Bog Myrtle & Peat

The question of whether or not you can have too much firepower while goose shooting has been comprehensively answered. With the ban on goose lifted a few days ago, I headed out onto the neighbouring farmland this morning with Richard, a registered firearms dealer with a new acquisition. The single barreled bolt action ten bore is a monster. It goes over and above anything else I have ever seen fired in this country, and as I lugged decoys down to a promising looking wet splash, I didn’t envy Richard carrying what is essentially a metal tree trunk.

A couple of teal pushed off in the gloom, and mallard yelled further up the side of the drainage ditch which had swollen and overflown during the night with an extra load of melted snow and heavy rain. Huge frosty pools glinted from the grass as we positioned the silhouette goose decoys and chucked one or two plastic ducks into a nearby splash in the hope of attracting some passing trade. Stars still sparkled overhead as we settled in beneath a pair of twisted blackthorn trees to wait, a stiff northerly breeze blowing directly into our faces.

Within half an hour, we had made contact. I would normally avoid trying to publicise products, by my American made pinkfoot call was absolutely indispensible. It came from “Illinois River Valley” and singlehandedly pulled a lone goose around half a mile off its flight path and through the gloom of the morning to investigate the plywood silhouettes. Richard and I watched him as he circled into the wind and vanished behind us, “wink-wink”ing every few seconds to give us a vague idea of where he was. Inch by inch against a rising breeze, the lone goose crept up from behind, calling and grumbling to us. My old BSA 12 bore was down at my feet as he suddenly appeared less than thirty feet away to join the wooden decoys, but the big 10 bore swung lugubriously into action. The goose had fought so hard against the breeze to join the decoys that, to escape the sudden loud boom, all it needed to do was tilt its wings. In an instant, it shot vertically into the air and was passing away downwind. It had been a clean miss, and in the ensuing silence, Richard and I marvelled at the apocalyptic clang of the 10 bore. The goose had been too near, too slow and then too quick for the freakishly enormous shotgun.

Half an hour later, a similarly close range engagement was equally fruitless, but by this point the main flights were more or less over. A skein of thirty birds passed just out of range, showing interest in the decoys but not willing to make any commitment to them. I was proud of my hand made silhouettes, and thrilled by the power of the call, but the main attraction of the morning had proved to be its downfall.

10 bores are fantastic guns, but they were not designed to be used for hedge hopping geese in a gale, who appear and vanish again in an instant. I’m sure that they would come into their own on the foreshore, or on a still day when a little more range makes all the difference on a high bird, but it turned out that for once in our lives, we had actually had too much firepower…