This form of shooting is much more formal than simply walking with your dog alongside the hedgerows, and is usually confined to pheasant, partridge and grouse shooting.
On the shoot day, a team of shooters, or Guns, line out at numbered pegs. Meanwhile, under the gamekeeper’s instructions, a group of beaters and their dogs move through areas of woodland or covert, flushing the game ahead of them.
The aim is to get the birds to break cover and fly high over the line of Guns to provide sporting shots. Shot game is retrieved quickly by a picker-up who sends his/her trained gundog to where the shot game falls. Because of the organisation and number of people involved in a shoot of this sort, the cost to the Guns is considerably higher than in the other types of shooting.
Banner image by Richard Faulks