay.

Here’s the rifle I use and some of my kit.

 Parker Hale Phoenix in .177 - £850 + new or good luck finding one S/H.

Upside: Accurate, and being a lever action very quick to get a second shot off

Downside: A bit heavy and 60 shots per fill.

The air rifle I chopped in to buy it. Air Arms S400 in .177 - £400+

Upside: Very accurate - more than one pellet through the same hole

Downside: No magazine - just takes one pellet at a time

Great rifle for Rabbits and still hunting, not quite so handy for stalking Squirrels through the undergrowth.

Camo clothing / Face cover/ Gloves

Lots of people have shot prey while dressed in orange jump suits, so that 'I'm a sniper me' outfit isn't essential, but some kind of face cover seems to make a lot of difference and gloves can help too.

My DPM (disruptive pattern material – English army camo) jacket was £1 and I waterproofed it for another couple of quid.

A Call

These little devices are the equivalent of a 'friend request' from a pair of nineteen-year-old nurses, not guaranteed to get attention, but squirrels, like suburban dads live in hope and may well wander over to see what’s going on. I use the PRIMOS call that comes with a CD to practice along with. It’s a lot of fun practicing in London parks and my backyard. About £15


"I don't think paralysis [of the electrical grid] is more likely by cyberattack than by natural disaster. And frankly the number-one threat experienced to date by the US electrical grid is squirrels." - John C. Inglis, Former Deputy Director, National Security Agency 2015.07.09 

Let's Go Hunting: Methods and Tactics

Mr Squirrel is one of life's opportunists so they only building a shelter if he has to. Their preference is to doss down in cracks, hollows and voids in the branch forks of trees but if none are to their liking they build 'Dreys' there. They look like a big untidy birds nests.
On my permission there is the best naturally occurring hidey-hole (often has a tail poking out) would only be shoot-able from a public footpath OUTSIDE my permission. Easy to get over exited, but it's not worth a firearms conviction for a meals-worth of Squirrel. Your rifle, and your pellet’s final destination must stay within the confines of the land you have permission to hunt on.

Hiding/sniping AKA Still Hunting

Basically choose a site where you can sit comfortably, for a couple of hours without moving, that overlooks the runway squirrels use between food and home. Wait.

Top Tip: squirrel's like to 'lay the table' for dinner, the wood where I took this picture was littered with stumps, almost every one of which had been used as a dinning table

Guess who kept his packed lunch here?

Spot and Stalk

Walk very quietly through the woods, when you see a squirrel freeze, then as the squirrel gets bored of looking at you and looks away, shoot him.

Top-Tip: Grey's are considered to have a jumping range of eight feet (2.43m)

Over Bait

A bit like still-hunting but much easier, monkey nuts and/or peanut butter/Nutella are irresistible to our bushy tailed friends with those Fat Balls that people put out for songbirds not too far behind. Once they've found your bait pile they will keep coming back to in at regular intervals as they move its content to their dray.
Top-Tip: You don't need to shoot them the first time you see them, they'll be back.

Agitation AKA Dreying (needs two of you)

You find the squirrels hiding place or Drey and using a set of drain rods (the day job), an old fishing rod, or a long thin sapling and give it a vigorous poke. The squirrels will come out to see what all the fuss is about and shout abuse. Your co-hunter shoots them. Be Careful. My top-tip is for one of you to stand on either side of the tree as Squirrels tend to run round to the other side as it's the shortest distance to cover.
Really Be Careful.

Now all you need to do is Practice. 

The Top-ist -Tip of All: Passers By

Thankfully most country people are against invasive species and, once they get talking with you, tend to be very supportive. Much of the time they will go out of their way to be nice after you've charmed your way past their initial suspicions - just as we think they are either going to be stuck-up toffs or yokels involved in , um-er... 'animal husbandry', they probably think we are the advance party for a ravening horde; come to eat their young. Please remember in all your dealings with the locals; you are every hunter and your behaviour is every hunter’s behaviour. If that's not incentive enough - they hold the keys to your next permission. Happy hunting!

