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Starting a small shoot


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I live in the US, and a friend and I are trying to put together a small shoot. I need a little input. We are thinking of putting together a mixed bag shoot, 6-8 guns, shooting 2-3 days. This would be a mini-driven type of shoot with 4-6 drives. The main issues revolve around property size, and bag size. Most of the potential properties are between 100-200 acres. These would have some woods, fields, and hedges. Most likely the birds would be driven from the hedges, and some of the crops in the fields. I think this could work for a small shoot.

The issue of how many birds to release is a bit tougher to figure because game laws are different here. We’ve got bag limits which we can’t go over. We can’t shoot more than 2 pheasant per gun, which would be 12-16 pheasant. We can also shoot 4 partridge (Chukar) per gun, which puts us at 24-32 partridge, which is why I would like to organize a mixed bag shoot. I doubt that we would ever shoot a bag of 36- 48 birds, but that’d make for a nice day. 

So, taking in to account that we will lose birds once they are on the ground, how many pheasant and partridge would you recommend we release for our small shoot? 

 

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Ha ha, so many variables on that one, what's your keeperin skills like, what's your neighbours keepering skills like !!!! Will you be dogging in, will you be feeding to hold the birds in,, will the ground hold the birds or is next doors grass greener ?

what sort of shots are your guns, you could put 10 000 birds down but if they can't hit them.................

Is your bag limit a daily limit or season limit ?

IF everything works in your favour,  you need to reckon on a 25-35%  bag of released birds, at least that's what we allow on a 300 acre shoot that we really don't work very hard at as it's just a bit of fun for us.

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4 hours ago, Rabid said:

Ha ha, so many variables on that one, what's your keeperin skills like, what's your neighbours keepering skills like !!!! Will you be dogging in, will you be feeding to hold the birds in,, will the ground hold the birds or is next doors grass greener ?

what sort of shots are your guns, you could put 10 000 birds down but if they can't hit them.................

Is your bag limit a daily limit or season limit ?

IF everything works in your favour,  you need to reckon on a 25-35%  bag of released birds, at least that's what we allow on a 300 acre shoot that we really don't work very hard at as it's just a bit of fun for us.

There are a lot of work-arounds. So, I have no keeper if skills, so I will be learning on the fly. This kind of keepering just doesn’t happen in the states, so our neighbors will not be “keepering”. We will be feeding, so hopefully our grass will be the greenest. We use a lot of partridge for dog training. Many are not shot. It has been our experience that those partridge hang around and survive  for 3-4 months, which is encouraging. 

As for the skill level of the other guns? Well, let’s just say I want to provide opportunities. What they do with them,...?  

The bag limits I quoted are daily bag limits. 

I think 25-35% would be great. Being we are trying to put together a small start up shoot I think we’d all be happy if we only shot a few birds each day as long as we were seeing birds flying. 

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30 minutes ago, Flairball said:

There are a lot of work-arounds. So, I have no keeper if skills, so I will be learning on the fly. This kind of keepering just doesn’t happen in the states, so our neighbors will not be “keepering”. We will be feeding, so hopefully our grass will be the greenest. We use a lot of partridge for dog training. Many are not shot. It has been our experience that those partridge hang around and survive  for 3-4 months, which is encouraging. 

As for the skill level of the other guns? Well, let’s just say I want to provide opportunities. What they do with them,...?  

The bag limits I quoted are daily bag limits. 

I think 25-35% would be great. Being we are trying to put together a small start up shoot I think we’d all be happy if we only shot a few birds each day as long as we were seeing birds flying. 

Best of luck, I don't know hardly anything about your neck of the world, what I do know, no matter where it is, a lot of hard work can be undone very quickly by a couple of stupid moves.

 

you only need a dog running amok through the cover a couple of times and the birds soon move on, usually by innocent passers by.

keep your feeders full, try a few drops of aniseed in them.

partridges will either like the ground or not, seems no matter what you do, they either stay or leave !

 

get some good cover for the pheasants, feed in some straw so they scratch around, where you getting the birds from ?

nothing likes been cold, so warm hedges and woods go a long way. (Guess that varies from country to country)

 

if you have fields, try and get some cover crops planted, just a small corner, try and link woods with a strip of cover so the birds can move about without been to open.

 

best of luck, let us know how you get on.

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