Understanding the culture of the hunter

Another Life: 'Before the sky is fully bright the crackle of gunfire will announce that cock pheasants are once again fair game." Not, perhaps, on this windy side of the hill, where a cock pheasant is still almost as exotic as a parrot, and not, indeed, in rural Ireland as a whole, where All Saints' Day has generally ceased to give relief from servile work, but November 1st, next Wednesday, is still, as Douglas Butler enthuses, "the biggest day in the Irish shooting calendar".

The new Ireland may have mostly moved such recreations to the weekend, but there are more hunters than ever before: almost 1,000 gun clubs spread throughout the country and more than 150,000 gun-licence holders, many of whom will snatch an hour after pheasant before breakfast on Wednesday. "Game hunting is an addiction," as Butler writes, "with origins buried deep in the caverns of the human psyche."

A doctor of zoology who teaches science in Tipperary's Rockwell College, Butler has long been a prominent, sometimes militant, figure among Ireland's hunting fraternity. This is the prime audience for his book Rough Shooting in Ireland (Merlin Unwin, £20), the first big book of its kind in more than 60 years. But it also makes instructive and lively reading for anyone concerned with nature conservation, or open to sharing the deeply felt joys and woes of the serious shooter.

Its evocative photographs show how far from rough shooting is the sport of knickerbockered stockbrokers, downing game driven by beaters and dogs, as caricatured in British films on television. In Ireland, at least, it is an egalitarian rural field sport that demands a genuine, if selective, love of wildlife and a readiness often to get very wet and tired for very little. In ecological terms, and with proper and strict controls, its toll on game species is insignificant, and it is often a powerful force for good in the conservation of bird populations and restoration of semi-natural countryside.

None of this makes me wince any less when the sound of shooting drifts up from the marsh behind the shore - like a lot of people, I am also selective and out of practice as a killer - and the blokeish provocations of Butler's book can sometimes grate on one's greener sensibilities. But reading it has been enriching, in terms of understanding birds, the Irish hunting scene, and the significant pleasures of the hunter with a gun and a bird dog.

Along with the iniquities of commercial shoot-promoters, his main woes are the loss of quarry species - the range of birds that can be shot - and the limits to their seasons. As he sees it: "The bird watchers are always the good guys and the shooters are always the bad guys. In the mindset of officialdom you cannot have regard for birds if you shoot them. And this despite the fact that the shooting fraternity does far more in Ireland than any other group to provide for the needs of birds." Thus, shooting any of Ireland's winter geese ended in 1982 and "goose shooters have grown weary of the fight" to get them back on the quarry list.

The one-month season for curlew - which also opens on Wednesday - "defies all logic", since up to 200,000 migrant birds join Ireland's plentiful natives in winter. Why should their season be any different from other wading birds such as snipe and golden plover? It's "ecopolitics", he decides, to satisfy "the twitching fraternity" and their soft spot for the curlew's mournful call. As for the prohibition on shooting woodcock at dusk (because, as he tells it, of fears that they were being "slaughtered" as they left their woodland homes), "that same officialdom should have been required to stand out at the forest's edge on a freezing winter's evening and see just how difficult it can be . . ." In Tipperary, the traditional shooting habitat for pheasant (topped up each year with reared birds released by gun clubs) has been the fields of sugar beet. Which crop will offer cover now? But Butler has some bright hopes for the future: part-time farming should create more cover for game-birds and a better mix of plants to nourish the insects they eat.

As for the "antis", he's a bit worried about the Green Party, for even the moderates of whom "the matter of killing will always be an insurmountable barrier". Unlike Tony Blair's party, Irish Labour's rural base is some guarantee that "the party does not represent any threat to hunting, shooting or fishing, at least in this generation".

The big parties are not going to take issue with rural traditions and the few politicians "that do oppose our sport tend to run in urban constituencies where snipe and woodcock are about as plentiful as virgins". Douglas Butler, bluff countryman and shooter, was never ashamed of his prejudices.