EP 548. Managing Waterfowl Across the Pond

“Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in England. I’ve been here a whopping three hours, and I told somebody it’s not my first time in England, but I kind of like the Beatles.”

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where today I am in England. I’ve been here a whopping three hours, and I told somebody it’s not my first time in England, but I kind of like the Beatles. But you know, it’s crazy, we’re driving up to meet today’s guest, and as we’re driving down the highway, I look and see this pile of rocks. I go, “Is that what I think it is?” My host is like, “Yeah, that’s Stonehenge.” That’s pretty, have you ever seen Stonehenge, Mike?

“Oh, yeah. I tell you what, Stonehenge, the thing that I will always remember is driving past Stonehenge along the north side at night with a low cloud and the faint sodium light in Salisbury away in the distance. And by God, it brings the eerie magic of an ancient monument really into focus with that background.”

Mike Swan: Oh, yeah. I tell you what, Stonehenge, the thing that I will always remember is driving past Stonehenge along the north side at night with a low cloud and the faint sodium light in Salisbury away in the distance. And by God, it brings the eerie magic of an ancient monument really into focus with that background.

Ramsey Russell: What is Stonehenge?

Mike Swan: It’s a ring of stones that were put up by our ancestors about 5,000 years ago.

“I don’t know how you would build that except with cranes and stuff, let alone how primitive man built it.”

Ramsey Russell: 5,000 years ago. I don’t know how you would build that except with cranes and stuff, let alone how primitive man built it.

Mike Swan: You wouldn’t start, would you?

Ramsey Russell: How would you move those rocks?

Mike Swan: They say either dragged over the ice or rolled along on logs with people pulling them. Some of those rocks are multiple tons, and they reckon that some of them come from South Wales, about 200 miles away. It would be quite an important rock, wouldn’t it, if you’re going to drag it 200 miles.

Ramsey Russell: Drag it that far, it must be pretty darn important. And nobody really knows why they built it. Of course, there’s all kinds of speculation with the way it aligns with the sun and the solstice and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Swan: It lines up with sunrise on the summer solstice. There’s an amusing story in that, too, which is that my elder son was born on the 21st of June. We were in Salisbury Hospital at sunrise, and there was jolly nearly nobody there because everybody that could escape had gone up to the stones to see the sunrise.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Mike Swan: Yeah. The important people were there, but the shift change was quite some time later, and there were all these bleary-eyed people coming on shift in the hospital at about 8 o’clock in the morning because they’d been up all night at the stones.

Ramsey Russell: I did not expect it to be basically in the middle of a pasture right off a busy two-lane highway. I don’t know what I expected, but I’m like, “Is that what I think it is?” “Yeah, that’s it.”

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And when we pulled up, there were some, I don’t know, some security or whatever, wearing big yellow bright neon vests. Apparently, to walk up to it, if you’re guys like me, you got to pay 50 bucks, U.S. dollars equivalent. I’m like, I ain’t paying $50. I don’t want to see it that bad. I got a zoom on this phone. But I walked down a trail, and when I got there, there were actually some people that weren’t security, a man and a lady sitting, knelt down, reading something. And there was this guy walking around, that was so weird. This guy was walking around, and he had this flock of crows like landing on him. Everywhere he walked, these crows were following him. That gave it this mystical air. I’m gonna tell you, I didn’t expect to see that either.

Mike Swan: No, it’s not all that long since it’s been closed off like that. I mean, when I was a kid, you would drive past on the A303, park the car, and walk across. There are photographs in the family album of my father leaning on one of those stones, pretending to be pushing it over, taken about 55 years ago.

Ramsey Russell: So we get up here, we find your cottage. What town are we in?

Mike Swan: We’re in a little village called Pentridge, which is Trantridge in Robert Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles and all that stuff, for those that are interested in literature.

Ramsey Russell: I have heard of that.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So there’s a lot of history around here, isn’t there?

Mike Swan: A hell of a lot of history around here. The Great Dorset Cursus, nobody knows what that is, but it’s like a runway that goes for about 10 miles, starts just up the road here, and passes the village. You’ve driven over it. You wouldn’t know you’d done so, but you’ve driven over it to get into the village. And there are burial mounds and all that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: I saw some burial mounds.

Mike Swan: All over the place.

Ramsey Russell: All over. I mean, man, it’s terrible, I don’t know my western seal. I mean, England is an old country.

Mike Swan: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I mean real old. Somebody told me the other day, Mike, “The heck with that European history. It’s all about American history.” I said, “It is our history.”

Mike Swan: So much so, wasn’t it? I got a chum who lives in Warwickshire whose house was built in 1400.

Ramsey Russell: Golly.

Mike Swan: And you know, he’s in a bar in New York, and they’re talking about this being an old bar in New York because it’s been up for a hundred years or so. And, you know, when someone asks him where he lives and about his house, he says, “Built in 1400.”

Ramsey Russell: That’s crazy.

Mike Swan: And it’s still standing. And the family has been in it for generations and generations and generations.

Ramsey Russell: Well, they built houses to last back then.

Mike Swan: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Again, it just blows my mind. And then we come here to your little cottage, and we get a very classical breakfast, a bacon roll.

Mike Swan: Yeah. And a cup of tea.

Ramsey Russell: Huh?

Mike Swan: And a cup of tea.

Ramsey Russell: And a cup of tea and it was good tea.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it wasn’t iced. It was just real good hot tea. It was good.

Mike Swan: Yeah. We need that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: Is that a bacon roll is a staple around here?

Mike Swan: It’s a staple sort of grab-and-go thing. You can stop, there’ll be vans all along the roadsides that are just cooking bacon, sausages perhaps, and got bread rolls. And you stop for a bacon roll in your travels. It’s something that’s quick and easy for them to assemble. Pour you a cup of tea. By the time you’ve half-drunk your tea, the bacon roll is ready, and then you’re on your way again. So it’s a sort of abbreviation of a proper English breakfast.

Ramsey Russell: It’s Kind of the thing you’d stuff in your coat pocket, bring out to a duck blind with you.

Mike Swan: All the way. Do that quickly before morning flight, and you’re out. You know, got a bacon roll still warm while you’re waiting for the light to grow and the ducks to start.

Ramsey Russell: It looks like our bacon back home, the way it’s sliced, but it tastes like Canadian bacon. So it’s not smoked, is it?

Mike Swan: Yeah, no, ours was. That was smoked. That’s proper dry-cured and smoked. Dry salt cure, no salt water injected into it, and then, yeah, oak-smoked. Little butcher that I recommend to anybody called Robinson’s, village called Stockbridge in Hampshire.

Ramsey Russell: It’s the best.

Mike Swan: It’s the best. They are an absolute top-quality food business. They smoke their own bacon, make their own sausage to a special recipe. And if you catch a nice trout somewhere, they’re the best place for miles around to get your trout smoked. If you want a cold-smoked fish.

Ramsey Russell: Speaking of trout, we drove through this little village right here, and that is the trout epicenter of England. That’s from my understanding.

Mike Swan: Oh yeah. Which one was that now? Mortison or oh you went through Stockbridge. So you actually drove through Stockbridge, which is where Robinson’s Butchers is, and the river is the Test, which is the quintessential English chalk stream.

Ramsey Russell: What kind of trout are you all catching here?

Mike Swan: Mostly brown trout, the native one.

