Shooting sprites with Clint Eastwood

For the modern bounty hunter, wild and westerly Ireland provides a worthy opponent in the snipe. Missing, however, is unforgiven

- Jonathan Young

Being way out west – and Ireland is west to Englishmen – and that the country was a little wild, it wasn’t that remarkable that Clint Eastwood had joined our shooting party. Not the real Clint, of course, but his cinematic legend buried in our memory, the Man with No Name who’d inspirited us boys with his monosyllabic coolness, constant cheroot smoking and lethal ability to clear leather with his Colt 1851 Navy revolver before the bad guys pulled their pieces.

Now no-one could call common snipe bad guys. In fact, they’re heroic to all in love with the undomesticated remnants of the British Isles inhabited by these buff-and brown sprites: the windy and wet, boggy and plashed, boot-sucking places where the only meetings are with stern-gazed hairy cattle. But to shoot a snipe you have to beat them to the draw, to mount and shoot before that flicker of wings jumping 40 yards out and now twisting skywards has reached another 15 yards and safety.

It’s never easy bagging Gallinago gallinago when he’s doing his fandango. Sometimes he'll be in generous mood, announcing his departure with the double note of ripping cotton, but often he’ll just ghost away, barely visible against the bleached grasses and mosses, a whiter shade of pale. A difficult shot, then, but not impossible, especially with practice. Sir Hugh Gladstone recounts the exploits of Patrick Halloran, a professional fowler from Kilkee, Co Clare, who, aged 69, shot 762 walked-up snipe in the 1924-25 season, part of a lifetime’s bag of more than 40,000, his best run without misses being 23, including five right-and-lefts.