Wingshooting in Africa’s Hunting Literature By Ken Bailey

Wingshooting in Africa’s HUNTING LITERATURE

Ken Bailey

The sporting literature world is rife with classic books describing great adventures about hunting across Africa. The earliest were largely anecdotal stories of shooting big game, buried in detailed descriptions of the early exploration by Europeans of the Dark Continent. Over time, and as Africa, particularly East Africa, become increasingly settled, more and more was written about the diversity of hunting opportunities, including books describing collecting for natural history museums, about life as a game warden, and protecting people and property from marauding wildlife. Eventually the commercial hunting safari industry grew, and with it came a proliferation of new titles detailing the exploits of traveling sportsmen and their pursuit of hunting adventure. Most of these, naturally enough, focused on hunting the Big Five, as that was where the excitement and danger lay, and that’s what sells (sex notwithstanding.)

What avid wingshooters know is that the African landscape is not just home to vast numbers of big game, it also boasts an unparalleled abundance and diversity of bird game. It dawned on me that seldom is wingshooting referenced in African hunting literature, and books or even chapters dedicated to tales of bird hunting are downright rare. You find the odd reference to plinking guinea fowl for the soup pot, the occasional description of the spectacle of sandgrouse coming in to waterholes on a Swiss watch-tight schedule, and periodically the names of game birds on lists of animals taken for museum collections, but that’s about it. Recently, I went through my accumulation of African hunting books, modest as it is, to see what significant references to wingshooting I could find.

Renowned raconteur Robert Ruark dedicated a full chapter to wingshooting in the posthumously published Robert Ruark’s Africa, a compendium of magazine articles and short stories of his African experiences. Titled Strictly for the Birds, and originally published in the October 1952 issue of Field & Stream, Ruark reveals his life-long passion for bird hunting when describing gunning for sandgrouse, spurfowl, francolin, guinea fowl, ducks and geese on what was supposed to be a big-game safari. About African wingshooting, Ruark says, “It is the best real glut of game birds left in the world. With no limits, so that a hog could wear out his shootin’ shoulder on almost any fowl he chose.”

He wraps up the chapter by saying, “One of these days I’m making another safari to Africa, and am taking with me only the shotty-guns . . . I aim to shoot nothing but birds . . . I am going to shoot birds in the morning, and birds in the afternoon, and I am going to thumb my nose at the kudus and the bongos and all the other rare beasts that command so much abstention from fun. I am going to make so much noise that all the rhinos in Tanganyika will commute to Rhodesia.” If he ever took that dedicated wingshooting safari, I’m not aware of it.

The imaginative yet imitable Peter Hathaway Capstick also dedicated a chapter to bird hunting, or at least half of one, in his 1984 release Safari: The Last Adventure. The chapter “Bird Shooting and Fishing” focuses, in part, on his love-hate relationship with sandgrouse, a species renowned for driving otherwise competent wingshooters to unforeseen levels of frustration. In the way only Capstick can spin a yarn, he relates the following about a fellow smoothbore hunter.

“One well-known competition pigeon shooter returned from a sandgrouse hunt in Botswana not more than a year ago in very bad shape. The first thing he did was

have his wonderful collection of Purdeys and Hollands recycled into IMPEACH AUDOBON buttons. Clearly unwell, he gave his wife her own checking account and, at last reports, was spending the rest of his life in meditation somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains.”

In the chapter, Capstick goes on effusively about the variety of game-bird hunting opportunities, touching on francolin, quail, guinea fowl (“the spotted terror, tougher than tax men”), waterfowl, doves and pigeons.

One of the more interesting and informative chapters on wingshooting, I discovered, can be found in Winchester Press’s 1971, A Treasury of African Hunting. Written by artist, noted marksman, and onetime associate editor of Field & Stream Russell Barnett Aitken, it is a thorough and lively description of the broader opportunities available and his personal experiences wingshooting from Kenya to the Cape. In an exciting close to the chapter, Aitken relates a story of a nearfatal duck hunt.

“Wading to retrieve, I had just started to reach for the plump drake when I saw a movement near it, a nine-foot black cobra coiled on a tussock and ready to strike, hood flared wide. By that time I was damned near within range and, shooting practically from the hip, blew the bastard in half with a concentrated load of 6’s.” Who says wingshooting can’t be exciting?

In Chris Dorsey’s 2002 book, The World’s Greatest Wingshooting Destinations, he actually dedicates five chapters to bird hunting opportunities in Africa, three describing the gunning in South Africa, with

one chapter each centered in Zimbabwe and Botswana. All the usual suspects are here, from guineas to francolin to sandgrouse to waterfowl. This is the most modern reference to African wingshooting in my library, and likely among the most relevant to today’s hunting fraternity. Of note is his tale of hunting grey-winged partridge in the mountains of the Eastern Cape, the only meaningful reference I could find in book form to what has now become an iconic hunt for hard-core upland bird hunters. Wingshooting in African literature also occasionally serves as a gateway to other stories. In Brian Herne’s 1999 White Hunters, he relates the tragic tale of PH Terence Owen Mathews, who was making a name for himself as a guide for celebrity hunters while working for the esteemed Ker and Downey. In 1968, while hunting francolin in Kenya, a hunter caught him square when a bird doubled back through the line. He took 39 pellets to his face, shoulders and hands, including one in the eye. Despite travelling to London to get better care than local doctors could For those who enjoyed “Into the Thorns” provide, they were look out for Wayne’s new book Drums of the Morning“ Wayne Grant Safaris In the Tradition of Old"O Africa" safaris nyalavalley@mweb.co.za unable to save his sight and he never guided hunting safaris again. The only fully-dedicated African wingshooting book I’m familiar with is Aubrey Wynne-Jones’s 1993 The Sport of Shooting in Southern Africa. This broad-reaching reference work touches on all aspects of game birds and wingshooting, from conservation and management to the basics of shotgunning, gun dog handling and care, and summarizes the basic ecology and life history for most common species of game birds. There’s even a chapter on gamebird preparation and cooking. Throughout are detailed pen and ink sketches that effectively support the text. If for no other reason than it’s the only dedicated African bird hunting book I’m aware of, it’s a must-have for ardent wingshooters that hunt, or aspire to hunt, in Africa.

The paucity of wingshooting in the popular literature is understandable, I suppose. I get why man-eating lions and truculent Cape buffalo grab the headlines. But in today’s shrinking world, when you can get to and from Africa and enjoy five days hunting within a week, and when bird hunters are increasingly willing to travel, it’s my hope that it’s only a matter of time before we see African hunting literature make a more welcome home for bird hunting. Terry Wieland, are you listening?