Fantastic birding this weekend but a very negative experience with wildfowling. Late Saturday afternoon, I was sat in the hide at a nearby NNR, watching 1000s of wigeon, lapwing etc being hunted by a peregrine. After a while, and close to dusk, the peregrine made its kill...

...and the swirling flocks settled. 5 minutes later, 2 lads appeared on the boundary fence, flushing all of the birds on the reserve, taking potshots. Shooting at birds from private land, over private land, isn't illegal of course and the impact of killing the one wigeon...

they managed to hit won't have a significant impact. But how do you quantify the sub-lethal impacts of disturbing nearly every bird on a Ramsar NNR, at dusk, on a freezing cold night - when birds had already been disturbed for several hours that day by raptors?...

Could that half hour of undisturbed feeding be the difference between surviving the night or dying of hypothermia or starvation? And the effect on the people enjoying the reserve was certainly profound, the joy of an amazing spectacle greatly diminished for all those present...

This seems a million miles from the 'Ducks Unlimited' model for wildfowling, of habitat creation and careful sustainable harvest. It feels like free-loading off the habitat creation and management by Natural England (taxpayer funded), turning public good in to private gain...

And it chimes with my own past experiences of wildfowling, watching shooters line up along a reserve boundary in Scotland to shoot the pink-footed geese coming on to the RSPB reserve...

...or on saltmarshes in The Wash, with no management by wildfowlers as far as I could tell, where wildfowlers would sit silently, camouflaged at high-tide roosts until the perfect shot was available, then disturb 10s of thousands of birds to get a duck...

Clearly I'm still angry at what I saw on Saturday, and that may not be the best time for reasoned thinking and discussion, but these events tend to be formative in ways that facts and data struggle to be...

I still think wildfowling with a 'Ducks unlimited' type model offers the potential for real conservation benefits. I'm just sceptical that in reality, UK wildfowling can be demonstrably, provably, beneficial for conservation with all impacts accounted for...

We know that we don't know what annual sustainable harvests look like for the UK (let alone the cumulative totals for the European flyway), so it seems unlikely that we would have any grip on what sustainable disturbance levels look like, or the cumulative impacts...

But these are superficial experiences - it is perfectly possible I'm missing a bigger picture, or that my few first hand experiences have all coincided with rare occasions of poor practice - if so I would love to be set right? @ecoevoenviro @wildforest_matt @GethinJones123

It's also worth noting that even if I have misinterpreted events, this will be many nature-lovers first-hand experience of shooting. Even as someone opposed to the AR agenda, and open to pragmatic conservation benefits of shooting, it was hard not to have a negative impression.