After a rather disappointing start to the 2018 shooting season, coming to Denmark on Friday 26th of October was certainly a refreshing change. Fact of the matter is that I have not been fortunate to bag any game in Norway so far this season. This is rather unusual for me, who on average shoot approximately 50 gamebirds or more during a season. In fact, not since the 1990s have I had a poorer start to my shooting season. Due to harsh and even extreme weather conditions, many Norwegian hunters, myself included, have struggled just to reach their shooting and hunting grounds this year. Others have been far more lucky with regards to the weather, and some have been fortunate to shot more than 30 willow grouse in a couple of days. But for many hunters and shooters, the weather in Norway this autumn has been unforgiving. By the end of October, my shooting was in desperate need of a boost, which I most definitely got when I arrived in Denmark, a country rich in gamebirds and famous for its magnificent bird shooting.
Teal bonanza in Tønder
Bjørn Nielsen (bnjagt87@gmail.com) is an experienced and very pleasant young shooting man and shooting provider located near Skærbæk in the county of Tønder in Southern Jutland. His shooting grounds are situated west of Skærbæk, towards the famous Vadehavet National Park and the Sea. In this area, rich in gamebirds of various species, Bjørn offers numerous shooting opportunities for guests. Last year my wife Marianne and I shoot grey partridges with him; she with her camera and I with my gun. This year I was eager to try the evening duck flight, which Bjørn spoke so warmly about last year. So just before 5 pm I entered the driveway of Bjørn’s house at Hedebovej 33. Bjørn greeted me with his big smile and asked me if I wanted to try to shoot a snipe or two before the evening flight. But with my misses from last year fresh in mind, I politely declined his offer. “You Norwegians simply cannot shoot snipe” he laughed. “You are simply unable to hit them” he said laughingly. “If I can bag a brace of ducks this evening I will be more than happy”, I replied with a smile. Then I asked Bjørn how many cartridges I should bring, and I was kind of shocked when he answered, “bring at least 75 cartridges, perhaps even 100”. “Out here It is not unusual that 4 shots bag 60 teal in an evening” he continued. “So far we have shot over 1200 teal this year, and we are still only halfway through the season”.
Incoming ducks!
We arrived at the shooting grounds and the selected pond for the evening at around 6 pm. Bjørn immediately started dispersing food for the ducks at the fringes of the pond, as well as putting out decoys, both essential ingredients for successful shooting. “They eat on average 100 kilos of food every night” Bjørn explained. “There are literally thousands of wild ducks in this area”. When darkness started to fall we positioned ourselves with our guns on the ground close to the pond. We sat on the ground to avoid that the ducks would spot our silhouettes, and I was happy that I brought my Gore-Tex trousers and woollen underwear this evening, for the ground we sat on was anything else than dry. While waiting, tens of thousands of geese passed over our heads, approximately 100 meters above us. It was quite an experience to behold such numbers of wild geese migrating, possibly heading to Vadehavet National Park, even though thousands of birds do make a terrible noise! Soon the first teal started to arrive at our pond. Like small rockets they started curling in from every direction. In the dusk they appeared like small black silhouettes against the beautiful purple-blue and dark sky. The cracks from our guns came fast and furious and many ducks had to bite the dust. I also managed a nice double in the beginning of the flight. The fabulous flight lasted for about one hour, and the adrenalin boiled in our blood during the non-stop shooting action. I Denmark, the shooting laws state that you must stop shooting 1 ½ hour after sunset, so at 7.20 pm we had to stop shooting and we started to collect the quarry, a job which took about one hour to complete. The yellow Labrador retriever named Nelly did a fabulous job retrieving many of the birds. She was truly the heroine of the evening! Approximately 30 teal and a wigeon were collected, but Bjørn insisted he would find a few more the next morning in broad daylight. More than 100 rounds were fired by Bjørn and me. Surely he was right; bringing lots of cartridges was the right thing to do!
Teal- an attractive quarry species
Teal (Anas crecca) is the smallest of the puddle ducks, and it is about half the size of its cousin, the far more famous mallard. A teal weighs around 600 grams and the species is more populous in southern Scandinavia, than further north. A drake in its autumn colours is a very beautiful sight, with a chestnut-red head featuring a green stripe from both eyes and backwards to the neck of the bird. The wing-mirror is green, in contrast to the mallard’s blue colours. The drake also carries beautiful yellow-creamed feathers below it`s tail whilst most of its body is covered in light-grey feathers. The drake is a rather colourful gentleman compared to the more greyish-brown hen duck. As far back as my young teenage years, I have regarded teal as a quarry of desire. My mentor in the field of shooting, old Olaf Klepland, once shoot a teal near Gillsvannet in Kristiansand in the early 1980s. It must have made quite an impression on me, for ever since this quarry has been highly ranked on my wish list of gamebirds. Even though I have never shot a teal in Norway, I shot five teal at Klitgaard Gamefields in Northern Jutland in September 2012, and 2 more at the same grounds in November the year after. Today my freezer is full of teal, and my family and I look forward to some nice teal dinners this autumn. Word goes that teal tastes even better than mallard!
