A cure for pheasant fatigue

With the pheasant shooting season drawing to close, I expect one or two people have eaten more than their share of these tasty birds.
Although I seldom shoot driven game, a lot of my friends do and I'm always grateful for a brace of oven-ready pheasant. That said, the January 'pheasant fatigue' is now starting to kick-in.
However, there is a very simple way to simplify the cooking process for pheasant, and create delicious, moist, flavoursome meat that can be incorporated into a wide variety of recipes: Stick it in the slow cooker!
Slow-cooking pheasant, and rabbit too for that matter, converts what can be rather dry, sinuous game into flakey, melt-in-the-mouth meat.
I put my last brace of pheasant in the slow cooker along with big chunks of apple and orange, a slosh of cider vinegar, a few mixed herbs and about a pint of water.

Left cooking all day on a low heat, the meat was literally falling off the bone when I got home from work.

Best of all, the pheasant was beautifully infused with the flavours of all the things I'd thrown on the slow cooker with it.
I served the first batch with mashed potato, carrots and broccoli, along with a wonderful gravy made from the meaty/fruity cooking juices left in the slow cooker.
The following lunchtime, the flaked turkey made great sandwiches with lettuce and mayonnaise. And there was just enough left to make a nice supper when stirred into a wok-ful of fried onions and mushrooms and finished off with a big slosh of double cream and a drop of sherry. Served on rice, it made for a great pheasant dish.
Give it a go...

Spring power

I don't shoot spring-and-piston air rifles nearly as much as I'd like to but it's always a real pleasure when I do. I'm a bit of a slave to my PCPs, habitually picking up a pre-charged gun for most of my hunting trips. But recently, I've managed to squeeze in a few hunting trips with my Weihrauch springer, the trusty HW95K break-barrel.

Like most airgun shooters, I started out with a spring powered airgun, a Webley Vulcan to be precise, and the fun of shooting these guns has to be experienced to be appreciated. Admittedly, the kick caused by the action of the spring and piston makes it a little harder to achieve the kind of accuracy that many of us take for granted with PCPs but, once you get the hang of letting the gun recoil consistently on every shot, a surprising degree of accuracy can be achieved. And it's a whole lot more satisfying when you're using a gun with a bit of life in it compared with the comparatively 'dead' firing cycle of a PCP. It's also a real novelty not to be constantly keeping an eye on air reserves in readiness for the next fill-up with a pump or diver's bottle.
Once I'd got my hand back in with some practice on the garden range, I was confident enough to take the Weihrauch out hunting - though I did have to accept that my effective range was somewhat less than when using a springer. I'll do my best to give a more comprehensive account of a hunting session with the springer in one of my articles in Airgun Shooter magazine soon.

My book

Although we managed to have copies of my new book, Hunting with Air Rifles – The Complete Guide, ready in time for the Midland Game Fair, it has now been officially released and is available through most major bookstores and selected shooting magazines (see the book clubs in Airgun Shooter and Sporting Rifle).

It’s a 180-page hardback, detailing all aspects of hunting with air rifles - from simple springers to the latest pre-charged guns.
Chapters cover airguns and how they work; choosing the right gun for the job; different sighting systems and how to set them up and use them properly; ammunition and calibre selection; shooting stances and techniques; clothing and accessories; the law; acquiring shooting permission; quarry habits; hunting tactics and field craft through the changing seasons; hide building; FAC-rated airguns; game preparation and a wide range of easy-to-follow recipes for rabbit and pigeon.

My intention was to produce an in-depth guide to help enthusiastic airgun shooters make the most of their time in the field (and turn the result into a tasty meal) but there’s also lots in there to help more experienced shots to raise their game. Whether culling rats and feral pigeons around the farmyard, decoying pigeons over corn stubbles, shooting squirrels in the woods or hunting rabbits for the pot, it’s all covered.

The book is the distillation of what I have learned, through success and failure, during almost 25 years of hunting with air rifles.
All of the photos are by myself and my good friend Kev Hawker, who those of you who read the airgun magazines will probably recognise. Jeffrey Olstead at the BASC was kind enough to write a foreward, illustrator Jon Brammer at Creative Fold did a great job with images to introduce each chapter (as you can see) and I’m really pleased with what the design team at Northumbria Press achieved with the layout.

