What's the biggest day you would shoot?

Words by George Browne

Leaving aside the increasingly tedious lead-shot debate, probably the longest-running and most hotly debated topic in shooting is the question of bag sizes. People hold strong views, but put ten game shots in a room and ask them for their views and you'll get eleven different answers. What is a big bag? How many is too many? For that matter, how many is too few?

Of course, just because you think of a day of a given size as a ‘big’ one, doesn’t mean it is too big. My typical day is a 40-50 bird affair, but I’m comfortable shooting far bigger bags when I get the chance. This being said, anything over 150, given my frame of reference, feels very busy indeed. So where do people draw the line? 

How many birds do people shoot?

We need to look at some numbers. A pretty good place to start is to ask what bags people typically shoot. According to the 2022 Game Shooting Census, carried out by GunsOnPegs and sponsored by Lycetts, guns shoot days with an average bag of 127 birds, a slight increase on the 2018 figure of 116. A little creep, but not vast in the scheme of things: a 4% increase in four years. 

46% of guns typically shoot on days with a bag of 100 or fewer, a further 40% shoot on days between 101 and 200, and the remaining 14% shoot on days of 201+, with only 4% most frequently shooting on days bigger than 300 birds.  Back in 2018's Census, 27.2 per cent deemed anything more than 100 to be a big bag.

What’s the biggest day you would attend?

In the 2022 Game Shooting Census we asked respondents to tell us what the biggest day they would accept an invitation to is (the invitation element is important in order to take the cost factor out of the consideration). 

The results were very interesting, but let’s begin with the averages. Across the entire dataset, the average figure at which people would ‘draw the line’ is 326 birds, a sizable day by anyone’s standards. For reference, that's this many pheasants:

A bag of 326 is the average point at which people would not accept an invitation

How does the size of your typical day affect your upper limit?

When we start to break things down a bit more, we start to build a more detailed picture of people’s attitudes. The first thing I did was to compare people’s typical bag size with their notional ‘big bag limit’.

What we see is that (in general) the smaller your ‘typical day’ the lower that limit is, so someone who typically shoots on 100 bird days will hit their limit at a lower number than someone who typically shoots 200. This is perhaps not terribly surprising. 

What is more unexpected is that the difference between the typical bag size and people's upper limit is fairly consistent. The average across the dataset is 163 birds, but the variance is only around 20 birds either side of that number.  To put it another way, your upper limit is pretty much 163 birds more than you usually shoot, regardelss of whether you shoot 50 or 300 on your normal day.

The biggest day you would accept an invitation to is probably about 160 more than your typical day

You might expect people who typically shoot bigger bags to have a greater difference between their typical day and their limit, being, perhaps, less concerned about big bags, but this isn't the case. In fact, the groups with the biggest difference beteen their typical days and their limit is those who usually shoot on the smallest days, while those who normally shoot on 300 bird days have the lowest cut-off.

Next I looked to see if the amount that someone shoots has an impact on their attitude to bag size. Again, the correlation is easy to spot. The more you shoot, the bigger bag you are comfortable with. 

Is it true that ‘big bag’ guns are all about the numbers?

In the 2022 Game Shooting Census we also asked respondents to say what the smallest day that they would accept an invitation to would be. When we compare respondents' typical bag sizes against the smallest day that they would accept, we see that while it is true that those who typically shoot bigger bags have a higher threshold at which they will accept an invitation, the difference between a  300-a-day Gun’s floor and that of a 50-bird a day Gun is not as big as you might think.

Supporting this, is the fact that overall, more than 80% of guns would accept an invitation to shoot a day of 60 birds, rising to 96% for days of 100 birds. 

What have we learned?

The big takeaway here is that bag size is a subjective thing, and is probably influenced more than you think by your own frame of reference. We also learn that the majority the shooting community see a bag of much over 320 as 'too big'.

Cynics might say that the people at the lower end of the scale are simply ‘holier than thou’, and that their positions would change if they had the means to shoot larger bag days more regularly. Conversely, there is no evidence these people haven’t shot bigger days, and have decided that they prefer the smaller ones.

Don't be too quick to judge

I personally don't think there's a magic number at which a bag size becomes distateful per se; so much of it is down to how the shoot is managed, and what happens to the birds that are shot. Is the ground that the shoot occupies big enough to sustain the number of birds that need to be released in order to shoot bags of that size? Do the birds make their way into the food chain?

It is all too easy to look down one's nose at people who enjoy days that one personally wouldn't fancy, but so much of it comes down not to the actual numbers.

As we explored in a 2019 article, the big bag debate is potentially something of a red herring. The reality is that for many outside of the shooting community, one dead pheasant is too many, and you don't often see those who oppose shooting referring to bag sizes as an argument against shooting. Bag size becomes an issue when striving for ever bigger days results in substandard shoot management practices, or if there isn't a route into the food chain for the shot game.

The good news is that the shooting world is aware of the need to manage shoots in a way that is commensurate with good conservation outcomes (the notion of net biodiversity gain), while initiatives such as British Game Assurance and (like it or not) the move away from lead shot, are working towards ensuring that every shot bird is desined for the table.

At GunsOnPegs we make it easy for users to find shoots that do things the right way, by highlighting those that have been audited by the BGA and allowing users to filter out those that are yet to be audited, helping people to make informed choices about the shoots that they support.