JDog Posted November 22, 2012 Report Share Posted November 22, 2012 (edited) I posted yesterday that I thought that pigeons would be hungry after two days of torrential rain had interrupted their feeding pattern and I went out today to see if that was anywhere near correct. My default farm, where I can almost always find a flight line, still had five fields of stubble down when I looked yesterday but horror of horrors when I got there this morning there were four muck spreaders in covering the fields with manure. To say I was disappointed is an understatement. I am not good at shooting over winter rape I freely admit. Last year I had some very poor bags for a lot of effort but it seemed that my only chance of a day's decoying was over another farm four miles away where I had seen pigeons feeding a few days earlier, so off I went. Today has been a very windy day and it was especially windy on the escarpment edge where I found a few birds which were flighting from two different directions into a sheltered piece of one of the rape fields. It was a long drag to where I wanted to be so I minimised the kit I had to carry. Even so I was half dead when I found my position which was in a thin strip of wood along which the birds had been flighting. The wind blew my first effort at a hide down so I had to get serious and take my time building it for the second time. The rotary was unstable immediately so I had to bring it into a sheltered spot much closer in to my hide than I would normally place it. I had two dead birds for the rotary and four others which I put out on spikes. Plastic decoys would have been blown across into the next parish. I was set up by 11 and birds came confidently into the wind from my right and I began shooting them at about 30m. They were not easy as they were bouncing on the wind. The ones which came from my left down wind were especially tricky and I did not fare particularly well on those. Interestingly if I left the ones from my left without firing a shot at them they rarely curled back into the decoys. I had taken 150 cartridges with me at the start and I ran out by 1pm. The long trek back to the car for the remaining 100 cartridges was well worth it because by the time I packed up at 3pm I had fired the lot. I finished picking up in the dark and made several trips back to the car with my kit and bags of pigeons. The final tally was 93 pigeons and I have to confess that out of the many hundreds of days I have had out pigeon shooting this would rank as one of the very best, not because of the bag size but due to the fact that the pigeons were very difficult in the strong wind. Edited November 22, 2012 by JDog Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bevs Posted November 22, 2012 Report Share Posted November 22, 2012 sounds like you had a good day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paddywack12 Posted November 22, 2012 Report Share Posted November 22, 2012 Well done mate. Sounds like a great day out Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dolphin Posted November 22, 2012 Report Share Posted November 22, 2012 very good bag mate well shot atb dolphin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Topgunners Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Putting in the effort , reaped the rewards. Nice one. Dave K Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cranfield Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 You certainly made the long walk worth it, that was a very busy day. . High winds can be a nuisance, but there is a lot of satisfaction in pulling off some long, difficult shots. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ears Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Sounds like a job well done. keep up the good work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pigeon controller Posted November 23, 2012 Report Share Posted November 23, 2012 Well done, good result. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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