More hunting and gathering tales to come

Your pal

SBW

Field Sports In Scotland Pt5

Come Dine With Me

We spent the morning anxiously searching the Kingdom of Fife for Sciurus carolinensis AKA the Tree Rabbit, who has an urgent dinner invitation for some celebrity chefery. Further details are embargoed...

More soon (ish)
SBW

In The Woods Pt3 - Stalking Squirrels

The day was still warm, but in the wood the canopy keeps the world in shadow. The constant changeable breeze rattled the coppice and the whooshing of the trees hid the elephantine sound of our footsteps. A footpath runs along one boundary of the wood and, being mostly clear, meant we could if not properly creep, it at least reduced the noise of our ‘stalking’. 

A flicker of movement ahead and to the right revealed our quarry, munching on a nut at the base of an Oak. I twisted so my body would obscure my hand signal to TNM. The squirrel froze, and did a very good job of disappearing into the leaf litter. I shouldered the air rifle and realized just in time that the scope was set on too higher level of magnification. Finding a grey camouflaged thing against a backdrop of leaf and shadow wasn’t that easy. The cross hairs danced over his shoulder and as I should have been at my stillest my squeeze of the trigger must have pulled the muzzle to the right. The squirrel jumped four of five feet to the left; I worked the bolt back and forward and sent a perfectly aimed puff of air towards him. Sadly the puff of air wasn’t pushing a pellet.

The Air Arms S400 is a single shot rifle; I have an aftermarket ‘pellet feeder’ that must be clicked forward by hand each time. Right hand - Pull bolt back, Left hand - index pellet into place, Right hand - slide bolt forward. Ready to shoot. Supposedly. I’d missed the middle step and worked the bolt over an empty chamber. The squirrel gave me a withering look but stayed still. The next pellet jammed on loading. The squirrel sighed and bounded up a beech tree to wait patently to be shot. Now frantically fiddling I managed to free the now deformed pellet from the feeder. Through gritted teeth I start again. Bolt back, finger on the pellet feeder…No feckin’ pellets!! The Northern Monkey bounded off toward the hut to get more pellets and the squirrel and I kept each other under observation.  TNM is back in a flash and I feed a pellet into the chamber. The squirrel was now further up the tree and had disappeared from sight.  

As my heart rate slows, the terrible sinking feeling begins: had I shot him? Had I made a clean miss? The only way we could know would be to keep him treed until another shot opportunity presents itself.

I made that sound easy didn’t I? Several glimpses later a Holly bow lashes me across the eye and half blinded I give TNM the rifle. Due to the dense undergrowth and the fence line it’s not possible to get to the far side of the tree that the squirrel is now hiding up, I leave the wood to get a better view from the footpath. Twenty feet up the tree is the classic rotted hole at the intersection of two boughs.  A hidey-hole with a bushy tail poking out. Dead, dying or hiding?

Several attempts to climb the tree prove fruitless so we cut a long pole from the coppice and rig up a lasso loop to grab the tail with. By the time we get back to the footpath armed with our retrieval-rig the tail is no longer poking out of the hole.

I’d love it if this blog were a long and triumphant record of hunting success’s and delicious meals, I’d settle for an amusing record of failures and frustrations. This time I’m just gutted, I just don’t know if I hit him, earlier in the day I was putting pellet after pellet through a hole smaller than our smallest coin. Did I fluff the shot completely? Did I allow a wounded squirrel to get away? I’m just not sure and worst of all I doubt I’ll ever know. The following day my eye swells up and I’m sofa-bound for a day feeling very sorry of myself.

More soon

Your pal

SBW

In The Woods Pt1 Escape Velocity

'First thing you learn is you always gotta wait' Lou Reed

I was to be snaring Rabbits with another blogger over the weekend. But as is so often the lot of the self employed, one thing leads to another, a client sets a meeting back and a Friday departure disappears over the horizon. 

