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Bumper day on beet tops.


motty
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I had a disappointing day on a freshly harvested beet field last week. The rain showers were frequent and the birds were reluctant to decoy most of the time. The final score was 36.

On Friday i checked the field again twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In the morning, only a handful of birds were around whereas in the afternoon there was getting on for a thousand munching away. I stayed to watch the incoming pigeons- there were plenty more. It seems like the flocks are starting to break, so i was hopeful of a better bag this weekend. I have shot a fair few hundred bags on this particular field in the past 4 or 5 years, so i was confident that we could get a decent bag today.

So yesterday morning, my friend carl and i were set up at first light with a hide around one of the trees in the middle of the field.We chose to set up so that the wind was coming from our left. It was quite breezy and it was nice and dry. We were using 2 magnets, 20 flocked shells and around 15 dead birds on cradles. The set up looked good.

It started fairly slowly, but the birds that were around decoyed confidently and were subsequently shot. This was a different story to last week. We were shooting quite well and the scoreboard kept ticking over. By around 10 o'clock we had beaten last weeks total.

At around 11.30 i went for a quick drive around to see where the birds could be. I looked on the neighbouring farm's cover strips and found nothing. I did find around 2000 sitting around the woods about 1/2 a mile away from where we were set up.

I got back to the hide to find carl had shot another 9 in my short absence. From this point on we got a bit busier. There was a lull again at around 2pm, and we were strugglng to get over the 100 mark. This was soon passed though and then the action started to really hot up. A flightline started from the woods i mentioned earlier, and there was a steady stream of birds.They found it hard to resist the pattern of now over 100 decoys. It was a case of reloading as fast as we could at times, as there always seemed to be birds ready to drop in.

In the end, we knew we wouldn't make 200, as the flight had completely dried up, but were happy to pack up at 4pm with a bag of 194.

Edited by motty
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