Tristan Dummer

A grey partridge doesn't care about statutory instruments. It cares about beetle banks, wild bird cover, and whether a fox is pinning down broods in June. Those things don't happen without people. Without gamekeepers, without shoots, without hunters paying to turn habitat back on across hundreds of thousands of acres of British countryside.

On 23 March 2026, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) opened a consultation that will reshape Schedule 2 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 for the first time in almost half a century.¹ Every shooter in Britain has until 23:59 on Sunday 17 May 2026 to respond.¹ Here's why the conservation case for shooting is stronger than most people realise, and why silence right now is the wrong call.

What Defra Is Actually Proposing

The consultation, badged Improving protection for huntable wild birds, is co-ordinated jointly by Defra, the Scottish Government and the Welsh Government.¹ Schedule 2.1 of the 1981 Act is the list of wild birds that may be lawfully killed or taken outside their close seasons. It names 19 species in England and Wales, 23 in Scotland, and hasn't had a comprehensive review since the Act was first written.¹

The headline proposals are to remove pochard, European white-fronted goose and goldeneye from the quarry list across Britain; to end open-season shooting of pintail; to shorten the seasons for common snipe and woodcock; and to add woodpigeon to the schedule with a 1 September to 31 January open season.¹ Wales proposes going further, with a total shooting ban on snipe and the full removal of coot and golden plover.¹

Some of those proposals are grounded in species decline that no honest shooter should ignore. Others go beyond the recommendations of Natural England and Natural Resources Wales (the statutory nature advisers), and that is where the science-versus-politics question lives.²

What The Data Actually Says

Shooting in the UK is not a hobby that leaves nothing behind. The Value of Shooting 2024 report, commissioned by BASC and 23 partner organisations, values UK shooting's direct contribution to the economy at £3.3 billion in gross value added. It estimates that shooting providers and volunteers deliver around £500 million of conservation work every year, equivalent to 26,000 full-time jobs and 14 million work-days. Roughly 7.6 million hectares of the UK, or 31 percent of the land area, is subject to habitat management as a result of shooting.³ A separate natural-capital study by Economics for the Environment Consultancy put the environmental benefits shooting delivers at £1.1 billion annually.⁴

Those are headline numbers. The species-level evidence is harder to argue with.

Take the grey partridge. The UK population fell by roughly 91 percent between 1967 and 2010.⁵ On farms enrolled in the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust's Partridge Count Scheme, where shoots actively manage land for game, partridge pairs rose 81 percent between 2000 and 2010 while the national population fell another 40 percent over the same window.⁶ At the Peppering Project on the Sussex Downs, decades of shoot-led management has delivered more than 13 grey partridge pairs per square kilometre on the managed area versus barely 1 pair per square kilometre on neighbouring unmanaged ground. Skylark, linnet, yellowhammer and lapwing densities rose alongside them.⁷

At Otterburn in Northumberland, a decade-long GWCT predation experiment showed that legal fox and crow control improved breeding success for lapwing, golden plover, curlew and red grouse by an average factor of three. Wader abundance rose 37 percent on controlled plots and fell 28 percent where predators were not managed.⁸ On GWCT's Allerton Project demonstration farm in Leicestershire, introducing shoot-style game management led to a 102 percent increase in nationally declining songbird species.⁹ And across Scottish farmland, songbirds are more than 100 times more likely to be found in game cover crops than adjacent arable ground.¹⁰

That evidence isn't the shooting sector patting itself on the back. It's peer-reviewed research, published over decades, sitting on the same evidence shelf that Defra itself uses.

The Census That Keeps Everyone Honest

None of that case is possible without data, and British shooting happens to underpin one of the longest-running wildlife monitoring datasets in the country. The National Gamebag Census was established by the GWCT in 1961. Sixty-five years later it holds continuous records from more than 600 shooting estates across the UK, covering 24 huntable bird species, 11 pest bird species and 19 mammal species.¹¹

The NGC is how government wildlife agencies know what is happening to species that aren't otherwise well monitored, and it exists because shooters voluntarily send in their returns at the end of every season. Every estate that keeps its game book contributes, directly or indirectly, to the policy conversations being had at Defra right now. If you shoot in Britain and aren't part of it, this is the moment to start.

Why The Codes Of Practice Matter More Than Ever

When critics argue that shooting needs more legislation, a fair question is: what are shooters already doing to hold themselves to a standard? The answer is already in print. BASC publishes 18 Codes of Practice covering everything from airgunning and deer stalking to snaring, wildfowling, loading for other people, picking up and the overarching Code of Good Shooting Practice, which is endorsed by 13 national shooting and conservation organisations.¹²

The Sustainable Shooting Code of Practice is the one that matters most for the quarry debate. It sets the standard BASC is formally asking Defra to endorse as the regulatory mechanism: self-regulation over legislation, evidence-led adjustment over blanket bans.¹³ That matters because well-designed codes adapt faster than statutory instruments, they travel with shooters across disciplines, and they preserve the local knowledge that underpins every decent shoot day. When BASC says the sector has a track record on self-regulation, the Codes of Practice are the track record.

