I SOMETIMES wonder what it would be like to work as a keeper on a big shoot with a big budget and simply be able to pick up the phone and order whatever equipment was needed secure in the knowledge that someone else would be paying for it.

“Another 50 feeders? We'll drop them off in the morning. A new release pen? The fencing contractors will be arriving next week. Rearing units? As many as you want, complete with sun parlours, heaters, feeders and drinkers, delivered and erected in the rearing field of your choice.”

Then I wake up and come back to reality and the usual system of make do, mend, salvage and scrounge.

Both our shoots are run on the lowest budget possible. This is simply because most of us struggle to find even the extremely modest annual fees that buy a place in the syndicate.

The rent has to be paid and the pheasant and partridge poults and their feed purchased, but that is about the sum of our cash outlay. Anything else that is needed will only be bought for hard cash if all other possible sources of supply have been tried and found wanting.

After all, why would we buy it if we can beg it, borrow it or, not steal of course, but salvage, recycle, adapt or amend it so that it does the job without costing anything? It makes sense to me at any rate.

And this is why I have spent many a happy hour untangling rusty netting, extracting nails and staples from scrap timber, patching holes in release pen fences and making feed hoppers out of just about anything from old oil drums to milk churns.

It doesn't matter if it is old and rusted. If it can be patched up sufficiently to serve for one more season then patch it up we will.

Take a feed hopper as an example. Ours typically are a plastic drum standing on wooden legs with some sort of dispenser for the wheat attached to the base. The legs rot and need replacing from time to time, the badgers chew up the dispensers so they have to be repaired or renewed occasionally, and it is not unknown for the actual hopper to crack or split too.

Some of the original feed hoppers have had three sets of legs, two different dispensers and at least one replacement body since I have been keepering here.

The problem is I hate to see anything useful being wasted, even if I can't see an immediate use for it.

Over the years the outbuildings round the farm have filled up with ‘useful’ stuff that I have salvaged, including timber that was going to be burnt, plastic drums that might come in for feeders, several of those big plastic water carriers, various bins that might do to store wheat away from the rats and various lengths of wire and netting that will surely come in for something, sometime.

There is still a little room left though, which is why I have been spending the last couple of weekends rescuing fence posts.

The fences on part of the shoot were getting more than a little worse for wear and a big re-fencing project has been going on, not just repairing the worst bits but renewing them altogether. The contractors have simply been ripping the whole fence out and replacing it with brand new posts and wire.

The old fencing is lying about in heaps all over the place waiting to be burnt, buried, or carted away for landfill or whatever happens to old fence posts and rusty wire once their useful life is over.

Except that for quite a lot of the posts there is still quite a bit of useful life left provided they can be extracted from the tangled mess of wood and wire laying in the corners of the fields. All that is needed is a good strong nail bar to extract the staples and some means of dragging the posts back home.

Luckily I have the use of a quad bike for the latter task so all that I have had to do is to pull out lots of staples. The problem is that the posts and wire are all rolled up into a big tangled mass and getting at the staples is not easy. I am not fond of barbed wire at the best of times and when it is flapping about loose or ripping through my coat or leggings I can positively live without it.

However, those posts are too tempting to pass up. We need to build some feed stations in the Long Wood to keep the sheep from robbing the hoppers, and we need new stiles at several of our fence crossings, especially now the fences are new and tightly strung.

Furthermore, there are enough posts to put in a bit of game crop up near the high beeches and I am convinced that a crop there would give us a really spectacular extra drive. I also need a few myself to keep the dogs out of the vegetable garden.

So until the contractors decide to drag it all away I intend to keep burrowing through the barbed wire entanglements and rescuing more posts. You never know what we might need them for in the future.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply order a load of fence posts from the sawmill? Of course it would, and I suspect if I charged for my labour it might even be cheaper as well. But then I would miss out on the satisfaction of getting something for nothing ­and what small shoot keeper would ever do that? Actually, I suspect that exactly the same happens on quite a lot of those big shoots as well!