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Scott Patterson is the head gamekeeper at a 5000-acre estate, owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, in the Forest of Bowland, in north-east Lancashire, England. He looks after a combination of pasture, forest and moorland, where he practices traditional habitat and land management, and rears pheasants for keepered shoots. Here's a taste of a day in his life as a gamekeeper.
"On a shoot day I usually get up about 06.30. I’m usually too nervous to eat. I tend not to eat at all during a shoot day. It’s surprising how much pressure it is, because you’ve done all the work through the season and you’re judged just on those 20 shoot days, between October and February. There’s so many things that can go wrong, especially the weather. You need to pick the drives out that will suit the weather conditions, like a westerly wind, for example. We’re driving off the top of hills, so still days are better for us.
I'll have tidied the yard where we all meet and washed the vehicles the day before. I work out a team of beaters, which drives we’re going to do, and how we’re going to do it. The beaters come from all walks of life - we have plumbers, roofers, policemen - and we do pay a small wage, but they come because they enjoy walking in the countryside, the craic, and working their dogs. They’ll get a sausage, bacon, black pudding and egg bap for breakfast. The guns will get a bacon sandwich.
The first shoot happens when the pheasants are fully mature, at 22 weeks, which is quite a bit older than a chicken. The estate has 14 pheasant drives - that’s areas that we encourage the pheasants to be in. We do five drives in a day, so each drive will get shot only six or eight times in a season, so the pheasants get plenty of rest in between. It’s not like you feed them up and then you shoot them. Unless you’ve been on a shoot, it’s difficult to describe. What we’re trying to do is get them to be as sporting as possible and give the pheasants as much chance as possible. On any normal shoot day, we’ll have nine hunters with nine pegs, 45 yards apart in a line in between the two woods.
During a shoot, my underkeeper and I will work with the beaters to flush the pheasants through with the guns stood in between, where we think the birds will fly back to (the release wood where we originally released them in June.) I have a team of four pickers up - usually spaniels - that stand behind the guns and pick up shot or wounded birds. From the moment the bird is shot it’s considered a food product, so it’s really important that the retrieving dogs have soft mouths. We aim for 200 birds a day, but because the birds are that difficult to shoot, we often get 150 to 170, or something like that.
We'll hang the birds and keep them chilled, and the next day the game dealer comes, who has has a local market for them with regards to restaurants and shops. The local pub sells quite a bit of the game that we shoot on their menu. He also dresses 10 brace and gives them to the guns.
Game's not the easiest thing to sell because everyone’s still got it in their head that it's for rich people, but it's definitely quite popular in the UK now, there’s just not enough people cooking it at home. I prefer to eat it within a couple of days, I think that’s what puts people off, if it’s been well hung and it gets that gamey flavour. I like pheasant goujons – just take the breasts off, breadcrumb and fry them - people say they're so tasty they often mistake them for chicken.
We also have small grouse on the estate, and they are different to pheasant. They are totally wild and very territorial – the main thing with them is habitat management and predator control. So, the grouse shooting season starts on the 12th of April and then runs through to the 10th of December. I also love eating our grouse, it has a really heathery flavour. We have a few roe deer on the estate as well, one of my jobs is to control the population. I do love venison too, but my favourite is mallard duck, with the skin scored, seasoned and then pan-fried. Now that’s really delicious.
We are a supportive community of gamekeepers here. There’s six different estates in my area, and we’ll often help each other out with beating and picking up on shoot days, or go on clay pigeon shoots together. Perhaps one of the funniest and most memorable moments was a few years back, posing naked for charity calendar to raise funds for MacMillan Cancer Relief, I was Mr February. We also have a nice local pub to meet for a pint, and we have the Forest of Bowland Moorland Group promoting what we do and show that we’re not the bad guys. Part of it is going round schools and to WI events in the evenings, making bird boxes and cooking in school demo - we recently did a pheasant tagliatelle.
In winter, the days are shorter and it can be hard work if it rains a lot, as it tends to do in the North East. Our season really starts in February, with tidying up everything from shooting season, then starting on vermin control through to May. Foxes, stoats, weasels, crows, rats, grey squirrels, all prey on ground nesting birds like curlew and latwing, as well as game. By doing our job, we get those birds breeding down here, whereas in other parts of the country they’re still very rare birds because that work isn’t going on in those areas. All those birds are thriving on keepered shoots. We’ll also do quite a bit of woodland work, thinning, creating glades and open rides, as well as the oingoing planting of trees, shrubs and bushes and looking after the heather with controlled burning.
Summertime is the hardest time, but if the weather’s right, it’s a pleasure being up at first light and seeing the sun rise, and then again seeing the sun set at the end of the day. When the pheasants are in the release pens we’ll work 80-90 hours a week. You get fit handballing 150 tons of feed a year, sometimes up hills so steep that we can't get the quad bikes up and you have to walk the feed up. At the start we have 10,000 pheasants, of those birds that we release, we probably shoot about 35% of those, and we keep feeding them throughout the season, which benefits the wild birds as well.
Fishing is my real passion and the best way for me to unwind, it’s very meditative. I'm priviledged to be able to fish the river Hodder, that runs right through the estate. There’s salmon, brown trout and sea trout, which occasionally I'll keep, because it's the best tasting fish I think I've ever had. I also love the fact with fishing, you still have that hunting instinct, but at the end of the day it’s nice to let the fish go, that gives me a big a thrill as anything.
I'll go on holiday a couple of times a year, probably to Poland and Greece. It's important to have a change of scene and see new things when things are quieter. At home, I’ve got two golden retrievers, a lab and two cocker spaniels. They’re working dogs for the shoot and should live in their kennels outside, but every time we get a new puppy, it somehow ends up in the house. Probably one of the biggest parts for me is working the dogs. I just really enjoy training them and getting them out and working them. It’s company as well, you know. It’s great to have that bond with a working dog.
No 24 hours are the same in the day of a gamekeeper. I got into it when I left school, aged 16, on a two-year Youth Training Scheme, and I can’t imagine doing anything else now. I'd never give all those years back of training and living out of caravans and working all hours. Being a gamekeeper is not a job, it’s a passion. It’s something you’ve got to enjoy doing because you’re out in all weathers, working weekends and most days. But, you can manage your own time, I know what needs doing, and I just get on and do it.
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