BIRD HUNTING

or Pest Control!

A friend of mine works as Nature Conservancy Officer and part of her job involves being an on-call pest control office and she goes hunting in her spare time! What a woman!

Now hunting is one of those topics I have always wanted to photograph and not with any agenda for or against and I had been pestering Katrine for a long time to follow her on one of her hunts. But until now that had not been possible and here comes the but….

Near where I live is a children’s play area. A place I know all too well, well maintained, no graffiti, everything works very Denmark, just one problem; a huge flock of crows has built up an enormous rookery in the trees and the noise they made the local residents life very unpleasant at times so, they were allowed to call in the hunters!  Katrine called me and said her whole family was on a hunter gatherer mission at the playground.

Well  I couldn’t resist! I was greeted to quite a scene when I arrived on my Christania bike with camera kit in the box. If this had been “Health and Safety England” the place would have been cordoned off with brigade of Hi-Vis jobs-worths on guard with clipboards at the ready but not in Denmark. Katrine was there with her husband, 2 rifles and 3 children and a dog!

Culling Noisy Crows

The day of the shoot, sorry for the pun, also coincided with a long holiday weekend so families took advantage of the good weather to spend some quality time together at the playground. What they did not have in mind was eating their picnics to a soundtrack of rifle shots with their young children running around 2 sharpshooting bird hunters and subsequent dead crows falling from the sky as they ate! It just shows it takes a lot to put a Dane off his or her rye bread sandwich!

Thanks Katrine for a memorable day!

Tech stuff Nikon D800, iPhone 5s. Black and white pictures processed with Alien Skin Exposure 5