Ramsey Russell: Brown trout come from here?

Mike Swan: Well, brown trout come from all over northern Europe and even North Africa. They’re in the Atlas Mountains, and they are sea trout. So they’re the same species. Wherever they can get to the sea, they’ll run to the sea and grow faster there before coming back. Where they can’t get to the sea for whatever reason, they’ll feed in freshwater. So they’re a sort of cross between a salmon and a trout really.

Ramsey Russell: Excellent. Folks, you all listen to my buddy Mike Swan over here in the UK. Mike, introduce yourself. You’re a wildlife biologist.

Mike Swan: I am a wildlife game conservation management advisor for an organization called the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, formerly the Game Conservancy Trust. I’ve been there since January 1982, so 42 and a bit years in harness, helping people to make a better job of their shoot, their fishery, whatever terms turn them on. It could be how many, it could be how high they fly, it could be what the wild ones are producing, it could be the quality of the habitat, it could be the other wildlife that goes with it. All of those sorts of things are all integrated together. One of the joys of my job is that the individual people I go to have different aspirations. So you can help them develop their aspirations rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach to conservation and management.

Ramsey Russell: An interesting statistic I learned on the drive over is the UK is 2,000 square miles, I think that’s right, 2,000 square miles smaller or bigger than the state of Mississippi. But there are 63 million people here.

Mike Swan: Yeah, we’re packed in fairly tight.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a lot of people.

Mike Swan: A lot of people. A heck of a lot of people. It’s a remarkably urban country and yet a remarkably rural country. But people love the countryside. People look after the countryside.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, we drove forever getting here to your house. If there was a car coming the other way, somebody had to get over.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: And it’s as rural as anything I’ve ever been in.

Mike Swan: Yeah, you’re quite right. There’s lots and lots of space, but there’s not a square inch of it that’s not man-managed. It’s all part of the human environment. We’ve been here too long and there are too many of us.

Ramsey Russell: Thousands of years.

Mike Swan: Yes. So there is no wilderness anymore, not really. It’s all about the environment that people have created by doing the things they do. So conservation for me in this environment is looking after the wildlife within the constraints of a managed landscape. It’s not about trying to let it all go wild again in any significant sense because you can’t do it.

Ramsey Russell: That genie’s out of the bottle.

Mike Swan: Yeah. I mean, not to be critical of people’s aspirations, but we’ve got these projects that they call rewilding, where people let go of a piece of land and let nature take its course. But it’s not nature that’s taking its course, it’s man-made nature that’s taking its course, and it’s going somewhere. And that’s fine and well. But because we haven’t got the grazing herbivores they think they want, we haven’t got any wild boar in most of the UK, just in a few places, they run Tamworth pigs instead, which is the nearest domestic thing, so they’ve got something rooting about in the woods to imitate what the wild boar would do. And then you’ve got another whole glitch here. Britain has more bluebells, our native bluebell, than the rest of the world put together. The reason we’ve got all those bluebells is that we haven’t got pigs digging them up and eating them.

Ramsey Russell: What do you call them? Bluebills?

Mike Swan: Bluebell. It’s just a bright blue-flowered.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, a great flower. Oh, yeah, it’s a flower.

Mike Swan: It has a bulb, and you get woods absolutely carpeted with bluebells in the spring. It’s the only country in the world where that happens. The reason is that there are no wild boar in those woods. If the wild boar were in there, they’d be digging them up and eating the bulbs. So we’ve got an international duty to conserve bluebell woods. At the same time, we’ve got a growing population of feral wild boar that have been reintroduced to the UK, and they’re eating the bluebells. So there are all sorts of checks, balances, controversies, and complications in how you manage wildlife in the UK.

Ramsey Russell: Boy, I tell you what, that’s a whole other level. Because in your explanation of what you do as a wildlife manager, it’s about what the landowner wants for output. It may be indigenous wildlife, wild, feral, or it may not. It may be purely introduced.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: A very daunting process.

Mike Swan: Yeah. You know, the bread and butter for me, for my living for the last 40-odd years, has been red-legged partridges and pheasants. Management for shooting two non-native species.

Ramsey Russell: We saw a lot of them. You’re doing a good job. We saw a lot of them on the roadside driving in.

Mike Swan: Yeah, well, yes, there are lots. We shoot more of them probably than the rest of the world put together. I wouldn’t be surprised. We certainly shoot more than any other country.

Ramsey Russell: I can’t imagine anybody that shoots more.

Mike Swan: No.

Ramsey Russell: Where did you grow up, Mike?

Mike Swan: I was born in Kent, on the banks of the River Medway, the Medway estuary. I was born in Kent, on the Medway, and I grew up with coastal wildfowling, fishing in the estuary, boating, and that sort of thing.

Ramsey Russell: Would that have been something you did as a child?

Mike Swan: Yeah. No, Dad was a mad, passionate wildfowler and a keen sailor. So we did that until, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, how do you judge that, when I was eight years old, his job changed and we moved away from the coast. But he couldn’t give up his wildfowling, so he carried on with it on that coast, and we used to just travel to and from. I first went wildfowling with him when I was about 13.

Ramsey Russell: What are some of your fondest memories of hunting with your dad? And when you say coast, would this be like a coastal marsh?

Mike Swan: Yeah, coastal marsh. Tidal salt marsh below high water mark, sitting about on little bits of the highest with decoys floating on the tide and waiting for the ducks to come on the tide. I’ll tell you one of my fondest memories. My father lost his right eye when he was 14, and so he had to learn to shoot off the left shoulder. So he had swapped over to left-handed. I’m with him about 30, 40 yards from him, two separate hides, pattern of decoys in front, and we are spying our half of the horizon each for what comes. And I spotted a teal coming from 2 o’clock. So I said to Father, “Teal, 2 o’clock.” And this teal came round past the decoys, turned back in to set to the decoys. Father put his gun up and squeezed the trigger. At that moment, another one that was following on the same trajectory went behind, and they lined up, and he shot both of them in opposite directions. Two teal in opposite directions. And he got up, sent the dog out to the one floating in the water, and got old Chips to bring it back. And then he went to settle back down in his hide, and I said to him, “Dad, aren’t you going to pick the other one?” And he said, “What other one?” And I said, “You shot two. There was one going the other way. That’s just on the edge of the marsh out there. You better send the dog over.” He had never even seen that bird. Wow. Because if you think about it, if you hadn’t got a right eye and you’re focused on the one that’s coming from the left.

Ramsey Russell: No depth field.

Mike Swan: Exactly. There’s no information on that side of the view. Absolute sheer accident. And that bird would have rotted out there but for the fact that he had his boy there watching for him.

Ramsey Russell: How would you all have cooked those ducks back then?

Mike Swan: Oh, we always roasted them. Plucked and dressed and roasted.

Ramsey Russell: And your mama cooked them?

Mike Swan: Yeah, Mother cooked them. Mother taught me to cook because when I went to university and I still wanted to shoot my ducks, if I hadn’t been taught by Mother how to cook, So I, and I’m the late developer, I was nearly 40 before I was married, so bachelor cookery and cooking my own wildlife was crucially important. I still do the bulk of the main course.

Ramsey Russell: How did she roast those ducks?

