Air Rifle Hunting Squirrel

Long before the sun was up, I was downstairs getting myself ready for the goose cull which had been pencilled in for today. Having walked and driven round the property last weekend checking out the lie of the land, today was the day I got down to business and I was leaving nothing to chance, checking and re-checking that I had stashed everything I needed in the pockets of my smock and even taking two rifles should there be a problem with one. The dogs were dancing around the kitchen in the hope that I would take them with me but unfortunately, this was to be a dog free day. Slinging both rifles over my shoulders I went outside and loaded the car. There was just the faintest glimmer of light on the horizon when I telephoned the caretaker of the property I was to shoot on to make sure everything was ok. What he told me was that the geese had gone, leaving only about half a dozen on the flight pond and that there wasn’t much point in my coming down. Well this put me in a right bad mood. Having been looking forward to this all week, I was seriously annoyed that my little jaunt was cancelled. Being in a frame of mind for some sport, I decided to press on with alternative methods and go and thin out some of the squirrels over the woods.

The woods where I have my permission are very thick and coppiced due to the owner making his living selling fence posts. These woods have a few logging tracks through them which makes travelling through them relatively easy. If you were to leave these tracks and venture through the coppicing, then it is very slow and heavy going. When you stand in the woods off the tracks, you can’t see more than 15-20 yards in front of you, the trees are that thick. Because of this the woodland floor is always damp as hardly any sunlight penetrates to the floor and the leaf litter makes for slippery conditions underfoot. For situations like these, a large dog is no good at all as they cannot get any kind of speed up for them to become effective and the close conditions hamper their movement. The woods abound with all kind of game including rabbit, muntjac, pheasant and fox. You have to be careful in the evenings though as brock is often found rooting around in the leaf litter.

After putting one of the rifles back, I made the dogs day by taking their collars off the hooks and getting them onto their leads. You would have thought I had just given them the best news of their lives the way they reacted. I don’t know why I am surprised though as they are always like this. A stranger watching would have thought they never get walked the way they play up!

We walked through the orchards on the way up to the woods, breathing in the sweet smell of the wind fall apples. The dogs were loose and ran around, noses to the ground trying to pick up the scent of whatever had crossed this way during the evening. Upon reaching the wood, the rifle came off my shoulder and was loaded in anticipation of a squirrel being sighted.

Hunting these woods is very different from hunting fields containing only a few trees or sparsely populated woods. If you put a squirrel up here, with the trees being so dense, the squirrel can be dozens of yards away before you get a chance to put your rifle to your shoulder. The blink of an eye can mean you missing your game and then you are left wondering in which direction it has gone. That’s were a good dog comes in. I had both of the dogs with me on this occasion and both have their good points when it comes to hunting. The dog as I have said before, has what I consider a decent nose, being able to pick up a scent and run a line on it, but the bitch doesn’t hunt up as much as I like. What she has got which the dog lacks, is a much more heightened sense of spatial awareness. When we hunt the woods, the dog will hardly ever look up, concentrating on the ground and the scents held there. The bitch, whilst lacking in nose, is aware of what is going on around her, be that on the ground or in the trees and hedges. That particular skill is invaluable to me in these situations. Many are the times that I have walked past squirrels sitting tight in the high branches, only to turn around and see the bitch marking it. Without her I would get far less tree rats and I wouldn’t enjoy hunting them half as much. She more than makes up for my limitations as a hunter of these nimble little creatures, leaving me to simply aim straight and shoot them.

Having eulogised her talents here, the first one we took that day was actually running towards us! Due to the fact that this little fella was busy foraging for chestnuts, he seemed unaware of mine or the dogs’ presence. I was very surprised that the dogs didn’t run at him and I can only think that they weren’t expecting a frontal assault. I raised the rifle and he dropped as a hollow point .22 pellet hit him in the head. As I got over to him I noticed he still had the chestnut in his mouth! Sniffing around him, the dogs were soon back on the case as if they had just realised that squirrels were the order of the day.

After about half an hour of me walking down a logging track with the dogs ranging out to either side, I heard the dog open up with a yelping noise, thus indicating he was on to something. I ran down the track to where I thought the noises were coming from and then cut through the coppicing to where there is a line of old oak trees. The bitch was looking skyward whilst the dog was running the ground around the trees looking for the squirrel. Without the dog opening up, I would never have known they had treed this one and would have walked on by without acknowledging the dogs contribution to ours days sport. The bitch would have marked the tree but would never have let me know she was there as she doesn’t give tongue like the dog. To me, that just goes to show that dogs in a pack situation (albeit a small one) can make up for the deficiencies of other individuals and come good to make sure we get the quarry in the bag. I would love to have a dog that could do all of this, but I haven’t and therefore I will get by with what I do have. They have their individual strengths and weaknesses and they seem to combine to complement each other where one is weak. I will be taking on a lurcher pup later this year and it will get all the work anyone could wish for so maybe I will get the dog that can do the lot? We’ll see I suppose. I just hope that my deficiencies as a trainer don’t spoil it.

As we made our way by a circuitous route back home I remembered that I had promised to clear out a warehouse of the feral pigeons that had taken up residence there so we made a detour and after about ten minutes shooting, we had solved the problem.

All in all, as well as the pigeons, we claimed five squirrels on that morning, which is a drop in the ocean in terms of numbers which that wood holds. What was important for me though was to get out into the woods with my dogs and see them work for each other and for me. At the end of the day, I am not doing this for any form of serious pest control; I am simply enjoying a morning in the bright autumn sunshine, away from the traffic and work, watching my dogs do what they were born to do. We must have walked about 6 miles, the dogs running far more than that and it was an absolute pleasure, one of the best morning’s sport I have had in a long while and provided the ferrets with a few days worth of grub and the dogs with some early season exercise into the bargain.

Written By Richard Christian