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October 1st Corvid bashing


steve_b_wales
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My good mate Mark, 'the poacher' and myself decided to try a local farm today, after I spoke with the farmer yesterday and he said that there were '100's' of birds up there. The farmer does tend to exaggerate a bit, so we did'nt expect to see a lot. But we were wrong, because there were 100's there, although many of the birds were almost a mile away in a different field.


We set up, and by 7 am were ready to go. We put approx 15 Crow decoys out, a rota with Hyperflap Crow decoys on it, a floater with a dead Crow (kept from our last shoot) and a flapper with a dead Jackdaw on it, again kept from last time.I also placed two floater Crow decoys that I had off Paul Hart, and these helped pull in the birds from a good distance away.The birds came into our decoys almost straight away, but both Mark and I missed them. They were very close to be honest, and we think that the pellets from our cartridges hadn't had chance to open up. That's our excuse anyway. :whistling:


Birds (all Jackdaw's) were coming in to the decoys in 5's and 6's, and we shot a few of them each time. We put the dead ones out with the decoys, and propped them up using green cane sticks, inserted from the back end into the head. This has proved successful every time. The weather changed after an hour or two, and we had a low mist coming over the fields. Although we got slightly damp, it didn't stop us from shooting. We had a few lulls, but the birds (again Jackdaw's) came into range many times. I managed to shoot one solitary Crow, that came over the hedge behind where we had set up, and it paid the price. Both Mark and I had some very testing shots, as the birds twisted and swooped fast because of the wind.


After six and a half hours, and with the bad weather closing in fast, we decided to call it a day. We ended up with 43 birds, but picked up 39 Jackdaws and the 1 Crow. All in all, we were pleased with the result, as we had to work hard getting the birds into range. My Primos caller proved successful again, as did the Hyperflap decoys on the rota and the large Crow decoys from Paul Hart. As we were packing up, we could see a few 100 birds on the top field, and we plan to tackle them another time. My thanks as always goes to Mark, who pulled off some really good shots.We had a great laugh and a very enjoyable day.


The photo's show (in no particular order) the decoys, the view from our hide, the mix of decoy and dead birds on the ground, the end result of our shooting, and my hide net, which is made by CamoReal. This net is brilliant, and always seems to blend in to whatever background we put it against, even dry stone walls.


A.JPGB.JPGF.JPGG.JPGE.JPGP1000858.JPGH.JPG


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