Seeing as I already had the weekend booked, I roused The Northern Monkey and we resolved to visit the permission in the forest. 

Saturday: one thing leads to another and we finally leave at the end of the afternoon. The drive out of town is uneventful, and we're making good pace, too good to be true. We spend an hour or so sitting in the car, gridlocked, with the engine off. By the time we're finally back on the move it's getting dark. 

Then follows a hilarious [you had to be there] interlude where we drive round a village trying to find an unmarked turning before we get to the wood. Then, for shits & giggles, we repeated the process on foot in the wood itself.

SBW [on phone]: So we're in the wood, where's the hut?
R [on phone, losing patience with SBW]: If you're in the wood, you're standing next to it
R [talking to E] They're in the wood they can't find the hut
The sound of splashing bath water and laughter
R [on phone, laughing]: Good luck, call me in the morning. CLICK

Now we'd scared off any inhabitants the wood may have had, we spend a relaxing evening in the hut eating our bean stew and bickering.

SBW: the deal was I cook and you pump up the rifle
TNM: I'll do it in the morning
SBW: I bet you if you don't do it they'll be Squirrels outside first thing
TNM: What! After a night of us two snoring like a pair of chain-saws they'll be long gone

I don't remember the highlights of the next argument, which was about who sleeps where on the sleeping platform, but I remember that it revolved around who was more likely to want to go for a piss in the night. TNM's getting on a bit so I let him have the easier route to the door.

Sunday-first light

SBW: Are you awake?

TNM: Yeah man

SBW [fighting his way out of a hooj duvet and now straddling TNM on his way to the door]:
Good, I just wanted you to know I'm not trying to mount you

Of course there was a Squirrel perfectly poised on a tree not ten yards away.

More Soon
Your Pal

SBW

C'Mon You Redz!

Carm-ern-yoo-redzz!

Went to the football to watch Charlton play some bunch of no hopers from the west country.
That was a mistake, Charlton were the no hopers. Two- effing -Nil!

Though at last there is some good news for beleaguered Blighty, those cheeky chappies the native British Red Squirrels, if not bouncing back, are at least no longer circling the drain. Over the last few years Red Squirrel populations in England and Wales have been declining rapidly as grey squirrels spread squirrel pox virus, which does not appear to affect the greys.

Happily Steve Connor, science guy at the Independent reports Wild red squirrels have developed an apparent immunity to the squirrel pox virus, which was killing off the last their remaining communities in England and Wales, as well as threatening the much larger native squirrel population in Scotland.
Although it's not practical to count them all, a common guess would have it that there are about 140,007 red squirrels left in Britain. With about three quarters of them north of the border with Andy Richardson and our Caledonian cousins. Across the country there are about 2.5 million delicious grey squirrels, (a convenience food introduced from the Americas in the 1800s). So as you can imagine things are in a perilous state and the British Reds need all the help we can give them.
Meanwhile well-meaning numpties are doing their muddleheaded best to make the natural world more like it looks on TV. Lindsey Maguire, who runs a squirrel rescue centre with his wife, is reported to have said:
"We are involved with animal rescue and if someone brings you a [grey] squirrel what can you do? You can’t just throw it in the bin."

No Lindsey, you numpty not in the bin, in the pot!

I'm calling on Patriots, Nature Lovers, Gun Owners, and People who are just Peckish, to help bring about a 'culinary solution' to these pesky (yet delicious) interlopers and in doing so, save our British Reds.

Even on his days off James has been doing his bit, with delicious consequences.

As they are originally from the USA here's a few pointers on how to organise a squirrel camp from Rex and his Dad at the Christmas Place Hunting Club, and a report on how this years proceedings went.
Scoutin' life has also been hard at it, read squirrel-sniping here.


Fight back and Tuck In!

SBW