Mike Swan: Just whole plucked and singed. Father would always singe them. He always said if you presented them oven-ready, you stood a chance of getting permission to go again. So, whole plucked, little straight, little bit of butter, some salt and pepper, and into the oven. Then make a bit of a gravy out of the drippings that come from them and serve them with probably roast potatoes and whatever vegetables were seasonal, bearing in mind that Father always grew a good vegetable garden.

Ramsey Russell: Is that still your favorite way to cook them?

Mike Swan: Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. I love a roast duck. I’ll cook for the family here, whatever it is they want, and then I’ll slip one of my ducks in the oven and I’ll sit there and dine on it, feast on it myself, quietly. Slightly later in the evening, after they’ve all had whatever it is they’re having.

Ramsey Russell: Good stuff. You were telling me, you went to college to become a biologist. Very interested in research.

Mike Swan: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: Bumblebee.

Mike Swan: Bumblebees, yeah. I went to university to read zoology. Rapidly discovered that I liked the people in the botany department in Swansea University better than the zoology ones. And you had to do two or three different subjects for the first year. So I switched to botany, got a degree in botany, and I got on extremely well with a sadly departed chap called Quentin Kay, who was fascinated by pollination, gene flow, and plant genetics. So I ended up studying how pollinators move pollen around and what that means in plant gene flow terms. All completely esoteric, but it fits in well with fishing and water fowling because it’s a summer occupation, so you can go wildfowling all winter, and if you’re careful with it, you can always work around it with the tides.

Ramsey Russell: Well, it seems like it’d be a good fit. It dovetails fluidly with what you do as a wildlife manager here.

Mike Swan: Yeah. No. So now I like to think I can still understand the science. I like to think I can distill it, and I like to think that I can convert what the slightly esoteric scientist is saying into something that is a management prescription that an ordinary land manager can understand, a gamekeeper, a warden, you know, any of those sorts of wildlife rangers, any of those sorts of people. I hope I’m helping that. You know, if that’s my legacy, then I’ve achieved something useful.

Ramsey Russell: So much science worldwide, there’s a big disconnect between the scientific community and everyday people like myself.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: You know, it’s almost like trying to read Mandarin Chinese. We just don’t know it. It’s got to be distilled and presented so that we can make practice of it and make good use of it, I think.

Mike Swan: Yeah, no, that’s absolutely so. And that’s been a central theme of what Game Conservancy, Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust is all about. It’s about doing the science to understand what’s going on out there in the countryside and then using that to help deliver better conservation and better game management.

Ramsey Russell: I read something on the ride over in airport, I think it flew up, and it just caught my attention about the monarch butterflies. My U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed that monarch butterflies be listed as endangered. Are you all having a problem with pollinators over here also?

Mike Swan: Oh, yeah.

Ramsey Russell: What’s going on with the pollinators of the world? Is it Chemicals? Is it light pollution?

Mike Swan: I don’t know that we even know half the answers, really. I strongly believe that it’s a whole combination of circumstances. Yes, habitat. I mean, you know, the harder we farm, the bit we farm, the less space there is for the wild pollinators in amongst it. There’s less wildflowers, there’s less of all of that sort of stuff. There may be chemical residue effects. I sometimes think that the chemical residue questions are exaggerated by those who want to blame that when actually there are simpler answers in many ways. The other thing actually that I think is quite important and that people don’t often hit on is that there’s competition out there in a big way for pollinators because honeybees are not native here. They won’t be native in North America either. They’re an Asian species.

Ramsey Russell: I just learned something new.

Mike Swan: Yeah. Everybody wants honeybees because they want the honey, and they use the honeybees in your country to pollinate the almonds, don’t they? But they are strong competitors with the bumblebees, hoverflies, and a lot of the native pollinators. And that’s surely the case in North America, just as it is here.

Ramsey Russell: You know, one thing about the reading, that monarch butterfly being listed as endangered struck a nerve with me because if they list it as endangered, they’re probably going to put some kind of mandate or incentivize some form of habitat conservation, which in the instance of a monarch, I believe is thistle.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But it’s going to be more grasslands, more wild, you know, non-ag type habitats. And I know that we’ve got two non-governmental organizations back home, Pheasants Forever and Quail Unlimited that are pushing for monarch butterfly conservation because that kind of habitat would benefit those two upland bird species. And here I am thinking, hey, maybe it’ll help the ducks for nesting habitat.

Mike Swan: Exactly.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what I’m looking at something to stem the curb and protect, conserve habitat.

Mike Swan: You know, if you’ve got a duck breeding in a little prairie pothole pond with next to no margin around it, then the ease with which a predator can find that bird is pretty high. You put a bit of grass margin around the thing, you know, with some wildflowers in for the monarch butterflies and the other pollinators, it’s much less easy for the predators to find the nesting bird and also less risk of perhaps chemical drift or something like that impinging on the invertebrates in the pond, which are the food source for the ducklings.

Ramsey Russell: Right.

Mike Swan: So, you know, all of these things link together.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, it does. I want to talk about a little bit of the similarities and differences. Quick says there’s a little bit of both between waterfowl hunting here and managing for migratory populations of waterfowl here versus the United States. Are you aware, as a biologist, of how the North American Waterfowl Management Plan manages waterfowl maximum sustained yield in the United States America? You know, we do the pond counts, we do the adult breeder counts as best they can from aerial surveys and ground checks. Then we’ve got bands, leg bands that go into some model for harvest estimates. It’s very rigorous, very, very, very scientific. A lot of people question it. You know, science is imperfect.

Mike Swan: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. It’s just a more structured way to common sense, you know, and it’s an approach. But how are migratory game bird populations managed over here compared to over there?

Mike Swan: In a much less prescriptive kind of way. You’ve got to remember that we live in a world where the Soviet Union was on the other side of the fence and there wasn’t much communication. And the Soviet Union produces an awful lot of the wildfowl that come to Western Europe in the winter.

Ramsey Russell: That’s where you all’s birds are coming from.

Mike Swan: That’s where a lot of our birds are coming from, Northern Europe, Iceland, Greenland, you know. I mean, there’s a wide area. But having any real handle on what’s happening in the breeding areas was impossible historically. There are better possibilities now, a little bit, but not very much, really. So there was no way you could do those breeding counts, those monitorings, those productivity estimates, and all those sorts of things.

Ramsey Russell: Without flying over a hostile power.

Mike Swan: Yeah. And you wouldn’t want me being the pilot, I’ll tell you, absolutely not. Now, as I say, to some degree, those things have changed. But ultimately, the first thing we know about how many birds there are is when they get here. And by then, adapting the rules is going to be very, very difficult. So what we have is what’s been there historically. The current wildfowl shooting season was established in 1954 with what was then called the Protection of Birds Act, and it was shortened compared to what went before. Now, you can go and look for wildfowl from September 1 to January 31, and then an extra 20 days below the high watermark on the foreshore. The logic behind that, the argument behind that, is the inland ducks include most of the home-breeding ones, and they are starting to pair up in January. So you stop a bit earlier. Out on the foreshore, especially if the weather’s cold, the migrants are still there, and you’re not interfering with breeding behavior, so you get those extra 20 days. So that’s our season. You can go out at the beginning of the season in September, and really all you’ll see is homebred mallard and perhaps a few early teal. Then, the numbers build up through the autumn and winter. So there’s no actual legal bag limit. Nothing legally.

Ramsey Russell: No bag limit?

Mike Swan: No, we’ll come to that in a slightly different detail.

