My name is Tom Adams and I'm the Shoot Camp Manager at GunsOnPegs.
Today we've got our Syndicate day. We've got ten guns from other the country
who have come to join us on a 200 bird for a pheasant/partridge day at Blowingstone and Punchbowl.
It's the GunsOnPegs Syndicate day which we do four or five of these a year. It's a way to promote the GunOnPegs
club which is a fantastic club for the members, we now have 75,000 members.
Blowing stone and Punchbowl is one of our clients with Charles Matthews who is the
proprietor and has the sporting rights. He works very closely with us and
we've sold a lot of days through GunsOnPegs
and we've had some fantastic reports from our members, hence why we've taken our own Syndicate day here.
We've been hugely beneficial to Charles and selling his days for him.
And vice-versa, he's been great to have one site for our members.
So it's been a really good relationship.
My name is Charles Matthews,
we've shooting on the Punchbowl and Blowingstone shoot
with GunsOnPegs today.
We are actually standing in the valley called
the combs.
Which we
call Star Wars for partridges, because they come at you from three different directions.
As you see from the valley behind,
the topography is amazing and the way the birds fly down the valley
is quite exciting for the guns below.
My role as shoot captain I organized the guns,
I communicate with the keeper
second by second really to make sure all the guns are getting
the same amount of shooting and we can
pull and push the drives accordingly
we the beaters as they all have radios and
we just try and keep it very fair.
We start the season on the 1st September with small bore shooting,
40 and 28 bore shooting partridges.
Then we'll get onto the end of the season
where we don't really want the small bores, we want the bigger guns because
as we gradually get towards November the pheasants are coming high and fast off these hills
and they're a little bit more challenging.
Predominantly we are mixed pheasants and partridges.
We have different pheasant drives
and different partridge drives
we can blend the two together and it seems to work.
We like to be fair to everybody, we like to make sure everybody
has there fair share shooting.
Our aim for the day is to make sure everyone has an enjoyable day, a safe day
everybody gets their fair share of shooting.
So as you can see today we've got a mixture of people from all walks of life. Many different
industries and I think they all kind of
get together on a level that they enjoy their
sport and shooting is what they are passionate about, I don't think there's any
kind of boundaries or limits.
Pheasant shooting is hugely important to the British countryside, mainly because of
the conservation work that is done by the keepers, by the shoot owners and everyone else who works alongside it.
The amount of bird species, flora and fauna that is found compare to a non management shoot is vast.
The work that goes in by the keepers is amazing.
So, Charles here puts on a fantastic day,
he is a fantastic host as well. We've had some great drives and we've been accommodated throughout.
As you can imagine plenty of fizz and good food flowing.
It's got a great and friendly feel, the beaters are all very welcoming and the keeper as well
big smiles all round, it's been a very enjoyable day.