freshley cut fields

[chris o]

hi all. was having some brilliant days shooting bout three to four weeks ago on my permission with resonably large bags averaging up to 30 birds in two and a half hour on one day. the farmer has just cut his fields and two of the fields have been bailed and there is the odd bird coming into the fields but how long does it take before they will start hitting the barley really hard? any advice?

[MerseaDavid]

I have not seen any birds on our Barley this year.

 

there was hardly any grain left on the fields for the birds to eat.

 

Quite often as soon as the combine has cut a strip the birds are coming in, but I would normally leave the field a couple of days before shooting it. The best way to find out is to keep going down to the field and see what the birds are doing

[Cushat]

THey probably won't hit barley stubble "hard". There's so mcuh feed for them to chose at the minute (and even such a large amount of barley stubble). Plus modern kit leaves very little grain behind for them to feed on so they don't tend to build up in large numbers in any one area of stubble.

[M ROBSON]

We get large bags on winter barley in July when they are wind blown and then the first fields to be cut in my area. Once the Rape has been sprayed off and is ripe they change over to that and very few birds will look at Barley stubbles.

 

Cheers,

Mark.

 

This summers running total - 2509 woodies