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Will Clarkson

photographer

January 24, 2014

Game Chapter 4: Night-Shifts

by Will Clarkson in documentary photography, blood sport, conservation, photojournalism, outdoors, wildlife, photography


At just about all stages of the year, save the stalking, Thorn, Mark’s new dog, is at his heel. 

Training dogs is a dark art to most, and Mark’s ability to train his is important - badly trained, and Thorn will become a substantial waste of his time. Worse still, it means his work is much more difficult. Consequently Thorn is the only of his dogs allowed in the house, as constant contact is required. The other dogs (a labrador for retrieving, three terriers for foxholes and a sheep dog for gathering; another freelance activity), are kept outside in kennels. At all times he is is developing under my very eyes. At six months old, I watched him carefully walk two pheasant poults back towards a tiny hole in the fence and back into the pen - an amazing feat for a puppy that only really wants to chase them. What is more amazing is that this is one of his many disciplines. 

As Mark is versatile, so already is Thorn. He is a retriever, a pointer, and a second set of senses at the foxes. Mark can cover double the ground overnight if he leaves Thorn sitting watching a blind spot. The relationship is starting to border on instinctive, and Mark will soon be able to discern what Thorn’s body language is telling him; fox, roe, pine marten or even badger. This is the level of understanding reached by his previous dog, a lurcher, and makes his success rate with the foxes considerably higher, saving him a great deal of sleep. 

Mark, as he will admit himself, is an obsessive character. This is the guy who was given a Playstation game for Christmas, and out of politeness he had a go, but failed a level after a while. He got so furious “that a bundle of wire and plastic” can beat him, that he spent the next three days, with little to no sleep, completing the entire game. Three years later and his son, Bob, still hasn’t even come close. The ultimate challenge for him, though, is the fox. The cliché ‘cunning as a fox’ doesn’t match the respect he has for their ability to evade humans, and sometimes elaborate schemes, surprising in their necessity, are set up to shoot them. His longest stakeout waiting for a fox to arrive was “probably 50 hours”, the longest time awake following a fox “...about 76 hours straight, is the longest I’ve ever done awake and I don’t fancy doing that again”.

Mark's back room is full of past projects

Unlike most of us, who tend to sleep on nature’s circadian rhythms, Mark’s sleep patterns are ruled by fatigue. When he is tired, he sleeps. When he is awake, he works. If there is no estate work, farming work or fox work, he is to be found in his taxidermy shed. Doing work. It might be taxidermy, or it might be the creation of a new special hide (the latest being a fake sheep, so he can travel around a field without his target noticing).

This work ethic seems through choice rather than necessity, even though I question the ease with which he can pay for a family on freelance keeping wages alone. Ultimately, and just about all keepers will agree with this, the job is a vocational lifestyle choice. This is a passion. I haven’t yet seen, aside from in a Zoology professor’s office, a larger collection of wildlife and wildlife photography books specifically on the subject of Scotland. Purely for the purposes of taxidermy, he will sit staring at any animal for as long as the animal will allow him. He spent 30 minutes on a stalk once, staring at a red deer hind through a telescope, just to see how her nostrils flared when she was relaxed. Apparently the clients behind were totally silent the whole time, assuming that Mark was spying something important for the stalk, only to be told they were moving elsewhere after that long wait. 

He is not shy of exploiting his reputation of being well versed in some quite unique knowledge, and practical jokes on the stalk are one of his favourite games. This year he has been taking chocolates rolled into small balls onto the hill. Every now and again he will stop, pretend to pick up some deer droppings, eat them, and say, “hmm, we are about an hour behind them, we are close now”, then move on. Eventually he persuades the ever-keen client to try some for himself. The best thing about it is there is always the initial surprise that “hey, deer poo tastes just like quality street!”. 

The constant is taxidermy, and Mark often has something on the go for clients. Seeing as this is something entirely on his own time, it takes a back seat, and this is how I find him in his shed in the small hours, sewing up a pheasant. I left him at 2.45am (to accusations of "southern fairy" as I walk out), and go to bed. When I get up at 7.30am, I find him back in the house, passed out on the sofa. He got very little sleep, as he spent the entire night preening the bird while it dried. Encouraged by Jade, his daughter, I snuck a photo. On waking after two hours’ sleep, the pheasant needed a little more preening work, then after a cup of tea, he headed out to the pheasant pens. 

It is taxidermy that defines Mark, the diligence and attention to detail accompanied by artistic flair, practical problem-solving and an obsession with the nature that surrounds him. His note to me sums it up better than I ever could:

“I do taxidermy now because it helps pay my wages and it also gives me the perfect excuse to do what I want to do! I started taxidermy as a way to get closer to and a better understanding of wildlife, drawing and painting gives you an understanding of colours and textures but only by taking them apart and rebuilding them do you get a true understanding of why they are the way they are. Once I’d started I kept trying to improve the mounts and the only way to improve is to study them in their natural habitat and the more you study them the more you want to improve your mounts (vicious circle). Taxidermy teaches you to really look at the live animal and not just look at it like everybody else does…”

Mark after an all-night pheasant preening session. 

The next part, Chapter 5: Stalking: Ecological Necessity?, will be posted on here at 10.30am on Saturday 2nd February. To buy a copy of the book for £25, contact me. 