Ramsey Russell: No mandated legal bag limit?

Mike Swan: There is no mandated legal bag limit as a national thing or even as a provincial thing or whatever. What we do have is that most of what I call proper wildfowling, the coastal wildfowling, is run by clubs. The clubs have their own sets of rules for their members. A club that I’m a member of in South Wales has a bag limit of six ducks per flight. You can have two flights in a day, so you could shoot a dozen in a day if you had a morning flight and a tide flight or something like that. The practicalities are that most people don’t get to those sorts of figures anyway, so it’s no real constraint. So clubs have their rules. They may also say you can only go so many times during the season. You can’t be out there all day, every day. Let’s keep the disturbance to a sensible level. Let’s just, use the thing when it’s good and leave it quiet at other times, and so on. Some clubs will have rules. A syndicate that I run personally that shoots on the Medway, where I first went wildfowling as a child, has a rule that under no circumstances does anyone go out on either Monday or Tuesday. So it gets a two-day rest every week. What that really works out to is that, because people shoot on the tidal cycle, you get two days at each end of a week when nobody goes because the tides are all wrong. Then, you get four or five days the following week when people might go out and shoot a few ducks. So it’s being shot for three or four days once a fortnight. And, you know, over a thousand acres of marsh, someone in one corner is not disturbing the whole place either. So, you know, we pride ourselves that by doing that and by having a limit of three trips per month per member, nobody is going to be going out there and shooting it hard enough to make any real difference to the numbers of ducks.

Ramsey Russell: Is hunting pressure a pretty big deal over here? Do you see that? I know hunting pressure is a big deal back home. It’s like every square foot of the landscape is getting hunted, and the birds are just as wary as can be.

Mike Swan: I think it’s very variable. There are some places that are hunted very hard. Scotland’s rules are different. Because it’s basically free foreshore, anyone can go there in Scotland. Parts of southern Scotland get hunted pretty hard because it’s the first place you come to after you cross the border. So there’s some of that. Overall, I think actually if it looks as though the pressure’s too high, it’s managed. Most of the wildfowling clubs, when they first formed, did so in the 1950s in response to the Protection of Birds Act that made those new regulations. And people suddenly started to think, “How’s my wildfowling in the future?” So they came together and formed clubs. My father was a founding member of the Kent Wildfowlers Association. In those days, those clubs very often put a limit on where you could live. You had to live within the area of the piece of foreshore. And they would put a limit on the number of members, which helped to control the pressure. The historical legacy of that is that a whole generation of young people were not able to get into wildfowling from my age onwards for probably 20 years. And now, the average wildfowling club is occupied by old-age pensioners in their 70s and older.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Mike Swan: I’m a young member in some clubs at 69, or younger than average, shall I say. And so actually, that’s beginning to have, if anything, a more serious effect, which is that some clubs are struggling to recruit new members.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: Because there’s been disconnect out there, and, you know, the sons and daughters of members would probably have a route in. Anybody else who was just interested and aspired to join would find it very difficult.

Ramsey Russell: Access problem.

Mike Swan: A real access problem.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a worldwide problem, access. I’m seeing it everywhere.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But I’m just going to back up just a minute. So try to help me understand this because, you know, my understanding of the way that we manage waterfowl in North America with the counts and everything else is that we do as rigorous an inventory as scientifically possible so that when we start taking withdrawals, we don’t overdraw. That’s kind of the system.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Over here, because big, bad Russia is to the north, where a lot of European birds are breeding, you all can’t do an inventory, but there’s no bag limit?

Mike Swan: No.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, it’s like, wow. How do I know I’m not killing too many?

Mike Swan: I think the answer to the question is, the ducks won’t let you do that, will they?

Ramsey Russell: Or will they? Because there are people back home that say they will.

Mike Swan: Well, I don’t think they will. There is always somewhere to go where they’re not going to be shot. There are nature reserves all around the coast that are unshot. There are inland places, there are loads and loads of them. So if you put the pressure on too hard on your piece of ground, your club’s piece of ground, or however it is, they’re just going to avoid you. And I have to say, with that laissez-faire approach to regulation on what we do, I don’t see any significant dramatic changes in the numbers of waterfowl that I see. The places I go over the last 50-odd years haven’t changed much.

Ramsey Russell: For 50 years, I asked you that question over breakfast. I said, “You’ve been hunting for 50 years?”

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Is duck hunting better, worse, or the same? You said, “No difference.”

Mike Swan: Overall, no difference. Good and bad years.

Ramsey Russell: If you ever had a year so bad you think the sky’s fallen, you’ve killed too many, there’s something going on. We kill too damn many ducks. We got to stop killing them, got to stop doing this. We got to stop doing everything. We got to throw the baby out with the bathwater and just quit killing them.

Mike Swan: No, I’ve never felt that. I’ve always felt, if we define a poor season as one where you don’t shoot so many, and is that necessarily a poor season anyway if you’re enjoying yourself still? But if we define it as a season when you don’t shoot so many, I can see a reason. Like, for instance, on my Medway wildfowling in Kent, I don’t need cold weather to get a good wildfowling season. The whole tradition is when it goes frosty, they all get squeezed out onto the foreshore, and coastal wildfowling gets better. For my Medway wildfowling, I want a dry autumn. If I get a dry autumn, there’s no floodwater inland, and they’re out on the marsh. If we get a wet autumn, they’ve gone inland straight away, and there they spend their winter. And because it’s London clay, once the water lands there and forms the splashes, it doesn’t drain away, it lays wet all winter long. So, you know, I can see explanations of why we see what we see varying from year to year. That doesn’t need to be anything much to do with the numbers that we’re harvesting. I really can.

Ramsey Russell: If you had to guess, Mike, since you all may not have a harvest inventory or a scientific harvest estimate, how many ducks are you all killing in the UK guided hunts in a year?

Mike Swan: Well, as we discussed slightly earlier, the whole thing is masked by the fact that we release quite a lot of mallard, game farm mallards, and we probably shoot a million game farm mallards in a winter, which will be more, I think, than the total number of wild ducks.

Ramsey Russell: You said three to one. You said you probably shoot three game farm mallards per wild duck shot. Maybe 1.3 million to 1.5 million ducks.

Mike Swan: Yeah. Maybe a bit more. I really don’t know because, of course, there’s no requirement for people to register their bags. We don’t have a number.

Ramsey Russell:: The club level?

Mike Swan: Yeah. But there’s something else as well that gives me confidence. My organization, the Game Conservancy, the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, I should say now, with its modern name, we have run a voluntary census of the bag for the inland shoots, mainly across the whole of the UK, for 60, 70 years. And we’ve also tied that into historical records from old game books. So we’ve got data going back 200 years on the numbers of birds that are being shot. Now, that is mainly about upland game birds, as you would call them. It’s about pheasants, partridges, red grouse, woodcock, snipe to some degree as well. It’s not so much about wildfowl because the inland shoots and estates don’t shoot wildfowl in the same way. So if you ask me what our game bag census tells us about pintail, for example, the answer is precious little, because rather few pintail are shot inside the seawall. They’re mostly shot on the coast. Whatever we shoot, widgeon, a little bit more reliable, but not massively so. But what you get out of that is that there are no big changes going on in the numbers that are being reported to the game bag census. Now, that’s not an absolute number, that’s an index. But unless there’s an obvious reason why the index would change, you take the index as a reasonable measure of the health of the population of the species concerned. And when we see big, big fluctuations year on year, but we don’t see big holes, we don’t see serious declines of any of those migratory species. The ones that are declining badly or have declined badly are the resident upland game birds, particularly the grey partridge.

