a great day out on the rape

stubby · January 22, 2010

a good mate chris had kindly invited me to one of his new permissions for a morning on the woodies, we'd been out a couple of times before, but in the colder spells and it was way too cold, blue finger type of days, anyhow chris had taken a day off work, and as Im a night worker, the plan was to finish as early as possible (3am) go home, change and grab my gear and go straight to chris's house, thus missing the early rush hour traffic, and grab a couple of hours zzzzz's on his couch, well at 2am it started pee'ing it down, and it carried on until just after 7am, by this time we were sitting in the jeep, in a field, so we grabbed the gear and heading for the straw bale hide situation in the middle of a rape field that had been well hit by the woodies, set up the magnet with hypa-flaps and layed the decoy's out, within minutes of setting up we had a flock come down, I took one shot and bagged two

the rain held off for most of the morning, and we had a very exciting few hours, once we had a couple of woodies in the bag, we used these to replace the hypa flaps, and I reckon this really pulled the birds in, you could see them spot the deeks and turn and come down into the pattern, it was my first busy shoot with the hatsan, yes I can understand those that dont like the button that needs pushing when re-loading, but with two of us shooting, taking it in turns, it never became a problem, not once did it jam either

we ended the day with 19 birds, not a large bag, but the best so far, a very enjoyable day with good company and some birds for the freezer,