GAME-SHOOTING SEASON

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27961, 7 May 1956, Page 12

GAME-SHOOTING SEASON

POOR START DURING WEEKEND

MANY RETURN WITH EMRTY BAGS

The 1956 game-shooting season opened disappointingly on Saturday, many shooters returning .from Lake Ellesmere at dusk with empty bags Four or five birds were a comparatively good bag for the lake. Mr F. Alexander, of Lakeside, who was not out for the opening for the first time in 57 years, recalled last evening that 50 years ago a bag of fewer than 25 birds was considered a poor day’s shooting, and that one day he shot 197 birds. According to Mr V. Henderson, a North Canterbury Acclimatisation Society ranger, there is still plentv of game on the lake, and had there been good shooting weather over the weekend the lake would have been a shooters’ paradise. - T J? e weather was the main factor m the poor shooting at the week-end. Long before the season officially began at 6.30 a.rh. on Saturday, fog enveloped the lake, making it difficult tor shooters to find their stands. The tog persisted for hours, creating conditions which shooters of long experience said they had never before enS?,«il tered ’ P? 6 man said that th e n^?b e ”J ed lost - ,“ They would comc out of the fog anywhere, and you could ?? e . then ? till they were on top of you. he said. “You were just a bit lucky if you -spotted them in time” nJtv re QL ere . lo guns in this man’s TrwSi rtfS 0 ? 11 . 1 }, 8 on the lake in the birds“each l ’ they averaged abmjt six Poor Results at Lakeside in A a v ha i S sh . ot up to 108 birds r n .i a d 2 y dld J ot get a single bird at Fh k f e + lde °n T Sa turday. Yesterday he shot two. I used to say if you did not get 20 or 30 birds in a day that there was something wrong with it ” he said last evening g rt ' riveJ- o< h^ s at th -, e mouth of the L2 TLJ had ? good run . said a Greenpark sportsman. Good bags were Plentiful there, he said. On a pond li?nit pr °Perty this man took a limit bag on Saturday. th J A O3 ?- between Christchurch and Amberley, the opening y-as probably one of the poorest on !h£°N?’ Fry ’ a ranger of the North Canterbury Acclimatisation bociety, last evening. The weather, he said had been too calm. Winds were needed, to bring the ducks in from the sea. In one of the only areas where shooters had any luck—round the mouth of the Waimakariri—ducks had been coming in on the breeze. By midday on Saturday, he said, a number of shooters on the lagoon at Brooklands had taken seven or eight ducks.

Unless there was heavy rain in North Canterbury to fill uonds and water holes, many of which were still very low or dry. Mr Fry said, the season might remain a or - in North. Canterbury, as the ducks would not stay inland when they came in from the sea.

Mr Henderson appealed last evening to shooters to return all bands they found on birds to the secretary of their acclimatisation society so ' that they could be sent to the wildlife division of the Department Internal Affairs.