Bog Myrtle & Peat

Crows become extremely territorial during the breeding season. They attack buzzards or sparrowhawks when they come too near their nest at this time of the year, and sometimes those aerial skirmishes can be a thrilling sight. Buzzards allow the marauding crows to come in extremely close, flicking their thick wings at the last moment to dodge a peck, while a sparrowhawk will speed close to the ground like a damaged spitfire making for the white cliffs. My old friend Joe Irving, a former author and professional gundog trainer tells a tremendous story about how he once saw a buzzard that turned the tables on a territorial crow by crushing its head and killing it in mid flight.

Asking Joe for advice on controlling crows, he explained that the best way to outwit any wild animal is to turn its own natural behaviour against it. Only through a thorough knowledge of vermin behaviour can the would-be keeper hope to turn the tables on pests and troublemakers. Various decoys are available on the sporting market for drawing crows into aggressive displays which the keeper can exploit, and a popular plastic model of an eagle owl is used up and down the country for this very purpose. Setting out the owl in a prominent spot near a crow’s nest before daylight is always sure to provoke some kind of reaction when the birds wake up and discover a dangerous intruder in their midst, and it then simply becomes a matter of picking them off with a shotgun.

This technique relies on the crow recognising the eagle owl as a threat, but since these beautiful birds of prey are not indigenous to Britain, this is not always reliable. Peregrine decoys are also available from various gamekeeping suppliers online, but wanting to save a few pounds, I decided to make my own. A pair of peregrine falcons is resident throughout the year on the Chayne, and while I have never seen it happen, I am assured that they regularly kill crows. I began to design my own decoy in the hope that a home-grown predator might give me an added edge.

After an hour and a half of increasingly frustrating labour, I finished work on my prototype. “Duncan” is not your average predator decoy. Built from a gin bottle, half a can of Irn Bru and most of a box of sugar puffs, he is not the most convincing falcon I have ever seen, but after a test run in my garden, I think that he will serve admirably. All the garden birds immediately vanished, and a magpie perched on a blackthorn tree nearby to pour a torrent of abuse down upon him. Duncan was built to give the appearance of a mantling bird, covering a fresh kill with his tail and wings. The addition of a dead bird at his feet should give even the most cautious and wily crow the added inflammatory push to come closer and investigate….