My interest in wildlife and conservation started the day as a young lad that I was allowed to take the farm gun out to shoot pigeons and crows. It was the heightened concentration and sharpened observation that you have when you’re shooting that opened my eyes to all the wildlife that surrounded my home in West Wales.
My early years of shooting taught me the importance of sustainability, an ethos that has stayed with me ever since. I have been a supporter of GWCT for many years because I understand that the research they conduct informs landowner on how to ensure there are healthy populations of the game we shoot by providing and maintaining good habitat - it is an added bonus that other species also benefit from this habitat.
In 2008 I became closely involved with GWCT’s woodcock research by ringing and tagging on sites near Aberystwyth and also setting up the Woodcock Network to encourage others to participate in woodcock ringing. Our success is measured by the fact that there are now over 1400 woodcock ringed each year whereas prior to this the figure was less that 70. The biometric data we gain from this ringing has greatly improved our understanding of the species and helps us ensure that our woodcock shooting remains sustainable.
For the past 35 years I have earned my keep as a sporting artist, my paintings are my humble contribution to a long artistic heritage depicting sporting scenes. This is an artform that reaches all the way back to Neolithic cave paintings. In recent years I have managed to help fund my tagging of woodcock through my art. I have produced two limited edition bronzes of woodcock, the sale of each fund the purchase of a geo-locator that the buyer gets to join me fitting to a woodcock on my study site.
Geo-locators are used to record details of an individual birds’ migration, but the bird needs to be re-captured before the data can be downloaded. I frequently re-capture woodcock that I’ve ringed or tagged in previous years so there is a reasonable chance of finding where the bronze buyers woodcock has been.
The buyer also gets a limited-edition book with their bronze, this references their name, the edition number of the bronze they have bought and a reference number for the tag we fit to their bird. If I re-capture their bird we can also produce a map of where the woodcock has migrated to, this can then be added to their book. It has been wonderful to find a way in which art and science can work so closely together.