Standing wheat.

[Cranfield]

Today I sat and watched a steady stream of pigeons, dropping into the tractor tracks of standing green wheat.

The grain (in this area) is "milky" at the moment and hasn,t started to harden.

This is very attractive to them.

 

What suprised me, was that the wheat is standing tall.

I normally only check up on fields with laid crop.

It must be the grain they are after, as the ground is clean, no chickweed etc.

Unfortunately, I don,t have access to this field, but I will be looking at similar fields on "my" Farmers land with renewed interest.

[brooktrout]

Ive noticed myself that they go for the grain in any condition Cranfield. I used to think that only the hard grain was attractive to them, but I have watched them feed on the {milky} grain early in the year on fields on high ground where winds have laid the exposed outer edges. I have also watched them deliberately land on the half bent stalks of unripe corn on these outer edges as they alight.

[M ROBSON]

I have seen them do this too, a couple of years ago we had some really good sport at this time of year on a field of barley that was cut early and wrapped for silage. The farmer cut it with a silage cutter and left loads of it lying flattened, we had a few 100+ days. It was really milky, you could squash it easily in your fingers.