Bog Myrtle & Peat

Having recently moved house (to a new place less than twenty minutes from the old), I have been doing a little research into my new neighbourhood. One of the most striking bonuses to the new house is the fact that it is now less than six miles to the Chayne, whereas before the twenty five mile trek was starting to get a little tiresome, but also, the new cottage is currently surrounded by standing seas of whispering cereal crops. I have never been in a better position to do some ‘pigeon decoying, and watching the surrounding fields from my office window, drifting shapes in the wind have been calling me out to shoot.

Everybody loves shooting ‘pigeons. There is something so soporific and comfortable about sitting by a stubble field on a hot summer’s day, picking off birds as they come in and dozing periodically with some monotonous test match buzzing away on a portable radio. Plastic decoys shimmer and wobble in the heat haze, and birds drop noisily in to join them. It almost seems a shame to take it seriously, but when you do really get into it, woodpigeons can be made to offer some of the most fantastic sport.

As soon as I received permission to shoot from the farmer, my neighbour, I set out for a recce. A quick walk around the three acre field revealed around a hundred ‘pigeons, two of which I bagged as they barged clumsily out from patches of flattened barley. High drystone walls surround the field, and two feet out from the wall, an electric fence is held in place by a series of stobs. There are no trees, hedges or natural cover to exploit, and tucking in at the bottom of the dyke is liable to leave you smarting with an electric shock. Despite a wholesale shortage of hide materials, I found that by crouching in one of the field’s furthest corners, I was out of direct sunlight and concealed from sight to some extent.

By a stroke of genius, I had left my decoys with a friend. Having been given strict instructions from the farmer that no birds should fall into his standing barley, my methods were therefore extremely restricted. I could only shoot from my stony corner when birds came up behind me, so I turned the walls into a miniature grouse butt, squatting beneath them and emerging to blast away at the birds as they tucked in their wings and twisted like bobsleighs down into the crop.

Nobody can possibly argue that ‘pigeons do not make for thrilling shooting. They can turn on a sixpence and a slow moving bird, if missed with the first barrel, will explode into a frantic state of shot baffling activity. Second barrels are speculative at best. After a couple of hours, eight birds lay out behind me to act as decoys for others, but the shadows were stretching and the moorland above me had begun to take on a golden glow. The day was clearly over, and as I walked the hundred yards back to my new house, I couldn’t help feeling unbelievably lucky to have woodpigeon on the doorstep.