Ramsey Russell:: Ah, yeah.

Mike Swan: Because we’ve intensified the agriculture, and then we’ve given up looking after them.

Ramsey Russell:: Very good. Very, very good. You know, back in 1918, in the United States, they enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. We were killing too many ducks, punt guns, and market hunting. And it wasn’t just ducks, it was mockingbirds and anything humanity would eat. Back in the day, as I’ve met with historians and done a little bit deeper dive into why those laws changed, it really wasn’t purely for conservation. It wasn’t so that your great-great-grandkids would have more ducks. It had to do with, as the American wilderness was being ingress with railroads, boom technology of the day, rich sportsmen out of the cities could come and shoot them. And there came to be a conflict between the sportsmen, the hunters that were out there on the weekends in these clubs, versus the market hunters. The private individuals wanted to go shoot all them ducks, and the market hunters were messing it up, and they just couldn’t fix it. So they went and reached out to their political buddies and began to relegate market hunting into oblivion, not purely for conservation, but so that these private individuals could benefit. And we’re stuck with a great conservation measure now. But what I found so interesting when I got invited by James to come over and visit was you all didn’t quit using punt guns ever?

Mike Swan: No.

Ramsey Russell:: You all still shoot punt guns today, If you want to?

Mike Swan: Yes.

Ramsey Russell:: It never stopped.

Mike Swan: No, it’s never stopped because, believe you me, because I’ve done a bit. There is pretty little in waterfowl hunting more exciting than creeping across open water in a punt with your head down, trying to get within 70 yards of a sensible number of ducks.

Ramsey Russell:: What’s a sensible number?

Mike Swan: I would like to put 10 in the bag on a shot, and if I do that twice in a winter, then I’ve done what I would consider a great season. And the practicalities are, if you think you’re going to get 10, you’ll probably get six or seven or whatever. I have never aspired to the really big shots that the old commercial hunters were after. I didn’t have a big enough gun for it anyway. My gun only threw 12 ounces.

Ramsey Russell: Only through three-quarters.

Mike Swan: And 10 was about what we got to. I remember four mallards and six teal on one occasion. And I remember six, seven, or eight mallards, widgeon, and pintail combined a couple of times. Most days, you wouldn’t get a shot. If you did get a shot, then hopefully you’d shot a few birds. If I got a teenager along for the ride to expose them to it, I’d let them line two pintails up and pull the string on the basis that it’s great for them to actually hear the gun go off. And you get this great cloud of black smoke and bits of wad that caught fire going down the tube, hissing on the water in front of you and all that. It’s glorious.

Ramsey Russell:: It sounds glorious.

Mike Swan: So, know all of that and just such great. I mean, if you’ve stalked deer, still hunting, this is still hunting with nowhere to hide. You’re in a punt, which is supposed to merge. It’s pale, pale gray, nearly white. And you want a gray, overcast day. And then you’ve got a gray sea, you’ve got a gray sky, you’ve got this thing emerging slowly out of here. The birds can’t really make out what it is. It’s widest about a third of the way back from the bow, so that whatever you’re doing to push it is hidden behind the wide point. So there’s no movement visible to the birds as you sneak in. And you don’t need very much wind because if there’s any significant breeze and you’re not absolutely poling straight into it, what happens is that it catches the side. Because you’re pushing from the stern of a punt 20 feet long, it catches the side, you spin broadside on, and they all get up and fly away because they don’t like the look of what they’ve seen now. If you think you want an adrenaline rush, there’s not much more than that one.

Ramsey Russell:: Bring up a good point. And, like, recently I was talking to my friend C. John Sullivan, who is a Chesapeake Bay unbelievable historian, has got dozens, I’m going to guess, punt guns of various shapes and forms. And, you know, I guess until speaking to him and now hearing from you, when I thought about the bad old days of market hunting, it was like these guys would just go out every morning and shoot thousands of ducks. That’s not the case. You know, to hear him say it, the weather conditions have got to be perfect. The birds have got to behave. Everything’s got to conspire together. And they might only go out a few times a week when the weather was conducive to it. But even in those times, they went out pulling the string and making the gun go boom was far and few between. But they wanted big bags when they did it. Seems to me that, especially as you transform from that to now, to hear you describe punt gunning today, it’s almost, it’s not about the volume. It’s just about the sneak, the sport, the art of skull and that getting into position.

Mike Swan: It is. But it’s still about sneaking up on a group of ducks. It would be relatively easy to pick them off one at a time.

Ramsey Russell:: What kind of ducks, mostly are you bagging out there? Poachers?

Mike Swan: No. Widgeon and pintail.

Ramsey Russell:: Oh, really?

Mike Swan: Yeah. Pochards are pretty rare in the UK. They’re basically an inland freshwater duck on deeper water.

Ramsey Russell:: Okay.

Mike Swan: So no, widgeon and teal. Teal are funny when you creep up on them in a punt because teal are sat there all asleep and all of a sudden they’ve gone. The other ducks start to lift their heads a little bit because they wonder what’s going on. You’ve got a split second to pull the string before it all goes wrong on you. But as I say, with teal, you don’t very often get a shot because you think they’re all being very complacent. And then suddenly they’ve all got up and gone together.

Ramsey Russell:: As I was doing a little bit of reading, it seems like right about the time that North America was putting a hiatus on going out and shooting punt guns, more than three shells, shooting at night, and shooting all this different stuff, you know, our Migratory Bird Treaty Act, it seems to me that, as I was reading about it, around that same era, it’s almost like, I may be saying this wrong, nobility. It’s like the upper crust began to adopt punt gunning as a pure form of sport. It’s like they almost revived or saved it. It was like a revival in punt gunning.

Mike Swan: I don’t know if that’s quite true. Certainly, the nobility caught it. The great Ralph Payne-Gallwey, who also wrote the book about shooting high pheasants, called High Pheasants in Theory and Practice, Shooting Moor and Marsh, and various others. I think what you get is the literature from the gentleman who could write.

Ramsey Russell:: Okay.

Mike Swan: Because all they needed to do was go out to play and then write about it. They hadn’t got to do anything else.

Ramsey Russell:: They have a job right.

Mike Swan: Yeah, exactly. They got an estate, they’d got the people, and I mean, even Colonel Hawker, the grandfather of the written word in wildfowling, if you like, from Keyhaven, not so very far from where we are right now, he employed a puntsman. There is an account in his book of sending a man with a horse and cart to collect a fellow from Poole, which is about 30 miles away. I can’t think of the name now, but he was recognized as the best punt gunner in Poole Harbour. And Hawker wanted him and moved him lock, stock, and barrel, moved house, the whole thing. Moved him to Keyhaven to be his personal puntsman. Think gamekeeper inland as to be there to attend to him, to do all of that stuff. So, you know, these people, they loved the pursuit, they loved the sport, and they began to see the fascination of what, for the ordinary working people that were on those coastlines, who, if they were lucky, could afford a gun, you know, what those people were doing for the marketplace. And inevitably, because they actually shot numbers of birds, they were sending birds to market because they didn’t have a freezer to put them in, so they couldn’t eat them all summer long. They could only eat them when they were in season. And when you’ve eaten enough, you’ve eaten enough.

