Pigeons and hard winters.

[Guvnor68]

I was talking to my uncle today looking for shooting permission and he said to me that during the late 60s when we had the cold nights and the snow that the pigeon numbers fell off after the hard winters and the pigeon numbers are not what they should be. Back then he said there were pigeons everywhere you went i dont remember this as it was before my time but i do remember the winters of the 70s/80s and he said they were much worse than that. Can anyone remember what it was like for pigeon shooting in the 60s/70s and was it as bad as my uncle said it was. Thanks .. Steve.

[Yellow Bear]

I started pigeon shooting properly in the late 60s after I moved inland to Surrey from the coast after leaving school. The best memories, which are those you remember best, are of fields of kale and other brasicas under snow but grey with birds, hides made from old bed sheets, and bags of 100 plus for a day. Also shooting over stubble in late August with bags of 600 and more for 3 guns. Had to stop when I moved on again in the late 70s to the north west and family and finance put a damper on things, but even by then things were slowing down.

These days I don't really have the time to do it properly so I have put things on hold 'till retirement in a year or so, but I have noticed in my travels the numbers I see seem nowhere as large.

 

YB

[mossy835]

there were a lot more back in the 70s,we had good bags of pigeons when i worked on a big estate the numbers have gone down a lot and the big bags are not what they used to be,there are not that many about here now, same as last year they seemed to have gone and not come back.the old days were the best,i dont think things will be the same again, when i used to drill wheat you had some left on the top, now with drills now a days, it is drilled deeper.and not much on top,

Edited November 7, 2012 by mossy835

[mudpatten]

Some of the winters in the 70`s were notable for the amount of snow that fell but,although it laid for a long time air temperatures frquently rose to tolerable levels.It was the winter of 1963 that was one of the harshest on record. Not only did the temperatures fall but they stayed desperately low for weeks on end.

 

Many bird species suffered spectacular losses with the population of some birds such as the kingfisher being damaged to the extent that they took decades to recover.

 

Wigeon, brent geese and myriad small waders could be picked up from the shoreline mud where there feet had frozen to it and pigeon just fell from the trees, killed by the cold and the lack of availability of food.

 

Pigeon shooting back in `63 became pointless, as did wildfowling because the birds were in such poor condition as to have absolutely no meat on them whatsoever.

 

BTO bird counts suggest that the wood pigeon is at least as numerous, possibly more numerous, than it has ever been.

 

Woodies seem to respond very much to agricultural change,especially when it suits them. On a historical note, there is always the temptation to believe that birds were always more numerous in the past. Colonel Hawker, who kept a diary of his shooting between the early and mid 1800`s shot shed loads of partridge, pheseant and wildfowl, but only ever shot a handful of wood pigeon. They simple were`nt about then in such numbers as today.

[mudpatten]

With respect to some of the contributors who posted whilst I was writing.I know what you mean about pigeon shooting over fields covered in spilt seed to which the birds kept returning day after day simply because of the sheer quantity left exposed by inferior drill technology.

 

I`m not entirely sure that there were actually more about, just that today they have to be far more opportunistic and may well be here today and gone tommorrow, moving quickly from one feeding opportunity to the next.

 

I`ve seen some recent winter gatherings of pigeon, useless for shooting, but bigger than any I`ve seen in over 45 years.