Chichester Harbour Wildfowlers Asociation

Weather and Tides +1hr for BST

What is Wildfowling?

Not for the faint hearted, wildfowling is mainly a solitary sport requiring considerable stamina and patience as it takes place on estuaries and coastal marshes during the winter months in wet, muddy and often cold conditions.

The main quarry are wild geese and ducks which are mostly migrants, travelling from the Arctic circle, Scandinavia and the Low Countries in the autumn and returning to their breeding grounds in the spring. Their habits are governed by tide, wind, weather and moon.

Generally geese fly in at day break to their feeding grounds i.e. potato fields or winter cereals and return to roost far out on the mudflats at dusk. Duck, many of which are seed and grass eaters, usually come in at dusk to feed and spend the night on the pools, returning to the mudflats at dawn.

The wildfowler needs to be able to identify legal quarry species in poor light and difficult weather conditions. Often, despite many hours spent on the marsh, he will not fire a shot. When he does, it is important that he has a dog to retrieve the bird from the mud or water. An intimate knowledge of this wild and dangerous area of the coast is a prerequisite to this sport. The inexperienced wildfowler can easily be cut off from the land by the twice-daily tides or become disorientated by the sudden descent of fog.