Swans aye ? . I don't want to start anything here but would you prefer black or white :tongue::biggrin:
It might be an urban myth, but I always understood that St. Johns College Cambridge was one of the rare places that is legally allowed to serve swan.
Im pretty sure you can shoot em here in the correct game bird season .... with the appropriate license , but mostly I go for the Canada geese , which have just lost their gamebird protection and become a pest that is no longer limited in how many and when or where you shoot them ..... all that is req is permission of the land owner. A young one of them roasts up well :smile:
Black Swans are legal in gamebird season in Southland, 2 per shooter, per day, last season. Why you would want to cook one of the pungent, tough, awful things I couldn't imagine. We breast ours and put it with duck breasts to be made into salami. (same with Canadian geese, if they are lice free)
Apparently, all wild swans in the UK belong to the crown (are you listening, Poland?), so I assume it's perfectly legal to kill and eat hand reared swans. Or tame ones...
swans and geese are like everything else , if you get a tough old bird you get a tough old feed . Most billed birds the bills are softer in the young ones , squeeze the top bill sideways , if it splits its a old bird , if it is pliable its a younger one , best preform this test AFTER you have shot it . There used to be heaps of swans behind the sand hills , north end Oreti beach , and I know what happened to a few of them:biggrin: ..... but anyhow ole eagle eye's Di has spotted another hare on the hillside ( from the front door ) so I have bailed and put the 1st one in the freezer and Im going to make it my mission to get this other bugger too , and it will be to , steep hills and I cant walk without crutches , Its been 2 years sinse I last made it up there . He's sitting about 20 feet below the base of the gum tree on the skyline ... 326 yards away
You must be prompting me to recite the old limerick: There was a young grad from St John's Who attempted to bugger the swans But said the Hall Porter "Sir, you didn't oughta - them swans is reserved for the dons".
... except for the ones on the Thames which the Vintners' Company and the Dyers' Company are allowed to claim annually.
Im going to sneak up to the gum tree ( I can get to it from behind the hill on a 4 wheeler ) and wait for him . I have a rifle ( remmington XR700 in 204 ruger ) that is capable off taking the shot , but I have cronic A fib and I can no longer hold still enough for 300yard shots let alone make it up that hill without a few tea breaks , and a 204 ruger vaporises small animals so its pointless using that I you want to eat the intended target :smile:
I've never seen a live hare in my life. They're obviously not an issue on the mean streets of downtown Surrey...
Here in NZ they are introduced pests, them and bloody rabbits, Rabbits especially, in the past they overran farms to the extent that there was no grass left, and farmers just walked off their farms as the couldn't feed stock.
Yeah me too , especially the little ones . I pretty much don't shoot things unless I intend eating them , not just for the hell of it .... that's what targets are for:smile:
There are no rabbits in Switzerland (amazingly - you have to wonder why not?) but there are hares. I occasionally see one around here. I used to quite frequently see one in the same place when driving home from work. It went white in the winter - very cool!