Ramsey Russell:: Can you still sell birds? Can you still sell ducks?

Mike Swan: Yes.

Ramsey Russell:: At all here in the UK?

Mike Swan: Yes. Perfectly legal.

Ramsey Russell:: Who would buy them?

Mike Swan: Surprisingly, we’ve got quite a good market in game generally. So pheasants, partridges, and mallard in particular are in the marketplace. Pigeons, wood pigeons to some degree, grouse in season, and so on, so they go with that. The other ducks, the widgeon, the teal, the pintail, will very rarely go to market. Nearly everybody who is shooting those is shooting them for the sport and for the pot for themselves. I’ve never sold a duck in my life. And I’ve never bought one either, come to that. But, you know, my birds have all been for home consumption. Or if I’ve been lucky and there’s a few spares and I know a friend who likes one, I can hand over a brace or two of birds to people.

Ramsey Russell:: And what were you saying changed with World War II?

Mike Swan: World War II, the value of food changed dramatically. Before World War II, actually, we were hungry. We’d gone through depression and food prices were quite high. One of the things that came out of World War II through rationing of food and so on through the war was that we would secure our food supply into the future. So the market value of what people were shooting pre-World War II disappeared over that short period of time. It suddenly became unviable to be sending ducks to market. My father regaled me with tales of the Medway commercial wildfowlers. And the ducks were the jam. The bread and butter actually was what they called hard fowl, which were the wading birds, tied up a dozen at a time, packed in straw, put on a hamper on the train to London, and all of that. Again, remembering that there was no refrigeration even then. By the time you get into the 1950s, refrigeration comes in too and means that it’s easier for someone who’s producing slightly more than they want right now to be able to keep the spare birds and use them. And so, yeah, all of that stuff I think combines together, and it went.

Ramsey Russell: Very interesting. What species are legal here? What species of ducks? I’m gonna be here for the next eight or nine days. What species of ducks can I legally hunt here?

Mike Swan: Mallard, teal, green-winged teal, effectively widgeon, European widgeon obviously, pintail, shoveler, gadwall, tufted duck, pochard, goldeneye.

Ramsey Russell: Interesting. Mallard being the most abundant because they’re put and take.

Mike Swan: Yeah. And mallard being the one that you see. I mean, there’s a lot of wild mallard too. Mallard may well be the most important wild duck in the bag as well because they’ll be the ones shot inland by the flight pond shooters and so on. And they’ll probably be more, you know, although the widgeon, the pintail, and the teal are more important on the coast, mallard are probably the most important. And teal are probably a close second in terms of wild ducks.

Ramsey Russell: As a biologist, do you have any thoughts on game-farm mallards in the UK or in Europe in general?

Mike Swan: Yeah, I think overall we are depressing the productivity of our wild ducks by letting out stupid hand-reared ducks that don’t have the right behavioral characteristics and so on and so forth.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: And there’s lots of science to support that. It’s an interesting story, but when I was a kid, wildfowlers got this idea that to demonstrate their conservation credentials, wildfowling clubs would hand-rear mallard and let them go on unshot refuge areas to infiltrate into the local population. So this was not put-and-take mallard shooting. This was putting something out to replace what they had taken. And it came in as a concept. I remember it well because my father was on the duck conservation subcommittee of the Wildfowlers Association of Great Britain and Ireland (WAGBI) as it was then, now BASC. And I used to get the job of taking the bloody rings that were put on these birds to the post office to be posted out to secretaries all over the country. “Take those down the post office, boy.” So I remember it very, very well 60 years ago. And it’s my humble opinion that the great conservation benefit of that has nothing directly to do with those ducks. It was about the fact that the clubs were looking for pieces of land that could be unshot refuges. They were declaring a piece of their own, or they were finding a piece just inside the sea wall on an estate where someone was on their side and would say, “Yeah, you can take that on as a club and look after it.” And in turn, they then started doing the habitat management and improvement, and they started doing some predation control to look after the wild breeding ducks that were in there. That turned the wildfowler into a conservationist in a big, big way, where previously he just quietly accepted what nature provided.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve been hunting for half a century. When did game-farm mallard show up? Did they show up during your hunting career?

Mike Swan: They were already there. I don’t know when they first started exactly, but I can remember 60 years ago when I first started beating on a local inland shoot. There was a duck pond on which they released mallard, and we would do the ducks first drive and then go shoot pheasants. They would because I was just a boy beater with a stick in my hand.

 

Ramsey Russell: And with the thought in mind that in the half-century you’ve been duck hunting here, it’s just some years better than others. But duck hunting has not changed after all we’ve talked about.

Mike Swan: The numbers of birds I shoot have declined, but I’ve got an idea that’s to do with the fact that the old man doesn’t go at it quite as hard as he did when he was 30. Genuinely, out on my marsh in Kent, we have a personal limit of 15 per gun per day on the private coastal marsh that I manage. And there were seasons when I shot 15 in a day more than once. I haven’t shot 15 in a day for five or six years. My mate, who’s been a member with me for that length of time, shot 15 for the first time three seasons ago.

Ramsey Russell: Wow.

Mike Swan: And he said, “I’ll never do that again. I’ve done it once and I’m quite happy with that.” Half a dozen from here. And then he’s now hung his guns up for various health reasons.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, you bring up a good point. Maybe as we get older, we don’t shoot as many ducks because we don’t go at it as hard. I mean, we were talking at breakfast about some of the cultural shooting. You slog out in literally knee-deep mud. That’s the authentic duck hunt here. Knee-deep mud. And you were saying a big Canada goose flew over, you shot one, and decided not to shoot anymore because you had to get him out.

Mike Swan: Three times that happened to me this season. One Canada is quite enough to carry off at a time. Makes a lovely goose casserole with the family, you know, we love it. But the first one I shot this season was the other side of a muddy creek. When it hit the deck, I sent my old golden retriever to pick it up. And she’s never been all that fond of carrying geese. She’ll drag one ashore off the water. She waded through the mud up the other side, went out to it, sniffed it, and looked at me as if to say, “If you want this thing, you can bloody well come and get it.”

Ramsey Russell: “Come and get it yourself.” Yeah.

Mike Swan: And I went over there and collected my goose.

Ramsey Russell: She’s not as young as she used to be either, is she? But you all love, you all bait ducks over here.

Mike Swan: We feed flight ponds. I don’t think we quite call it duck baiting as such, but I hear you.

Ramsey Russell: What do you feed flight ponds?

Mike Swan: Yeah, flight feeding flight ponds is perfectly legal.

Ramsey Russell: How do you feed flight ponds?

Mike Swan: You scatter a bit of barley in the shallow water at the edge of the pond. The mallard come there under cover of darkness or at dusk and leave at dawn. Teal to a degree and other species to a small degree. But yes, feeding ducks is perfectly legal.

Ramsey Russell: That’s been just since forever?

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: One of the most interesting things I hope to do this week is you all shoot geese, not ducks, at night, but not by light. That’s a big tradition over here.

Mike Swan: Moon flighting.

Ramsey Russell: Moon flighting, yeah.

