THE DRIVEN GAME SHOOT

The Driven Game Shoot is a day in mid to late October in the Hudson Valley: pegs drawn in the morning, the birds driven over standing guns, loaders, dogs and cartridges provided, and the guns coming in for lunch between the drives.

It exists because, in the words of one American gunmaker, “the popularity of British driven shooting has spilled across the Atlantic”, and the Hudson Valley has the ground for it.

The Driven Day

In the 1870s, British bird shooting “turned into something much grander”: the guns stood at butts or pegs and beaters drove the game over them, making noise to bring it out of cover, with flagmen to keep it in range; to beat about the bush is a phrase from fowling. By the 1900s a great shoot had “dozens or even hundreds of beaters”, with gamekeepers, loaders and pickers-up. The cost was put in a rhyme: “Up gets a guinea, bang goes a penny-halfpenny, and down comes a half a crown.” In six days in December 1913, George V shot more than a thousand pheasants of a bag of 3,937. The gun for it was a pair of twelve-bore side-by-sides of six and three-quarter pounds, sidelocks for preference.

The pheasant came to North America in 1773, and in America it has mostly been walked up behind dogs. New York held its first pheasant season in 1908, and the state still releases some fifty thousand birds a year. The driven day crossed later, in shoots run on the British pattern, many of them by British gamekeepers, and in the continental or tower shoot, where reared birds are sent from a tower over a line of pegs.

The Hudson Valley keeps its shooting preserves. Orvis Sandanona, at Millbrook, calls itself “the oldest permitted shooting preserve in the United States”; its clubhouse was “built during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson”, and its upland members shoot “driven, mallard, and continental shoots”. The Mashomack Fish and Game Preserve Club, at Pine Plains, keeps nineteen hundred acres; it was founded on Shelter Island in 1964, moved to Dutchess County in 1979, and has its clubhouse in a Greek Revival house of 1838 on Halcyon Lake, hung with Zuber’s scenic paper Vues de l’Amérique du Nord. In November 2025 it held a driven pheasant day, with “Proper English Shooting attire requested” in the field and black tie at dinner. On a licensed preserve in New York, reared birds may be shot from 1 September to 15 April.

A driven day has its customs. Before the first drive the guns draw for their pegs, numbered wooden stakes, generally eight to ten, and are given a safety briefing; at each drive they move up, often by two, so that peg four becomes six and then eight. A drive begins when the guns are on their pegs and ends when a horn or whistle sounds, and there are four to six in a day. A loader loads for a gun shooting a pair; a back gun stands behind the line. Elevenses, “usually held after the second drive”, bring sausage rolls or pork pies, with sloe gin. To shoot a neighbour’s bird is to poach it, and “a real faux pas”.

The Day

One day in the Hudson Valley, in mid to late October, on ground taken for the day. The Court has no ground of its own.

Pegs are drawn in the morning.

The birds are driven over standing guns.

Loaders, dogs and cartridges are provided.

The guns come in for lunch between the drives.

What Is Asked

Country attire. Nothing is published for a private day; the British Association for Shooting and Conservation lists tweed or moleskin breeks, a shirt and tie and a tweed cap, and the Court dresses to that register.

An over-and-under or a side-by-side; never a semi-automatic or a pump.

The gun is slipped between drives, and opened, unloaded and slipped as soon as the horn blows. Shoot only with sky behind the bird.

Remember the peg number. Forgetting it, the same association warns, “annoys shoot hosts immensely.”

Nobody is pitched at the peg, or at lunch.

The Places

The number of places and the sum are stated in the invitation.

The Court’s Game Dinner follows in early November.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.