Bog Myrtle & Peat

When the severe weather warnings are issued and the highways agency advises against all but the most important of journeys, it seems clear to me that the time has come to go wildfowling. Packing the shotgun and the chainsaw in the back of the car, I headed out into a sleety smirr yesterday afternoon. It is ten miles to the Solway coast, and I had to stop twice to clear ash and sycamore trees off the road, but settling in behind a stand of salted gorse trees above the mud, I felt like the desperate trip had been worth it.

The wind picked up again just shortly after the sun vanished, and it soon began to snow steadily as the reds and oranges drained slowly out of the landscape. Within twenty minutes, everything was a deep shade of blue. The wind came and went according some grand master-plan of its own, and during a temporary lull, the clouds parted to reveal a glowing silver streak of moon down to the west. Within seconds, the snow had returned and a single teal came blasting past against the final washed-out shades of yellow sunset.

It was a strange flight, if only because alternating periods of cloud and clarity brought the darkness on in a series of waves. For ten minutes it would be almost too dark to see, then the clouds would part and the afternoon would return. As a result, the birds came in a very staggered trickle over the course of forty five minutes, with the last whistling silhouettes tipping back into the flooded fields in near total darkness. So much had been flooded by the melting snow and rain that it was impossible to find any concentration of birds. The entire North Solway coast must have been a world of delight for the flighting duck, and there was none of the concrete form that you find in flightlines during thinner spells.

A couple of pintail came turning gracefully past against the stars, but with the wind behind them I hardly had time to raise a hand to my shotgun. They landed behind me and chattered away in a freezing splash, apparently oblivious to the focused, lazer-like stare of the dog, who gazed longingly at them through the darkness. When the wigeon started to tear past, I found it was all I could do to get the gun into my shoulder before they were gone again, and the sight of three more dark pintail shapes swarming out of between the heavy lumps of falling snow left me open-mouthed with delight. Only at the very end of the flight did I seem to get my eye in, and the bag was encouragingly plump on the short walk back to the car.

Packing up and setting off for home, I saw that the clouds had cleared and the wind had dropped into nothing. I had just caught the tail-end of the storm, but it had served me well.