The Birds of Slovakia

In the forests of Slovakia the shoot ends much like it begins: at a fire to the tune of three horns sounding an ancient song of the hunt. Slovaks open and close the day with ceremonies to honor guests, evoke the spirit of the chase and celebrate the birds that have brought shooters across oceans and a continent to a remote valley in a half-known land in Central Europe.
The ceremony that closed our day took place around a vyrad, an enclosure of evergreen boughs laid on the ground, each corner anchored by an upright log. After the last drive, beaters had arranged the birds from our bag in rows—cocks to the side facing the shooters, hens fronting the beaters and pickers-up opposite us. To our left a trio of musicians began blowing brass horns; across from them stood Thomas Steinemann, the gamekeeper, and Peter Oremusz, our Slovakian co-host.
As the horns faded, Thomas and Peter doffed Tyrolean hats and clasped them to their chests, and then Peter translated Thomas’s closing speech. He thanked us for our visit to the Pata Estate and for shooting safely, and he paid tribute to the game on the grass in front of us. Three weeks before, King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden had stood at Pata listening to a similar invocation, but this afternoon a new regent would be crowned.
“In the name of Diana, goddess of the chase,” Thomas intoned, “and Saint Hubert, patron of the hunt, we honor with 49 birds to his name Mr. Barry Horton and proclaim him—King of the Pheasants!”

Petrol was poured onto each of the vyrad’s upturned logs and, as the fires blazed into a wintry Slovakian sky, a surprised Barry Horton stepped forward to accept a congratulatory handshake and a certificate confirming his title.
“King of the bloody bazanti what?” a shooting companion groaned as Barry sheepishly returned to the line. His friends began bowing and scraping and making other sundry forelock-tugging gestures of deference.
“Hail, Barry, king of the pheasants... ”
“All kneel for King Barry... ”
“Bazanti krahl, bazanti krahl!”
The ragging went on until King Barry’s reign ended at midnight with the dawn of a new day. Barry was British, and back home good chaps are not supposed to bother counting birds—or at least make a fuss about it. Our Slovak loaders, however, didn’t know that. At the end of each drive they filled out a scorecard listing birds taken for cartridges fired. A running tally was kept, with the day’s high gun being crowned Krahl Bazanti. As Barry would lament, this would not have been done in jolly old England.
But we were jolly well not in old England.

