Play the long game with cover crops

The next shooting season will certainly look different but it is vital to keep everything ticking over, including your crops, says Liam Bell

Most of the keepers and shoot owners I have spoken to have already made up their minds about what they are going to be doing this coming season.

Some have closed their shoots and decided to have a year off, while others are carrying on as normal. But the vast majority appear to be hedging their bets and planning to shoot, while at the same time scaling things back a bit to allow for a late start and the possibility of an extension to the rules relating to social gatherings.

The truth of the matter, though, is that there is so much more to keepering than shoot days. If you let things slip and don’t make any repairs to your pens, control predators and leave your cover crops untouched, it is going to be so much harder to get things going again next year. Indeed, there is a very real chance that some of the shoots that don’t do anything will look at the workload and the added expense next spring and decide not to bother to get going again.

This would be a shame all round, given the well-documented biodiversity gains associated with gamekeeping and a well-run shoot.

Cover crops that are planted as part of a stewardship agreement will still need to be planted whether you intend to shoot them or not — and quite rightly so, given their benefits to farmland birds.

Game crops that are not in stewardship, which have been taken out of the farm and are planted solely for the shoot, still need to be looked after, regardless of plans for the coming season. Soil health is recognised as increasingly important. Bare soil increases runoff and nutrient loss, and clouds of thistle seeds from an unmanaged crop drifting across your landlord’s arable fields next autumn will make you exceedingly unpopular.

We are planning to plant any crops we are not going to shoot this year with a leguminous mix of clovers, vetch, buckwheat and phacelia. Phacelia is a superpollinator and its flowers will attract all manner of insects, while buckwheat will seed in July and August and provide a small amount of food and some early cover.

Soil health

Vetch is deep rooting and, again, a useful pollinator. It is winter hardy to a degree and certainly strong enough to stand early season and provide some useful holding cover, though it does tend to be a bit on the thick side. It also fixes nitrogen in the soil, boosts soil health by supporting useful bacteria and improves soil structure. It will generally help revitalise the soil in much the same way as a good dose of farmyard manure does.

An added bonus is that the clovers and buckwheat are attractive to deer, and could well draw them out of the thicker woods where it is nigh on impossible to stalk them, to somewhere where

we can at least see them and take a shot if we need to.

So while we won’t have planted a game crop as such on those plots, the mix ticks a lot of conservation boxes. It won’t need any inputs or sprays to get it established, and it will hopefully reduce our fertilizer costs next year.

Pens that aren’t being used this year still need to be kept in good repair. If they are not, the wire will sag, deer will get in — and, as usually happens, make a different hole to get out — grass will start to grow into the wire that is touching the floor and any broken posts you’ve got will swing about in the wind. This will put extra pressure on the good ones either side of them and you will end up having to replace a whole row of them instead of only one or two.

We actually stopped using wooden posts on release pens a couple of years ago, changing to metal ones on the recommendation of a friend. We were fed up with replacing poorly treated wooden posts that only been in the ground for five or six years. Properly tanalised or creosoted ones should last double that. In fact, I have got some we put in 20 years ago that are still as good as new. I am not sure if it is the preservative, the quality of the timber or the process that is different, but they simply don’t last like they used to.

The metal ones are a little more expensive but they are lighter, far easier to put in and have a 25-year guarantee. What is more, you don’t need to staple the wire on as the angle-iron frames have a series of clips running down the side.

Quick and easy

They are so quick and easy to use, and no one I have spoken to who has used the metal posts would go back to using wooden ones. They are marketed as Clipex fencing if you want to have a look.

The electric fences and runins can be left as they are for now because they are going to need tarting up next year anyway.

Other than spraying glyphosate around the outside to keep the ground clean and making sure the gates are hung, I’d probably leave things as they are.

We also need to remember the importance of timed, targeted predation control and the associated benefits this will bring — to not only gamebirds, but to other species as well. In just one season, and if they are left uncontrolled, predatory mammals and birds will set wild bird projects back several years.

If an increase in predation is coupled with a cold wet summer, some populations of wild game and red-listed birds may simply never recover.

Keep on the foxes, magpies and crows if you can, even if you are not planning to shoot. Even doing a little bit will make a difference.

“Game crops that have been planted solely for the shoot still need to be looked after”