50 tales from shooting experiences in England and Scotland

I have spent a lifetime wildfowling and involved in shooting and fieldsports. Wildfowling has been in my family for over a hundred years, it’s in my blood. I have a passion for punt gunning and have also spent the last year breeding award winning gun dogs, particularly Chesapeake Bay Retrievers. I decided to write this book as quite often I would find myself relaying some of my wildfowling, punt gunning, shooting and dog breeding stories and advice to friends and people I have met. It dawned on me that I had a wealth of experience and stories that I would like to share with others. I have put together this book to give you an insight into the world of wildfowling, fieldsports, punt gunning and dog breeding that I have gained over the years. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have enjoyed putting it all down on paper. I’ve included some interesting and humorous stories as well from over the years.

Wildfowling is the most romantic, exciting and challenging of all the field sports. All wildfowlers have a little poetry in their souls. The majority of fowlers are thoroughgoing individualists. A typical wildfowler is a true hunter, bred and born - a lone wolf pitting his wits and knowledge against the wiles of some of the wariest and fastest birds on earth. Taking all this into account it is no surprise that wildfowling has fascinated a great many well known writers as well as inspiring many lesser known and even amateur writers to write with brilliance and passion about their sport. In this book I have attempted to select a number of gems and rarities of fowling literature from famous writers as well as including notes, articles and snippets from less well known, but nevertheless, enthusiastic scribes. This anthology will, I hope, help preserve some of the more obscure wildfowling tales for gunners of the future. Several of the post war wildfowling stories include those of writers who contributed to now defunct sporting periodicals of that era. Their stories I consider masterpieces of the genre and have been included for the benefit of future generations. In some cases it has been impossible to communicate with them or their relatives, who may contact the publishers if they so wish.

Waterfowling is the most arduous and most romantic of all hunting sports, taking the dedicated fowler out on to windswept estuaries and frozen marshes long before dawn on wild winter mornings. With only a faithful retriever for company, the lone wildfowler experiences a communion with nature that is well nigh impossible in any other setting. At the end of the flight he measures his success not by the size of his bag but by the closeness of his encounter with the wild geese and ducks.In this beautifully written book, Eric Begbie captures the essence of the sport in a selection of personal wildfowling adventures spanning four decades. This publication is adapted from "Fowler in the Wild" by Eric Begbie and highlights the memories of a longshore gunner over almost five decades

In this beautifully illustrated book, Worth Mathewson vividly describes his bird-hunting adventures across North America. Over the course of thirty-nine years, Mathewson hunted all of the United States' and Canada's native upland and legal shorebird species, from the band-tailed pigeon and mourning dove to the ruffed grouse and ring-necked pheasant. His memories of these hunts, accomplished in the company of friends, family, and faithful hunting dogs, are recounted here.