Why This Consultation Matters

The first principle here is that good policy should rest on good evidence. Some of Defra's proposals, notably restrictions on pochard and white-fronted goose where international breeding populations are in genuine decline, are grounded in real species data. Others appear to go beyond the formal statutory advice, or swap evidence-led management for blunt legal restrictions that will hit the rural economy without obvious wildlife gain.²

BASC's position is that it opposes the restriction proposals, supports adding woodpigeon to the schedule, and is formally asking Defra to endorse the Sustainable Shooting Code of Practice rather than pursue unevidenced bans.¹⁴ The GWCT has separately warned that restrictive licensing risks disincentivising the privately funded habitat, feeding and predator-control work that keeps red-listed species on the map.¹⁵

Neither of those organisations is asking for shooting to be exempt from scrutiny. They are asking for the scrutiny to be serious.

Your Voice Is The Evidence

Consultations like this are won and lost on the volume and the quality of the responses. Government departments weigh the sector's engagement alongside its scientific evidence. A well-organised hunter-conservation lobby punches above its weight. A scattered one does not.

BASC has set up a response hub on its British Bird Quarry Species Review page with three routes to respond: an email template, a postal letter template, and step-by-step guidance for completing Defra's 23-page online form with BASC's recommended answers.¹⁴ The full online response takes around 45 minutes. The email template takes two.

If you shoot anywhere in Britain, whether driven game, rough, wildfowl or target, this is the most useful thing you can do between now and the start of next season. The consultation closes at 23:59 on 17 May 2026, and there is no further deadline after that.¹

Join BASC While You're There

Responding to the consultation is the immediate job. The longer game is membership. BASC is the UK's largest shooting organisation, and its ability to negotiate with Defra, Scottish Government and Welsh Government on behalf of the sector is directly proportional to how many members it represents. Each response in its name, each letter sent through its portal, each new membership in its column counts as a data point at the negotiating table. Joining BASC is the single most useful thing a British shooter can do this month after responding.

Every generation of shooters has had a moment where the rules were about to be redrawn and silence was the wrong answer. This is ours.

Keep your own season on the record with the Ambulo game book. Planning a hunt abroad this season? Sort your temporary firearms permit with Ambulo and focus on the shooting.

References

1. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Improving protection for huntable wild birds, consultation and announcement, 23 March 2026. Available at: gov.uk/government/consultations/improving-protection-for-huntable-wild-birds
2. Countryside Alliance. Defra launches consultation on bird shooting seasons. 23 March 2026. Available at: countryside-alliance.org
3. Cognisense (commissioned by BASC and partner organisations). The Value of Shooting 2024. Available at: basc.org.uk/the-value-of-shooting-report-2024
4. Economics for the Environment Consultancy and Strutt & Parker (commissioned by BASC). Natural Capital Benefits of Shooting, 2023. Summary at: basc.org.uk/shooting-provides-1-1-billion-in-natural-capital
5. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. Long-term trends in grey partridge abundance. Available at: gwct.org.uk
6. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. Case study: Grey partridge recovery. Partridge Count Scheme data. Available at: gwct.org.uk
7. Ewald JA et al. (2020). Research Into Practice: Gray Partridge (Perdix perdix) Restoration in Southern England. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 8:517500. Available at: frontiersin.org
8. Fletcher K et al. (2010). Changes in breeding success and abundance of ground-nesting moorland birds in relation to the experimental deployment of legal predator control. Journal of Applied Ecology 47: 263 to 272. Summary: gwct.org.uk
9. Stoate C & Szczur J (2001). Could game management have a role in the conservation of farmland passerines? Allerton Project findings. Bird Study 48: 279 to 292. Summary: gwct.org.uk
10. Parish DMB & Sotherton NW (2004). Game crops and threatened farmland songbirds. Summary: gwct.org.uk
11. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. National Gamebag Census. Available at: gwct.org.uk
12. British Association for Shooting and Conservation. Codes of Practice. Available at: basc.org.uk/codes-of-practice
13. British Association for Shooting and Conservation. Sustainable Shooting Code of Practice. Available at: basc.org.uk
14. British Association for Shooting and Conservation. British Bird Quarry Species Review, consultation response hub. Available at: basc.org.uk/british-bird-quarry-species-review
15. Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust. Response to Government proposal for licensing of gamebird shooting in England, 19 March 2026. Available at: gwct.org.uk

This article summarises publicly available material from Defra, BASC and the GWCT as of April 2026. It is not legal advice. Regulatory proposals are subject to revision during and after the consultation period.