Driven Snipe
These shoots have been organised by The Arundell Arms for many years, and have established a unique reputation in the shooting world. They are one or two-day shoots and are run every week from the end of November to the end of January - excluding Christmas. We take a minimum of six and a maximum of eight guns on each shoot, and there is an average of 8 to 10 drives a day. The shoots take place within a 15 mile radius of the hotel over a mixture of plough, grass and marshland.
Each morning at 9.30 am we collect you from the hotel and bring you back at about 4.30 pm. There is some walking involved but we can take cars quite near to most of the drives. We have lunch either informally in the hotel bar or at a conveniently situated inn.
Driven snipe is possibly the most challenging of all forms of shooting, and bags vary according to the experience of the guns (seven to ten cartridges fired to one bird down is the average) and the number of birds shown. Being migratory birds, nothing is certain and individual drives can vary from a handful to a couple of hundred birds being put over the guns. All birds shot are shared between the guns.
Tariff
£210.00 per gun per day including lunch and transport to the drives. If all the party provides their own transport to the shoot the cost is reduced to £195.00 per gun, per day. VAT is included in both charges.
Charges for snipe shooting are based on a minimum of six guns. If the number of guns drops below six, the shoot organiser will still charge for six guns.
Snipe Shooting Since the Thirties
By David Pilkington
Snipe shooting has been a speciality of the house at the Arundell Arms since the 1930’s, when the hotel was owned and run by the Morris family. As owners of the Ambrosia milk factory, purchasing milk from local farmers, the Morris’s were in a very strong position to gain permission to shoot over large tracts of land nearby – how could any farmer refuse, when his monthly milk cheque was involved! In fact the permission was granted very readily anyway, the locals could not really understand why anyone should want to shoot such a small and difficult bird.
In those early days the guns often stood right on the highway, with virtually no cars on the rural roads. The beaters would walk around to the far side of the field, behind the hedge, then move towards the guns waving a flag, exactly as we do it today (with the obvious exception of standing on the road with a loaded shotgun!). A whistle would be blown when the snipe flushed, to alert the guns, who then had some very testing and enormously satisfying shooting at small, fast wild birds, which could come at any angle, height or speed. Pre-war farming was rather different from today’s pressured agriculture, with smaller fields, little land drainage, and mostly organic manures. There must have been vast numbers of snipe.
They are winter migrants, although a very small number do nest here in the summer, high up on the moors. We have shot at least 3 birds ringed in Gdansk, Poland, showing the strong east-to-west movement as the continent freezes each autumn. They can be found over a wide range of land, from the few marshes and rough moors still remaining, to ploughed ground, maize stubbles, or grass pastures well spread with slurry and left to stand the winter.
Today we still see a lot of snipe, with wisps of sometimes 50 or more over the guns all at once. I was privileged to be beating one chilly day a few years ago when we actually picked 17 birds from a single drive. They were being flushed from a kale field which was being strip-grazed, and well poached up. The shot birds were falling behind the guns into standing kale, and we probably failed to find all of them. They can be notoriously difficult to pick, although once your dog has acquired the nose for them he will easily trounce a highly bred and trained pheasant-finder.
As a driven bird, the snipe ranks very highly, and will be easily turned by anyone stupid enough to poke his head above the hedge to see what is coming. They actually fly upwards all the time when flushed, reaching quite a height after crossing the larger fields, and we have had some guns say that they were out of shot. That is rarely the case, being so small they do not take a lot of killing – rather, they take some hitting! Some of our guns, with no experience of snipe, seemed a little amused to hear that the kill-to-cartridge ratio is normally around 1 to 10. The same party were less than amused when they had all fired (unsuccessfully) at a wisp which spread well along the line, and I asked them where I should send my dog to pick their birds!
When beating it is easy to see when a bird is hit, since the angle of the flight will change from upwards to downwards, but if the bird does not crumple and fall, the gun may be unaware that the bird was hit. As a beater with a Labrador at heel, it is always very satisfying to mark and pick that bird, and present it to the gun.
