The Language of a Shoot

Notes from the Field · The Language of a Shoot

A driven day comes with its own vocabulary. If you have not been on a shoot before, the words can sound like a code: Guns and pegs, drives and bags, a loader at your shoulder and elevenses somewhere in the middle of it all.

None of it is ornament. Every one of those words describes a job, and nearly every job belongs to somebody you will meet before the day is out. Learning the language of a shoot is really just learning who is doing what, and why it has been done this way for two hundred years.

The line, pegged out at Ash Hill. Everything else on this page exists to put birds over these people.

The team

On a shooting day here there are around forty of us in the field. Eight of those are the Guns. The other thirty-two are the reason there is anything to shoot at.

A Gun on his peg, and the loader who will stand at his shoulder all day.

• A Gun. A Gun is a person, not a firearm. You will be called one all day. There are eight of you, and together you are the line. If somebody asks how many Guns are coming, they are asking how many people.
• The gamekeeper. Works the ground all year for the four months of shooting. He decides where the cover goes in spring, how the birds are reared through summer, and which way a drive should be shown if the wind turns. If a drive is successful, it is because a keeper spent a year making it so.
• The beaters. Twelve to fifteen of them on a single drive, walking through the cover in a line, tapping as they go, moving birds forward at a pace the keeper sets. They are the engine of a driven day.
• Your loader. Stands at your shoulder for the day, acting both as host, caddy and safety officer. If you are single-gunning, your loader will load your shells. If you are double-gunning, your loader takes your empty gun, reloads, hands it back, making sure you can make the most of the flurry flying overhead.
• The pickers-up. Behind the line with the dogs. Their work starts when the shooting stops and does not finish until every bird is accounted for, which is a point of honour rather than a matter of tidiness.
• The sweepers. The pickers-up move on to the next drive, the sweepers come in behind. The sweepers will move through the drive area to ensure that every bird is picked.
• The host. Stands with the line, calls the day, and hosts the day. The host often is the communication between the Guns and everyone else — keepers, loaders, pickers-up, the kitchen.

The pickers-up work the ground behind the line, and do not stop until every bird is accounted for.

How a drive is made

A drive is one act of the day. The Guns are placed on peg, the beaters start at the far end of a piece of ground, and over the next twenty to forty minutes the birds come forward and over the line. Then everyone moves to a new location, and it happens again.

Flags on the ridge at Bear Claw. The beating line, not a truck, is what puts the birds in the air.

At Hestenbeck we have twenty core drives across two and a half thousand acres, with more taking shape as the estate matures. They have names, because they are named for characters — either a person, a place or a loyal dog: Kings, The Crage, White Bark, Freddy’s Bank, Wee Scotsman, Petey’s, Flat Rock, Stonkers, Bear Claw, Obi Rose, Apple Core, Norfolk Knee. Deep valleys, aspen groves, narrow draws and open tops, and each drive presents the birds differently.

What is worth understanding is that there is no machinery in any of this. The birds are moved by people walking — in a line, in the right order, at a pace strategically guided by the gamekeeper. The quality of a drive is the quality of that group, and of the year of keepering that came before it. It is slow, expensive, and the only way we know of to put genuinely testing birds over a line of eight.

A pair of partridge lifting in front of the beating line at Ash Hill.

The words you will hear on the day

• Peg. Your position in the line, marked on a stake. You will draw for pegs and move along the line between drives, so everyone gets a turn in the middle of the line.
• Drive. One piece of ground, shown once. A full day is several of them. At Blixt we typically shoot five drives per day.
• The bag. The total number of birds taken over the day. On most shoots it is agreed before you start; at Blixt it is not — we shoot an unlimited bag. As long as the shot is sporting and safe, take it. We think that creates some freedom: everyone isn’t counting or feeling like others are paying for their birds.
• Quarry. What you are shooting. Here that is partridge from the middle of August, with a mixed bag of partridge and pheasant from September.
• Elevenses. The stop between drives. Something hot, something strong, and ten minutes of standing about telling each other what happened. Who doesn’t love a snack in the field!
• Double gun. Shooting a matched pair with a loader, so one gun is always coming to you loaded. It is the reason loaders exist, and it is quite different from shooting a single gun.
• Fibre wad. The cartridges we provide on driven days. Everything we fire breaks down in the ground it lands on, which matters when it is your own ground.
• Single peg or team. You can take one place in the line on a shared day, or take the whole line of eight and bring your own people.

Drawing for pegs, and elevenses. Neither one is a detail.

If you hear a different word at home

Plenty of American shooters arrive fluent in a different dialect of wingshooting, and nothing here is a correction. A peg is what you might call a stand or a station. Guns are what you would call the shooters. A bag is the bird count. If you say station and we say peg, we will both know exactly what is meant.

The one word worth keeping straight is driven. Authentic driven shooting: crafted by keepers and ready for you to test your skill on sporting birds, driven by beaters not trucks. Don’t be confused by tower shoot, continental, or even driven-style. A driven bird has been moved toward you on foot by a team of people and comes over the line high and fast and on its own terms, and often in flurries. That is the thing the whole vocabulary is built around, and it is the thing we do here.