Slovakia is one of Europe’s youngest republics but, like the ceremonies that begin and end the shoot, there is little new about its people, their culture or their national aspirations. Broad valleys and mountain passes have made its lands a marching ground for armies and migrating peoples for time immemorial. Consequently, Slovaks have lived under foreign heel for at least a millennium—alternatively by Hungarians, Poles, Tatars, Austrians, Germans and, since 1945, the Soviets. With democracy sweeping the Iron Curtain before it, Czechoslovakia won independence in 1989 with its much-acclaimed (and peaceful) Velvet Revolution. The Velvet Divorce, also peaceful, came four years later when, in 2003, the Czechs and Slovaks each went their separate ways, forming respective republics.
Tectonic shifts in a nation’s political and economic fabric create openings for entrepreneurs and, sensing one in the making, England’s Ben Mekie sold his business in London and moved to Bratislava in 2002. The ancient capitol of 400,000 evokes the architectural glories of imperial Prague, but five decades of communism had kept it stunted, making the city fertile soil for a young man with a bit of money and dreams of growing a business. After a couple of years and several savvy purchases and sales in the Bratislava property market, Ben decided to combine his passion for fieldsports by starting a sporting agency called Shooting in Slovakia.
Ben, now 38, recounted his adventures with Slovakia’s birds as he drove us toward the border from Vienna’s airport, where I had landed the morning before our first day’s shoot. Flanking the Austrian roads were the bare fields of February and hills laced with hardwoods, but as we headed east the horizon widened as the hills receded and the fields became flatter and wider.
“Here’s the border,” Ben said as we zipped past a building that appeared to be an overgrown truck-weigh station.
“Where?”
“Back there,” Ben said. “Welcome to Slovakia.”
Gone were the gun towers and electrified fences strung with barbed wire I recalled from a long-ago visit to Czechoslovakia at the height of the Cold War. Back then we had sat for hours at a border crossing as stone-faced guards in jackboots rifled through our belongings and scrutinized passports. This day we didn’t even slow down.
The fields grew even larger as we entered Slovakia’s great plain of the Danube, with treelines only visible in the distance and barely a hedgerow in sight. Off to the north, framed by the sun, the Small Carpathians rose from the plain like a row of dull teeth. “This was the breadbasket of the Soviet empire,” Ben said. It was once home to the gray partridge. Wild partridge—acutely sensitive to their environment—are mostly gone now, populations wrecked by cover-shorn fields and the intensive nature of Soviet-style collective farming.
Shooting, however, remains popular in a nation that overall is still more than 60 percent forested or in agriculture. Big game includes red stag, mouflon, fallow deer and the ubiquitous wild boar; bird hunting centers on the bazant, or ring-necked pheasant—some wild but many reared on estates that specialize in driven shooting.
Slovakia’s driven-shooting traditions date to the time when its southern districts were ruled by Hungary. In the late 19th Century the region’s estates produced world-record bags. One day in 1892, 2,870 partridge were taken at Baron de Hirsch’s St. Johann estate; one day in 1909 at Count Karolyi’s Totmeg-yer estate a staggering 6,125 pheasants were bagged.
Our destination for the evening was the castle at Totmegyer, today known as Palarikovo—a sprawling Neoclassical-style hunting lodge for the Karolyi family since the 1730s. When the Karolyis were kicked out by the communists in 1945, the castle traded princes and counts for the premiers and potentates of the Evil Empire. Khrushchev and Brezhnev, among others, were guests and participants in the decidedly non-egalitarian sport of driven shooting. The castle’s antler-filled halls and capacious rooms would be our home between shoots on two estates over the next couple of days.
Today Eastern Europe enjoys the reputation for providing driven birds at low prices—at half the cost, or less, than in Britain. It is not uncommon for English Guns, however, to complain that not only are the prices low, but so too are the birds. Tall pheasants are now synonymous with good birds, and these days an arch-angel—a scorcher that crosses the line 40-plus-yards up—is regarded with the sort of esteem once reserved for the celestial spirit that bears that name.
Ben’s investigatory shoots five years ago confirmed that improvements had to be made if he were to attract clients from the discerning UK market. He found a business partner in Peter Oremusz, a talented, personable, young gamekeeper, and began stressing the importance of presenting quality birds to visiting Anglicsky Guns. Two summers ago Ben arranged visits to four prominent English shoots—including one at the Earl of Leicester’s famed Holkham estate and another at the royal estate at Sandringham—for a number of his Slovakian gamekeepers. The effect, according to Ben, has been dramatic: His keepers have learned British driving techniques to produce taller birds. “It’s a work in progress,” Ben said, “but we are well getting where we need to be to make British shooters happy and keep them coming back.”