Mike Swan: Shooting them under the moon. It goes right the way back. And it applies to ducks as well. I’m told, I’ve never done it with geese, but I’m told it’s relatively easy with geese. You can sort of predict what the geese are doing quite well if they come into a field somewhere, coming to feed as the moon rises. So I’m told. I don’t really know. I grew up in a part of the country in the south here where there weren’t many geese when I was a kid. We’ve now got loads of Canadas. We’ve got feral greylags. But wild, wild geese were always good. Pinks never came this far south. What we got along the south coast were white-fronts from Siberia that would come across via Holland. So they were migrating westwards effectively, rather than south, if you see what I mean.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: So geese are not in my moon flighting geese is not in my history. Moon flighting ducks is not easy. It’s much harder to reliably work out what the ducks are going to do under the moon. You can spend long hours out there and nothing happens.

Ramsey Russell: That, and talking about getting older, my eyesight is not as good, now as it was.

Mike Swan: Yeah, yeah. No, I noticed that my 17-year-old son says, “Some over there, Dad! Look up, Dad, here they come.” And I haven’t spotted them yet. And, yes that’s absolutely right. I’m very lucky. Mine’s still pretty good. I need reading glasses for close-up work. I can’t tie flies without reading glasses, but I can see ducks in the distance fairly well. So moonlight and what they call a mackerel sky, that thin, broken, fleecy cloud like the stripes down the side of a mackerel.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: Moonlight and a mackerel sky is the absolute epitome of shooting after dark and remains perfectly legal.

Ramsey Russell: How long after dark, after sunset, can you shoot if you’re shooting by moonlight?

Mike Swan: All night.

Ramsey Russell: All night?

Mike Swan: All night long. Some clubs, I know the Kent Wildfowlers have rules on which dates you can moon flight, because there are enough places where, on a low cloudy night with industrial lighting and street lighting all around, the sodium lighting reflects off the cloud, and you could actually see a duck to shoot any night, any dull night. So, to maintain the tradition of moon flighting and at the same time stop people from going out when there is no moon, so that it’s not being overdone, they specify the dates when members are allowed to go moon flighting. But again, that’s in clubs and self-regulation, not in the legal framework.

Ramsey Russell: And when did the United Kingdom have to start shooting non-toxic shot for waterfowl?

Mike Swan: The legal 1997.

Ramsey Russell: About the same time as the United States. That’s about the same time. I believe we may have been a little bit earlier than that. Yeah, I think we’re about 1989, 1990.

Mike Swan: Yeah, I’m gonna say, I think we were working a little bit on American experience, and the change came without a great deal of trouble, really, because most of the waterfowl hunters were starting to think that a semi-automatic capable, the three-shot semi-auto, was actually the gun for the foreshore. I’ve never owned one, but lots of people, most wildfowlers probably use a semi-auto. And the semi-autos, of course, were being built for your marketplace, and they were therefore being built steel-proof, superior steel-proof, shove a three-and-a-half-inch in, and so people sort of took the change fairly easily. Unless you happen to be one of the old, you know, eight-bore aficionados and you’ve got an eight-bore Damascus barrel gun.

Ramsey Russell: I was just fixing to ask you, and we started talking shotguns. Mike, you know you shot punt guns. Did you ever go and shoot 10-gauge, 8-gauge, 4-gauge?

Mike Swan: No.

Ramsey Russell: Are they still legal over here?

Mike Swan: Oh yeah.

Ramsey Russell: So if I want to go out and shoulder a four-gauge?

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Wow. Or an eight-gauge?

Mike Swan: Yeah. I wouldn’t advise you do it if you want to shoot any ducks. Because, I mean, it’ll make a big bang.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: And if you get the swing right, you might. Frankly, you’d struggle to find a 10-bore. Oh, I don’t know, there’s some 10-bore semi-autos, I think, about because our 10s are legal in the States as well, aren’t they?

Ramsey Russell: 10-gauge.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: But not 8-gauge, 6-gauge, 4-gauge.

Mike Swan: So anything from 8-gauge upwards in terms of size, there is nothing out there that is not an antique. Probably Damascus barrels.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Mike Swan: And it’s probably never been proofed for a massive load in comparison to the size of the gun. So if you went out with an eight-bore Damascus barrel, you would probably not be able to put through it, as much as you could put through a modern 10-bore semi-auto.

Ramsey Russell: Good point. James was telling me that to qualify as a shotgun in the UK, it had to have a two-inch diameter on a barrel to qualify as a shotgun. Anything bigger than that is not a shotgun.

Mike Swan: That’s right.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, two inches is, what is that a one-gauge?

Mike Swan: Oh no, way, way bigger than that. No. I think it was 1981, the Wildlife and Countryside Act, which was the revision of the Protection of Birds in 1954, made it illegal to use a shotgun of two inches or bigger to restrict the very biggest punt guns.

Ramsey Russell: Lastly. Wow

Mike Swan: Which was probably irrelevant because so few of them would have been out there and being used.

Ramsey Russell: Well, I mean, if you’re shooting three-quarters of a pound of shot per trigger pull.

Mike Swan: Yeah. I mean, a two-inch bore would probably throw two pounds.

Ramsey Russell: Golly. How big a pattern is that throwing at 70 yards? Long as this table?

Mike Swan: No, not as big as that, not as wide as that.

Ramsey Russell: A meter or two

Mike Swan: Two meters something like that. Not quite that even. A meter and a half probably. The old maximum an inch of spread for every yard with a shotgun, it’s spreading in exactly the same way as your 12-bore. So it’s not going to be a massive, massive thing. That’s why the big shots would be achieved by lining ducks up and getting close enough to the closest of them that you could cut a slice. So where ducks are at the tide edge, sort of noodling along, some on the mud and some on the water, you would try and come at them along the tide edge so that you can get within 40 yards of the nearest ones and then pull the string and cut a long slice through them. That would be the technique that people would be using.

Ramsey Russell: It’s just mostly differences. Over here, the last question, last little topic is anti-hunters.

Mike Swan: Yes.

Ramsey Russell: You all got anti-hunters? I know just from being on the other side of the pond, I hear a lot about UK anti-hunters, especially when we start talking rhino horns and elephants.

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: All those iconic species. But you all deal with them with just game animals, don’t you?

Mike Swan: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Fox hunting. Is fox hunting still legal over here?

Mike Swan: No.

Ramsey Russell: No.

Mike Swan: Except its unenforceable legislation, but that’s another matter. We can still shoot a fox because foxes are a serious problem.

Ramsey Russell: But you can’t run them with horses.

Mike Swan: You can’t run them with a pack of hounds.

Ramsey Russell: Because of anti-hunters.

Mike Swan: Because of anti-hunters. And so, yeah, you’ve got this sort of craziness out there. And that has been a focus, and it’s still a focus, because the legislation, the great Tony Blair, who was our Prime Minister at the time, claimed at least once, I’m probably going to be done for slander for saying this, but we’ll give it a go, he claimed that he recognized eventually that the legislation he was about to pass was wrong, morally unacceptable, and he therefore changed the wording of the bill at the last minute to make it unenforceable.

Ramsey Russell: So what would happen if tomorrow I got up in the morning, let loose a pack of hounds, and chased them on horses, killed a fox?

Mike Swan: You were chasing after a drag. So it’s drag hunting. Someone runs off with an attractive scent that the dogs are going to chase after. And you put the dogs on the attractive scent and then you lose control of them.

