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Good bags have been fairly easy to come by in recent weeks. That is not to say that the groundwork has not been done - many hours of looking have proved their worth. I was really struggling with a decent looking opportunity to shoot anything this week. I'm sure I could have shot a few somewhere, but luckily Muncher stepped in with a reasonably promising looking field. The field in question was drilled with barley recently. It was attracting hordes of blacks and a few pigeons, too. I trusted my mate's judgement. We arrived at the field at around 8.30am yesterday and watched. There were plenty of blacks pouring in, and the odd pigeon around. We decided to set up a hide around a convenient bush. We had 9 dead pigeons and 1 jackdaw for decoys. We initially set up for crows, as we thought that would give us the best chance of sport. The farmer was also keen for us to make a dent in the black population. It was quite a slow start. The corvids seemed more wary than we had anticipated, with many peeling away just out of range. The hide was good, so it was a little strange. As we picked off a few, and the slain added, it became slightly easier. We were steadily building a decent bag of blacks, with a pigeon or two paying the price for getting too close. The crow flight started to die down, and more pigeons visited in the early afternoon. The decision was then made to completely alter the pattern to accommodate the pigeons. The black spread of birds was moved to the right, and the dead pigeons were placed in front of us, with the magnet spinning off to one side. This had the desired effect. We had to kill a lot of flighted pigeons, but some came into the decoys as good as we could have wanted. The odd blackie was still taken when the chance arose, but we were firmly concentrating on the woodies. Even when we were packing up at 5.15pm, we commented that we could well have shot more, as pigeons were still on the wing. We had to pack up sometime, though, and it had been a long day. We set the dogs to work to find the birds in the tall wheat behind. This helped to add a good few to the final tally, though i'm sure we didn't pick them all. A very rewarding day, we finished with 25 rooks, 9 jackdaws, 6 carrions and (unexpectedly) 73 pigeons.