Pine Martin- I'm very keen to know what the rules are, there's an English chap near our village that owns quite a few hundred acres and fishing lakes. He had said a few times to bring the toys over but the one time I checked in advance to make sure t was still ok, we were out of season apparently and as the Chasse Guard lives next door he said not that time.
Some clarification ion would be great, thanks.
Dan.
Right, first thing: you cannot do any hunting whatsoever in France without a hunting licence/Permis de Chasser. It's a criminal offence. However, you can easily obtain a visitor's licence for the departement you're in for 3 or 9 days at a time, and I believe you can obtain three such licences a season. For this you need the details of your FAC which counts as your UK hunting license. You can generally do this online. I've done it twice this year. You will need insurance. If you're a BASC member, you're covered.
Now that's just like your fishing license, it gives you the right to hunt, but no access to hunting. It's the first hoop. And as with the UK, there are hunting seasons to be respected whether you're on public or private land. They can often vary from one region to another, and there will pretty much always be a "Plan de chasse" which is really a cull plan, with quotas for age, sex, species and so on. Again this changes from one area to another. Your local Guarde Chasse can help! These quotas are set by officials, not by private landowners. So your friend, even if he does have the hunting rights on his property, can't decide for example to wipe out all the deer. It's not up to him because wild animals belong to no-one until they are killed.
Finally, your friend may very well not own the sporting rights, or at least not exclusively. So he may well have the right to hunt on his land, probably as part of the local association (and in the North it's generally private), but probably not just for himself. So he may not be able to legally invite you.
Simplest solution is to ask at the local Mairie. They'll know how the land is divvied up. If he's a resident there, he needs to obtain a full Permis de Chasser. It's easy enough, a practical exam which is really about safety, and a multiple choice test on legislation, species, safety and so on. If you can do DSC1, you can do the Examen du Permis de Chasser.