Ramsey Russell: I see. I wouldn’t go to jail.

Mike Swan: You’d be very unlucky to go to jail. Conceivably, if you did something stupid and you admitted that you were trying to do it in some way or built some evidence against yourself, you could go to jail. You’d be more likely to get fined. They don’t really want to lock you up for that because there aren’t enough spaces in our jails anyway.

Ramsey Russell: Does the absence of rigorous, scientifically-based waterfowl management here versus the North American Waterfowl Management Plan, put hunters or biologists at a disadvantage in dealing with the anti-hunters?

Mike Swan: I don’t think it does much, actually. I don’t think it makes very much difference. The anti-hunters are fundamentally opposed to killing things, particularly for recreation, for sport, if you like. So, on that basis, how well it’s regulated doesn’t really cross their horizon. What they will do is chip in at every opportunity in terms of a government consultation as a stakeholder group to have a view. When the government issues a consultation on some legislative change related to hunting, they’ll muster the troops and go in with a view. They’ll do that based on the idea that the more difficult they make it for us, the better they like it. But they really want it banned. That’s really where they are. And, as I say, on that basis, the vast majority of reasonable people can understand what we do if it’s properly explained to them. In fact, it may well have appeared in Shooting Times this week, my little monthly jottings for wildfowlers. The other day, I went to my place down on the south coast here, which is one of the busiest bird-watching venues in the area. There are people all along the sea wall looking at the freshwater splashes on the inside, which have got ducks all over them. So I parked the car. I went a little bit early, there were a lot of people parked. The dog walkers were there, the mountain bikers, the whole nine yards. So I thought I’d take it easy for a minute or two. I chatted with my mate on the phone and thought I’d let these people disperse a bit before I set off. They’d soon be packing up to go home for tea. But it didn’t work because, for every car that left, a new one arrived, someone else taking the dog for a walk or whatever. Then, as I decided it was time, I actually had to go. A lady appeared with a big telescope on a tripod, scanned the area for a moment, then put it in the back of her car, which was parked directly behind mine. I thought, I’ll let that lady birdwatcher go before I get out and give away what I’m about to do. And she didn’t. She sat on the phone, obviously plugging into the local network all the rare birds she’d seen or whatever. So I decided I had to get organized. I got out, went around to the back of the car, opened the tailgate, drew on the thigh boots, put on the camouflage jacket, and was just about to let the hound out of the dog box when she decided to start the car up and leave. The lights came on, and I thought, well, I’m rumbled now, even if she hasn’t noticed yet. So I walked around to the side of the car and shut the door to let her get out more easily. And I got a cheery wave as she went away. No bother. Then, as I set off with the dog, with the gun over my arm, two couples came in with their dogs, and we had a cheery hello. Then I got out to the front edge of the sea wall, and there was another couple with binoculars, obvious birdwatchers. They asked how well I’d done. I explained I was just on my way out for evening flight. They were fascinated by that. And they were birdwatchers for certain. Then a young fella of about 12 years old was marching along the sea wall, and I got a cheery “Good afternoon!” and “What a lovely day!” and “Isn’t this a wonderful place?” And I thought, there’s an embryonic wildfowler if ever there was one, if only he gets the right introduction. And then one more person with a dog. And nobody in any of that group showed any sign of any animosity to what I was obviously about to do.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good, that’s good.

Mike Swan: And it’s because they’re ordinary, normal people. And if you explain a little bit about what you are out to do, if you get the opportunity, they’ll listen, and most of them will be fascinated. And it’s not unreasonable. We love that place with a vengeance, don’t we?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How important are hunters to waterfowl or wildlife conservation in the United Kingdom?

Mike Swan: Crucial.

Ramsey Russell: How so?

Mike Swan: 90% of it. Because the only bits that are really being done for conservation by the government or by wildlife trusts are the small bits that are the national nature reserves, the county trust nature reserves, and so on. The vast area of the countryside is being managed with shooting in mind. Even if it’s not all of it, it’s being farmed, it’s growing timber for forestry, and all that stuff.

Ramsey Russell: But for the shooters, one of the desired outputs is wildlife.

Mike Swan: One of the key things that has been my drive and inspiration for 42 years as a game management advisor is that I am getting active conservation done in the living, working countryside. The countryside that provides our wood, provides our food. That’s the countryside that we really need to conserve in because the rest of it is only a tiny, tiny percentage. And I genuinely, genuinely believe that through what we do as a whole, the wildfowlers, the game shooters, all of that, all those clubs, all those private individuals, all of that is massively more in total output. And it’s also more pragmatic. If there is a problem with predation, as hunters, we will address that problem head-on. We’ll say, “Right, we need to reduce the numbers of foxes, we need to reduce the numbers of crows, we need to reduce the numbers of stoats,” whatever it might be, and we will get on and do that. Nature conservation groups are so scared of the antis in their membership that they won’t get on and do that in the same sort of way. And if they do, they’ll only mess about at it in relative terms. The RSPB, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, recently published some science that said that they could not help breeding curlews through predation control. And when you read what the science says, what it says is that they could not help, not that you could not help. They were not able to put enough pressure on the predation problem to achieve a useful result, which is another very important thing that comes out and which I preach right, left, and center, and that is, If you’re going to go and do something about predation control, get on and be ruthless about it. Do it properly, do it to a high standard, do it as humanely as possible, all of those things, but do it sufficiently to have an effect. Because if you don’t, it’s not morally justifiable, because you’re just wasting the lives of animals for no effect. Yeah, but we get sidetracked.

Ramsey Russell: You’ve got a 17-year-old son.

Mike Swan: Yeah. And one of 21. I’m a late developer.

Ramsey Russell: Late developer.

Mike Swan: Late developer. Ramsay. I was 48 when the first one came along.

Ramsey Russell: What does the future of hunting look like for him? Will he be hunting when he’s our age?

“I think that the world that we hunt in is different from the world that we were hunting in 50 years ago. It’s changed, it’s evolved, and we’ve evolved with it.”

Mike Swan: I think so. I’m ever the optimist. I think that the world that we hunt in is different from the world that we were hunting in 50 years ago. It’s changed, it’s evolved, and we’ve evolved with it. We use different guns, we use different cartridges, we use different shot, and all that stuff. He’s going to have to evolve. He’s not going to have to be a dinosaur.

Ramsey Russell: Dinosaurs like me and you, you mean?

“…fundamentally they’re entirely justifiable and they’re in the good spirit of conservation and management of our countryside.”

Mike Swan: Yeah, like me. Yeah. You know, when he’s an old fart, he’s going to be a different old fart from his father, but he’s still going to actually be able, I think, to do these things because fundamentally they’re entirely justifiable and they’re in the good spirit of conservation and management of our countryside.

Ramsey Russell: That’s a fine note to end on. Folks you all been listening to my buddy, Mr. Mike Swan over here. What’s the name of your little town again?

Mike Swan: Pentridge.

Ramsey Russell: Pentridge.

Mike Swan: We call it a hamlet.

Ramsey Russell: A hamlet.

Mike Swan: It’s tiny.

Ramsey Russell: Yes, it is, it is. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for breakfast, thank you for a great conversation, a great education in waterfowl hunting and management over here in the United Kingdom. I appreciate it.

Mike Swan: Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure. Always delighted to meet somebody from the other side of the pond.

Ramsey Russell: Folks thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. See you next time.