After the morning’s opening ceremony, Thomas paced down the line that had assembled for the first drive of the day. Clad head to toe in loden, the keeper stopped at each Gun, removed his hat, bowed his head and extended a hand. “Guud luuk.” Behind me, loader Stanley still had my gun—his gun, actually, a Russian over/ under I was to borrow. Horns sounded, and the day was on.
I had drawn peg four, in the middle of the line that stretched up a clearing cut into a hillside. We were facing a stand of tall elms. Stanley unsheathed his gun, checked that the barrels were clear, loaded the gun and handed it to me. Just inside the firs to our back was a picker-up with a German wirehaired pointer sitting at heel—quietly quaking with excitement.
A silence descended on the forest at Pata. I peered up and down the line, saw figures looking intently into the woods and felt a frisson of expectation building in the air. The Gun to my right glanced down to me, gave a quick thumb’s up, and then returned to staring at the trees.
Nothing happened at first, except to my heart, which raced full throttle as minutes ticked by. I licked the corners of my lips, which were parched, and fiddled with the safety. Then, from the wood, came the distant tick-tick-tick of beaters’ sticks and unintelligible shouts. Soon came the drumming of wings, muffled at first by the trees but growing louder, and then the uncouth cackle of a cock pheasant.
The first bird emerged from the woods to my left—a cock climbing over the trees and cutting out the far corner, and as he reached full height he set his wings and began to glide, tail streaming like a knight’s pendant as he gathered speed. Far down the line I saw a slender set of barrels point skyward and swing briefly, and then there was a single puff of smoke. The bird seemed to crumple as if punched —both wings collapsed, the neck arched backward and the tail went askew, and only then came the sound of the shot as the cock began to fall.
My first bird surprised me—a hen not too high but curling in fast on locked wings—and two quick shots later she passed unscathed. Stanley smiled and clucked and shoved in two more cartridges. I picked up the second bird early through the branches and swung through hard overhead; it dropped with a thump into the firs behind. “Oooph!” Stanley said. The wirehair went for the retrieve. A few feathers hung in the air. Another bird came on, and then another.
Gunshots now began to crackle up and down the line. The pheasants came out steadily as singles, sometimes in bouquets of twos and threes but never in that maelstrom of wings that sends a massive flush of birds over the Guns at once—the hallmark of a duff drive. Some low birds passed through the line unsaluted, but the fate of the higher ones was mostly to fall like stones or slant to the ground in steep mortal dives. It was the first indication that I had been squadded with a team of good shots who took only good birds. And there were plenty to shoot at.
Then the horn sounded to end the drive, and our beaters emerged from the fringe of wood in front of us—an army of 30 or more Slovakian rustics clad in a mélange of loden, hunter orange and oddments of the Warsaw Pact. As in England, the pickers-up are often well-to-do compared to the beaters. Slovakia’s appeared no different. They looked every bit the proud Carpathian jaegers in their boiled-wool jackets with horn buttons. In contrast to Britain—where Labradors or spaniels are the dogs of choice—at their sides were German wirehairs and shorthairs, English pointers and setters, Cesky Fouseks, Griffons, Vizslas, Weimaraners, even a long-haired dachshund. And, yes, a Lab or two. Checking the loaders’ scorecards, they searched diligently for each and every bird. Ben noted that the obsession with numbers is a holdover from the days of Red bureaucracy. It certainly aided in retrieving downed game.
Thomas directed us to walk to the next drive. (In fact we walked to all of the remaining drives.) Imagine the estate as a clock, with the axis of its open valley running from 6 o’clock to 12, with imbricate woods climbing gentle slopes on either side or topping the crests of the hills.
We’d started the first drive at 3 o’clock; walked to 2 o’clock, to the base of tall woods, for the second drive; and then ambled counterclockwise through drives three and four toward the lodge for lunch. Awaiting us was a table groaning with urns of pheasant soup, pots of wild-boar goulash, sliced roast pork under melted cheese, and pastries—all accompanied by Slovakian reds and whites and toasted with home-grown peach and pear brandies of almost-lethal potency.
Libations and lunch over, Thomas and friends showed that they had saved the highest birds for after high noon. I took off a drive to man the Nikon but soon wished I hadn’t. We were at 8 o’clock on Pata’s clock face—above the lodge and to the left but just below the crest of a hill with high hardwoods up top. This layout produced the tallest birds of the day, birds that still were climbing as they cleared the trees before setting their wings to curl and drop on a keen breeze across the valley—precisely the sort of birds that get British Guns lathered up and hot beneath the collar. I watched as one otherwise-excellent shooter came unglued. At drive’s end he was red-faced; his scorecard read two for 28 shots.
The birds of the final drive proved my undoing. Stanley spoke little English, but he offered appreciative “Ooophs” when I connected and laughed with me when I missed. When I stopped laughing as my misses multiplied, he chortled on anyhow.
I flubbed the last two birds of the day. Then horns sounded a final time and I was left much where I’d started the day: peering intently into a wood with heart pounding and still wanting more.
More, fortunately, would come at the next day’s estate. First, though, we had a vyrad to visit—and a coronation to witness.
Afterward, as the bollocking of Barry began in earnest, someone remarked, “The King may not like his title—but he’s earned it.”

The Practical Stuff

Shooting in Slovakia offers a turnkey hunt. Clients are met at the Vienna airport and transported to and from the lodging and shoots. The standard package is three nights and two 200-bird-day shoots, with additional birds a la carte. Typically, there are seven drives per day. Given the ambience and splendor of Palarikovo Castle, and with Bratislava nearby, this is definitely a couples-friendly shoot. Currently, Ben Mekie offers shoots on six Slovakian estates and is working to add two more. The season runs from November 1 to the end of February.
Although I borrowed a gun, I was told that bringing your own (doubles only, please) is easy, assuming you have proper permits, which Mekie obtains. An alternative is to fly into Budapest, which is closer to a couple of the shoots in southern Slovakia. My impressions were that Mekie’s planning and logistics worked every bit as well as the birds flew—a very high-quality operation at reasonable prices. For more information, contact Shooting in Slovakia, 01144-2073-843-736 or -7812-600-454; www.shootinginslovakia.com. —V.V.

Vic Venters is Shooting Sportsman’s Senior Editor.