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Worst January Ever


pigeon controller
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Following an Econversation  with  old'un I decided the count up my results for this January and for four outings the results are as follows 63,42,9and 25. So 139 birds in a month, that is the worst in thirty plus years of shooting pigeons. The main reason is my" Banker " farms which have good woods around them and allways hold good pigeon stocks  in the winter are devoid of rape this year some have ploughed it in others have pigeons around but in small numbers and other shooters. I have no farms  which I'm the only shooter,  so you try to rest the flock for a week and shoot another farm and it gets shot in your absence. This is the nature of the sport and we will have to find methods to deliver birds to our decoys.

With the demise of the rape crops we will have to return to other winter crops like Brassicas, turnips and potatoes etc.The end of the game season will give us the cover crops to shoot over untill they are exhausted.

With a little more warmer weather we may have some drillings and clover to look forward to but with modern seed drills and direct drilling nothing is left to feed on.

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After this coming Saturday you will find the regular Pigeon shooters will be back into Pigeon mode , at the moment a lot of land is still tied up with any late game shoots and that include game covers , at the moment we have got Pigeons but no big numbers , we will soon find out how many Pigeons we have got when the roost shooting start next Saturday week and the first week normally have the most guns covering the maximum amount of woods .

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Seems very strange this year that on top of the lack of winter rape crops, there has been reports elsewhere on the internet of pigeons having beechmast and acorns in their crops. Which seems bizzare for late January. I have seen pigeons on clover in parks and playing fields since Christmas, but no big concentration of birds anywhere round here.

As marshman says it will interesting to see what the roost shooting will bring.

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as marshman says ...wait until the game season has ended............we still have normal cropping in the cantley area rape and such like no big flocks but "collections" of birds 15-20 flitting about.............

at the end of the game season when the covers are slashed then i think we will start seeing some action............its just been too mild for flocks to desend on a single food source..

there is a story in the media about an owl that was rescued from a ditch ...it couldnt fly and was thought to have been hit by a car.....anyway it turned out that it was grossly overweight......!!!!!....it has been realesed now after a few days and a diet and is able to fly properly..........

i wish my pigeons were like that ...i might be able to hit a few.....

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58 minutes ago, aga man said:

Seems very strange this year that on top of the lack of winter rape crops, there has been reports elsewhere on the internet of pigeons having beechmast and acorns in their crops. Which seems bizzare for late January. I have seen pigeons on clover in parks and playing fields since Christmas, but no big concentration of birds anywhere round here.

As marshman says it will interesting to see what the roost shooting will bring.

I know it don't mean much , but we have been in some good roosting woods since Christmas doing the last two drives after dinner and to be honest we have seen very little activity to get excited about .

We have got a few healthy fields of Rape with gas guns just standing there waiting to be switched on , at the moment there are not enough pigeons to warrant wasting the gas .

We say it each year that there don't seem to be the numbers about and yet during the Summer months we get a lot of reports about decent numbers being shot .

The difference from other years is P C reporting this was the worst January ever as far as Pigeon shooting goes , alright he might not have the quantity of good rape fields but he have got a vast amount of experience to know where they are likely to be when not relying on rape for there main diet .

Like I said earlier , we will soon find out when the first week of roost shooting starts , but again that will only be local to us and things might be very different in other locations .

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Not that I'm bored or anything but just resting after a morning in my daughters garden and lunch I decided the check some previous January figures as follows:-

January 2020  4 sessions 139 birds

January 2019  9 sessions 652 birds

January 2018  4 sessions 310  birds

so it appears I'm loosing the knack!!!!

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39 minutes ago, pigeon controller said:

Not that I'm bored or anything but just resting after a morning in my daughters garden and lunch I decided the check some previous January figures as follows:-

January 2020  4 sessions 139 birds

January 2019  9 sessions 652 birds

January 2018  4 sessions 310  birds

so it appears I'm loosing the knack!!!!

I wouldn't say your loosing the knack , it might well be another one of these age things and you are finding shooting Pigeons in January is not so appealing as it once was , I know since I turned three score year and ten some of the keeness is beginning to wane a bit being out in the cold damp weather , I accept going wild fowling and being involved in game shooting is a winter occupation and you take the weather in it's stride , that's not to say I enjoy being out on the cold wet days but we cant alter the dates due to the weather conditions and it is all part of the package , but if I say I will be there , then the weather isn't going to stop me and up to now I haven't missed a day on the two shoots I go on , all I can say , roll on the warmer months , far more enjoyable for shooting Pigeons .

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13 minutes ago, marsh man said:

I wouldn't say your loosing the knack , it might well be another one of these age things and you are finding shooting Pigeons in January is not so appealing as it once was , I know since I turned three score year and ten some of the keeness is beginning to wane a bit being out in the cold damp weather , I accept going wild fowling and being involved in game shooting is a winter occupation and you take the weather in it's stride , that's not to say I enjoy being out on the cold wet days but we cant alter the dates due to the weather conditions and it is all part of the package , but if I say I will be there , then the weather isn't going to stop me and up to now I haven't missed a day on the two shoots I go on , all I can say , roll on the warmer months , far more enjoyable for shooting Pigeons .

hello, i agree MM as i am the same age, but i did go out yesterday and it was sunny/breezy/ not to cold , what i call a pleasant January day

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33 minutes ago, marsh man said:

I wouldn't say your loosing the knack , it might well be another one of these age things and you are finding shooting Pigeons in January is not so appealing as it once was , I know since I turned three score year and ten some of the keeness is beginning to wane a bit being out in the cold damp weather , I accept going wild fowling and being involved in game shooting is a winter occupation and you take the weather in it's stride , that's not to say I enjoy being out on the cold wet days but we cant alter the dates due to the weather conditions and it is all part of the package , but if I say I will be there , then the weather isn't going to stop me and up to now I haven't missed a day on the two shoots I go on , all I can say , roll on the warmer months , far more enjoyable for shooting Pigeons .

No, the pigeons are just not in this area, most of the rape this year as either failed or is poor, nothing to hold any numbers, out yesterday for 3 hours and the only pigeons (about 30) I seen were on a grass field, best is the grass field was next to one of the best rape fields around here but not a bird on it.

You cant shoot what ain’t there.

Edited by old'un
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2 hours ago, pigeon controller said:

Not that I'm bored or anything but just resting after a morning in my daughters garden and lunch I decided the check some previous January figures as follows:-

January 2020  4 sessions 139 birds

January 2019  9 sessions 652 birds

January 2018  4 sessions 310  birds

so it appears I'm loosing the knack!!!!

knowing your liking for chinese takeaways ...you have proberly picked up sum sort of virus..........

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This is what I have seen this year on one of my farms (a banker as PC calls them), last year the farm sowed around 60 acres of rape, the fields were next to a 30 acre wood, there was a resident flock in the area of around two thousand birds and I had a few decent decoying days and also flighting them coming to the fields along the wood.

Same farm this year 2019-2020, 60 plus acres sown, around 40 acres failed (flea beetle) rough estimate on numbers before Christmas around 150-200 birds, had a few reasonable days before Christmas averaging 20-30 birds killed, then virtually nothing, 20-30 birds sat in the trees, no flight lines, one shot and they were gone, driving around a reasonable area for 3-4 hours looking at fields that were poor with patches of failed rape and the good bits around two inches high, I seen the same thing, very few birds and very little movement, there is not the numbers in the area that there were last year, why? Could be the amount of failed rape (little to hold them) could be the mild wet winter or could even be pigeons are dying from something, who knows.

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