Westy Tray product test

I managed to get out with the SmoothShooting Westy Tray at the weekend and can certainly say that it makes loading Daystates a lot easier when in single-shot mode. You hardly have to look as the steep-sloping sides roll the pellet into its track in front of the probe, and there's not the risk of pellets rolling out the other side as with the standard tray.
Have a look at the profiles of the Westy (top) and standard tray (bottom) to see how it works.

You'll also notice that the Westy Tray has four fixing magnets whereas the Daystate has just two. However, the Westy lacks the locking pins that keep the Daystate tray rock solid and, although it has locating skirts on either side of the contact point, there is some discernable creep from left to right - probably just a fraction of a millimetre, though. The absence of those pins means you can fit the Westy either way round so it can quickly and easily be switched from left-hand to right-hand loading.
In use, the all-important alignment seemed to be perfect and there was no hint of contact with the loading probe or its O-ring.
Loading was much, much easier although it is harder to retrieve pellets from the deep-sided Westy should you happen to chuck one in the wrong way round!

On the range...

These groups were shot from at bipod at 40 metres with a steady right to left wind. The red target cicles are 10mm across. Groups shot with the Daystate tray are on the left and the Westy on the right.
As you can see, there really is very little difference in terms of down-range performance, and the shot that strayed slightly high in the top-right group can probably be put down to the weather conditions.

How it looks...
The Westy Tray is very well engineered and really doesn't look like a retro-fit gadget. Here it is on my Daystate Mk4.

For more info, see http://www.smoothshooting.com/

First rat of the winter

I keep poultry in my garden and this means that one or two rats occasionally show up for a sniff around the chicken run when natural food supplies get low during the colder months. My poultry run is made of 25mm wire mesh, the bottom foot of which is buried so they can't get in but it doesn't stop them from trying. The first rat of the year (pictured) arrived last night!

My first line of defence against rats is a Fenn trap that is hidden behind the back of the run and, as you can see, it is very effective. Once set, the trap is placed inside a wooden tunnel which is made secure to prevent any embarrassing accidents with neighbours' cats.

As soon as rats arrive on the scene, they course around the outer boundary of the run, looking for a way in, and soon fall victim to the trap. If I catch any more in the next day or two, I'll be investigating with gun and lamp...

Product review for Daystate owners... hopefully.....

I've just got my hands on what looks like a great little retro-fit gadget for Daystate owners - the Westy Tray from SmoothShooting.
I like to shoot my cherished Mk4 in single-shot mode but do sometimes find loading pellets to be a bit of a fiddle. The Westy Tray is designed to guide each pellet neatly to the spout, which should make life much easier in the heat of the action.

With a bit of luck, I'll get a chance to try it out over the weekend. If the current battering of wind and rain subsides, anyway.
In the meantime, I'm happy to say that http://www.smoothshooting.com/ certainly seem to be able to deliver in terms of service. I contacted them on Tuesday morning and the nifty-looking tray dropped through my letterbox less than 24 hours later...

Happy Halloween... and pumpkin soup

Well, maybe it is just another opportunity for the shops to fill their shelves with useless tat but at least Halloween is more fun (and hopefully less expensive) than Mother's Day.
No doubt many of you will be getting roped-in to carving pumpkins for the kids - or for your own creative pleasure. I did, and also managed to carve a scary Halloween pattern into my thumb, which added to the gore - and thoroughly amused the children.
Don't forget, there's also a good meal to be had from that lantern so remember to scoop out all the flesh from the pumpkin before the kids use it to torment vulnerable members of society.

Pumpkin Soup
Flesh from one pumpkin
One onion
Knob of butter
Chicken stock cube
Sherry
Mixed herbs
Curry powder
Salt and pepper

Melt the butter in a saucepan and gently fry the onion until soft - three or four minutes. Then add the pumpkin and soften for another three or four minutes.
Then add two pints of water, bring to the boil and dissolve the stock cube. Add a good slosh of sherry, a couple of pinches of herbs, a tablespoon of curry powder and plenty of salt and pepper. Simmer gently for 45 minutes, blitz to a smooth, creamy consistency and serve.