Ringing in the wildfowl

It actually feels like Snowden Slights weather today," says Craig Ralston as he guides his 4X4 along a grass track. By that he means it is grey and chill with rags of early morning mist still blurring the edges of fields, and ducks and geese are fully engaged in satisfying hunger.

Perfect conditions, in fact, for catching them unawares. And exactly the kind of day that England's most legendary duck hunter would have relished.

It is also just right for what Craig had in mind as he drives slowly through fields on the west side of the Derwent, upstream from North Duffield, while keeping close to the shelter of a high flood bank.

Finally, he eases to a halt and gets out making as little noise as possible, and stooped low, he moves towards what appears to be a roll of electric fence wire left half-way up the bank by an absent-minded farmer, then creeps to the top like a soldier reconnoitring the enemy's position.

Suddenly, with a deft tug on the wire, he creates much flapping and quacking on the other side of the bank.

"Got them!" he says, and stands up.

About a hundred metres away from the bank is a small lake. Overhead the sky is filled with scudding and extremely vocal parties of wildfowl, while some Canada geese and a family of mute swans remain placidly on the surface. But on the shore nearest to the flood bank a number of ducks can be seen wriggling in the grass.

Craig had used the wire to trigger what is known as a whoosh net, which fired a fine mesh over an area he had earlier baited with a bucket of grain.

The ducks that have been caught under the netting are wigeon and mallard, and Craig Ralston – Natural England's senior warden at the Lower Derwent National Nature Reserve, encompassing some 15 miles of flood-plain meadows and marshes between Selby and Market Weighton – has trapped them for bird-ringing purposes. Many birds fitted with numbered rings on the Lower Derwent are later found thousands of miles away in Africa or above the Arctic Circle.

Craig likes to compare what he is doing with the activities of Snowden Slights, who until his death in 1913 lived in the nearby village of East Cottingwith. Prior to the first Wild Bird Protection Acts these were his killing fields, and he shot everything from bitterns and kingfishers to any species of duck and goose that had the misfortune to get in the sights of his huge arsenal of 28 guns.

The wildfowler once managed to kill 44 mallard and wigeon with a blizzard of lead from a single shot. And between 1890 and 1907 from his punt alone he shot more than 5,300 birds.

Craig's nets capture about 1,000 birds a year, probably similar to Snowden Slight's annual bag. He has caught as many as 117 teal with one firing of the whoosh nets, but on this cold autumn morning the birds number just two wigeon and six mallard.

"If old Snowden were here today I think he would have been doing this," says Craig. "He would have been pretty good at bird ringing, I reckon, because just like wildfowlers, ringers need to understand the movements and habits of birds

very well.

"But most of all I think he would've enjoyed it. He would have appreciated the skills involved to outwit the wily ducks."

In fact, Slights did use nets on occasion, but they were crude affairs set between poles of coppiced willow to catch golden plovers and lapwings for the table. Many birds he caught in this way garotted themselves or tore off wings trying to escape. Thankfully, that is not possible in the fine mist nets used by today's bird-ringers.

Craig has been ringing birds in the Lower Derwent Valley for two decades. One of the most significant species to winter in the Lower Derwent is wigeon, a duck which has fewer than 500 breeding pairs in the UK and most of those are in the Scottish uplands. The wigeon caught by Craig mostly come from Russia, Iceland, Finland and Norway, and the average daily count on the reserve at the height of the winter can be in excess of 15,000. Across the whole winter the total can be 30,000, which is three per cent of entire European population.

One of the birds he takes out of the whoosh net is a young female wigeon which, he says, must be on its first migration south. "After being caught in my net it's probably feeling not right impressed by Britain at the moment," he smiles.

Today's haul of birds is carefully removed from the nets and placed in the kind of box people use to take cats and small dogs to the vet. One by one they are taken out and fitted with a numbered ring which, Craig says, is so light it feels like a wristwatch does on humans.

After each bird is measured to determine age, it is released back to the wild. Some mornings last winter Craig and his fellow Natural England wardens fired the nets only to find that icy conditions have stretched the elastic that fires the sheets of nets and nothing happened. But it was a minor inconvenience compared to the hardships suffered by Snowden Slights in cold weather. After one day's shooting his clothes were frozen onto him and he sat in front of his fire until he had thawed. Even worse, he fell into the water on one hard January day, a story told by his biographer Sydney H Smith.

"On seeing (a little bunch of) pochard he took the gun up onto the bank and the recoil sent him tumbling backwards into the icy waters of the Derwent, causing a huge splash as he disappeared into the depths of five or six feet. Hastily scrambling out he got into the punt and, wringing wet, went to retrieve his birds in rapidly freezing garments.

"At once he made for home two miles away, how he arrived he does not remember. He could not speak and his hard-frozen clothes had to be cut off by his friends."

An extremely limited amount of wildfowling is still permitted on the Derwent, strictly controlled by licence and subject to a so-called "quarry list".

"It's allowed because we recognise it's very much part of the local culture and social tradition," says Craig.

"There are only five licences, and the wildfowlers mainly shoot commoner species like Canada geese and gray-lags, which can do a lot of agricultural damage."

YP MAG 6/11/10