Beans to rape.

[muncher]

The now usual Friday call from the Mottster. I have a freshly drilled bean field that’s covered, we should be good tomorrow. We arranged to meet up at 9 o’clock at the said field. I arrived early as near this field, is a nice butchers that does lovely pies and sausage rolls and I couldn’t resist buying us one each before we started. I watched the field for a while and there was plenty down, but they were moving over the field at a rapid rate and this for me didn’t bode well. This to me said they weren’t finding any food to keep them there. Motty arrived and we watched as the pigeons departed and didn’t come back. We decided to have a drive around and check out other fresh drilling and then return to the field and see if we had just been too early. We went back around 10 o’clock and it was devoid of pigeons. I have a rape field that has had a lot of attention but just as they build up another shooter has a go and makes it hard to get much success on there. This was the only option reasonably local so we drove the 10 miles to the field and found several down feeding on a very well mown patch near an old copse. The wind was from our left so we had some dead birds from last weeks outing so we put them out and a single rotary. The first customers came quite soon and we had 5 down quite quickly, then it went very quiet and I started getting the feeling this would be hard work, but we said we’ll give a couple of hours and see.  After about 1 and 1/2 hours we had 12 , so now it was either stick or twist time, the other field was over 30 miles away and we would be going blind as we hadn’t scouted that area. So we decided to stick.  The flight started to increase with all the pigeons coming from in front some would decoy, others come to the trees and other swerve away presenting all the shots in the book. We would have a flurry of activity then long spells with not much happening, by 3 o’clock the flight line had dried up and we decided it was time to pack up, we picked 71 for a very respectable afternoon pigeon shooting.

 

 

 

 

[TIGHTCHOKE]

Well done, got to be where they want to be.   

[Krico woodcock]

Nice one . That's a dry looking field your on. Fields over here have only started to be ploughed,  drilled this week.  Ground still very wet in places.  

[marsh man]

Nice write up and again a respectable bag , when things go quite and you have got other options you start to think you can do better if you moved on , when you do move you then start to think you would had done better if you had stayed on the field you had first set up on , I think the 30 mile drive would had put me off , more so without checking it out in the first place , always handy in trying to build up a big area that is more or less within a short distance apart ,     THANKS for posting 

[Old Boggy]

Great write up and respectable bag.

Always good to know that others are finding the pigeons.

My area is devoid of them at the moment with no-one else shooting any, hence a call from my local game dealer requesting some, but sadly I couldn`t oblige.

Thanks for posting.

OB

[motty]

Nice report, Jules. 

It was a nice few hours. We shot some lovely birds, too.

Marshman, we have loads of farms to shoot, spread over Cambs and Norfolk. A lot of the farms I shoot are next door to each other, but some of the others are a bit further afield. I picked most of them up whilst seeing pigeon activity from different sites I work at. 

Moving can be a pain, especially when you haven't long been set up, but it can pay dividends. I am glad we stayed where we did, because I reckon we may have only got 20-40 on the other piece of rape I had in mind. I expect the rape to attract yet more interest in the next few weeks, along with some clover that I will be watching.