NOW that the shooting season has finished in the UK, although there are still a couple more weekends of sport to enjoy around our home in France, the last few days have at least allowed us all the chance to dry out after the tremendous rains of mid-January.

Never have I been out and got wet so often, giving all of my coats a thorough testing in the process. The loden and tweed types kept me dry even if during the course of the day they became increasingly heavy as they seemed to absorb the rain but I was disappointed with a Gortex-type coat made by Browning that I bought from our local Decathlon.

The label claims it is ‘the best there is’ so I thought it would be the ideal lightweight coat for wet weather and parted with my 70 Euros on the strength of it. When my particular coat was put to the test this claim proved a little optimistic but, having said that, my son bought an identical one at the same time and he reckons his has kept him dry throughout the whole of this period.

However, we both agree they are effective against gale force winds so for that reason alone I shall continue to wear mine over a fleece on cold, windy, but dry days when standing in the Gun line next season.

Cold moles

I learned recently that moles do not like draughts so perhaps there’s a market for wind-proof coats there! I mention it because, as any of you who might have seen our garden in France last year will know, I’ve not had much success at catching the moles that are rapidly turning our lawn into something resembling the moon’s surface.

A professional mole-catcher told me the reason I’ve been so unsuccessful with my trapping is because I’ve apparently not been careful enough in covering up the surface after I’ve set a trap. The mole then feels the draught and makes every effort to close it, filling my trap with soil as he does so.

One of my first jobs now that the shooting season is over and I have a little more time, although I am getting a little worried about the rapidly approaching deadline for a book on which I’m currently working, is to make a concentrated effort to begin trapping again. According to my mole-catching friend, it is the perfect time of year to do so.

Expensive, useless and dangerous

I think trapping, now that the use of strychnine is impossible, is the only sure way of eradicating such pests. Smoke bombs; sonic noise-makers; children’s windmills stuck into the runs, and a whole host of other supposedly effective scaring methods have so far proved expensive and useless.

Many claim to have a dog or cat that will dig up and kill moles or that one should stand quietly with a garden fork and spear the beast as it heaves up yet another Vesuvius sized crater but, although the odd animal may well have been taken by these strange ways, they are not the way forward.

Neither is, as famously recommended by the comedian Jasper Carrott in his one-man shows, sitting on a step ladder and blasting away with a shotgun once any soil movement is seen!

Other methods are positively dangerous. A very famous television actor who is a great friend of my wife’s sister recently showed me some very nasty scar tissue on his arm and leg – a result of severe burns collected as a consequence of attempting to set fire to petrol poured down a mole run.  

Weasels and stoats

Weasels have been known to use mole runs in order to gain entry to the grass runs of game rearing pens.

I have written before in these pages of when, many years a go, it happened to me and as a result I was fascinated to read a similar account some time later by fellow Countryman’s Weekly scribe, Robert Hocking, thus proving that such tactics were not the work of a one-off opportunist.

Writing in Ten Years of Game-keeping, published in 1909, Owen Jones described an incident where one of his under keepers had told him of a pheasant’s nest in which the eggs had completely disappeared without any outward signs of disorder.

He wrote: “I went with him to reconstruct the crime. There, right enough, was the empty nest. Not one of the dead oak leaves on which the eggs had rested disturbed nor could I trace a sign of a human footprint.

“I knelt down and was feeling round the edge of the nest when my finger went down a mole hole and against something hard and round and smooth. I retrieved all the eggs…asked for a trap, set it in the nest (with twigs above to keep out pheasants), and soon laid by the legs a fine dog weasel.”

Weasels and stoats are obviously a potential problem on the wild bird shoot where either will make short work of a nesting partridge or her chicks and their numbers should therefore be controlled in such situations.

Elsewhere, however, their numbers are nowadays generally so inconsequential that they do not pose much of a danger to the average shoot. In fact if anything they may be a cause of concern  to the countryside conservationist.

Easy to trap

I have found in the past a litter of stoats very easy to trap. They will generally have a litter in disused or blind rabbit burrows or in and around a clump of fallen wood and it is often possible to see where the youngsters have flattened an area of vegetation or enjoyed a gambol through a hollow stump or around a tree trunk.

A correctly set and decently camouflaged tunnel trap will, over a very short space of time, catch both the mother and the youngsters. This is due, at least in part, to their overwhelming curiosity.

They will also seek refuge in a hole when alarmed but not pursued and will quite often appear again almost immediately at the entrance. But they are so quick that it is impossible to get your gun up and a shot fired before they retreat.

I solved the difficulty on one occasion by training my gun on the hole and pulling the trigger just as soon as the stoat’s head appeared but I suspect my success was the exception rather than the rule.