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TAGS: fox, taxidermy, pheasant, dog training, pointer, sleeping, dog, skin


January 24, 2014

Game Chapter 2: Pheasants

by Will Clarkson in documentary photography, blood sport, photojournalism, outdoors, wildlife, raptor, photography




The young pheasants (poults) arrive in late August, but the date is unpredictable, as the first three days of their stay are key. If it is bad weather, they will be reluctant to feed, and will become susceptible to disease. If predators are constantly present in and around the pen, then again they will not feed, and the stress will only exacerbate their problems. After this initial period, they are still vulnerable, but will have recovered from the journey and will be a little more settled. As with all animals, the more mature they become, the more their chance of survival.

Over the ensuing weeks, the pens will be visited at least twice daily. The visitors (Mark, or the two other workers on the estate, the farmer and his assistant) make the same whistling noises every time, so the poults become accustomed to the noise and associate it with food and safety. This is something that comes in handy later in the year - Mark’s whistling easing their concerns, before they are pushed over waiting guns.

They are released into the ticker parts of the pens - where it is safer and there is more shelter.

Shooting alone is something of a controversy. To those who know it and approve, it is lauded as a privilege and a right. To those outside of this circle, it can seem a ‘sport for toffs’ and is derided for its perceived privileged status and, most of all, that it is a cruel activity.

In comparison to the whole of the meat-eating industry, shooting pheasants for food is arguably one of the least cruel (assuming those shooting do so competently). In principal, shooting for your own food is something to be encouraged - if you’re going to eat meat, why not know exactly where it has come from? A well-shot pheasant will have had a considerably better life than any battery-farmed hen.

The ‘snob’ element is more complex, and it comes alongside the realisation that rural issues have immense socio-political implications. Those involved in shooting actually make up a variety of backgrounds and interests, it’s just the gun-holding proportion have a lot more money - shooting is prohibitively expensive.

Every effort is made to keep threats away. This scarecrow mainly for sparrowhawks, but will scare off most aerial predators. 

History shows that shooting, especially on larger estates, was something of a jewel in the crown of a landowner, and symbolic of status. The more pheasants, partridge and grouse you could produce for shooting, the better. It would come at great expense so it is a real show of wealth and power to friends. It was a boast, as Dr Adam Smith of the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT), told me, “Grouse moors and deer forests were to a certain extent a display of one’s public wealth. They existed at least partly to demonstrate that one was so rich one could can stand under a cold shower tearing up money”.

The pens are as much to keep the poults safe from predation as to avoid letting them escape. 

Pheasant shooting goes back a long way in UK history, and it is deeply engrained in rural life. Contrary to popular belief, beating, dog handling and shooting are participated in by all strata of society (albeit somewhat imbalanced), and there is the hard fact that it creates all manner of jobs from gun and ammunition manufacturers to dog handlers, pheasant rearers and, of course, keepers.

So it is a potential force for good, especially if it is with the intent of a meal. This is not consistently the case though. It is overexploited in parts, with some shoots bordering on the grotesque. I cannot begin to imagine what the justification for a 4 figure bird day’s shooting is. It is big business, but money cannot be justification for ecological excesses such as these. Restaurants don’t even want the shot pheasants as there is danger of feeding customers lead shot, and the same goes for supermarkets and other potential outlets. Rumour has it that a lot of stock is sent abroad, or worse, not used for food at all. 

An unnatural amount of shelter is required to house an unnatural number of pheasants. 

These particular pheasants will be shot in late December over the course of three days. The excess pheasants are given to the local community, along with any venison to people who have been helping out. The number of pheasants shot is a lot less than the big commercial shoots – in the 100-150 range a day, and still they have sufficient to give them away. Imagine scaling that up by ten.

The step-change in agrictulture in the 20th century was such that, were it not for shooting interests, a lot of woodland would have been uprooted for other more profitable uses. Even some creation of new woodland has been credited to shooting, so there is actually some benefit to the ecosystem in this respect.


The £30/40 per bird in the air (paid by those shooting) pays for a lot more than sport. It goes into paying for the pheasants, their feed, the pens, preserving woodland, preserving areas from more intensive and more damaging farming interests. Without this input, where would the money go? What would happen to this pseudo-conservational intent? It doesn’t really matter, it definitely wouldn’t be there though, there would be somewhere else for the money. It would mean leaving these woodland areas and hedgerows, game crops and attendant jobs redundant, making way for other uses. The first to suffer would not be the pheasants (as foreign species, technically they wouldn’t be of much concern anyway); it would be the local wildlife that rely on the habitats preserved for sheltering game. This land is not publicly owned, and no government, be it local or national, will be prepared to fill the financial gap that shooting pays for. Furthermore, this money would not end up in the hands of the likes of the RSPB or similar charitable conservation bodies. Their work would still be invaluable, but shooting would constitute a great financial loss. 

Thorn is always at Mark's side. He is only six months old but is already trained to carefully herd the young escaped poults back into the pens. 

There is real room for improvement in the world of shooting, and excess is something to be strongly discouraged. As they are so closely tied to and affected by the habits and desires of their employers, it is in the long term interests of gamekeepers to curb these massive shoots.

 

 

The next post, Chapter 3: Trapping - it's like they're stealing, will be posted on this blog on Saturday 19th January 10.30am. To buy a copy of the book for £25 contact me. 

TAGS: pheasant shooting, scotland, dog training, scarecrow, pheasants, blood sports, game, highlands, gamekeeper