All’s well that ends well
Geoff Garrod recounts a recent day that did not go quite to plan after an early surprise
Ihad great plans for a day’s shooting on a flightline between a field of rape and one of linseed – until I received a call from my wife that is. The pigeons were navigating their way along a power line, as they frequently do, so I planned to set out some decoys on a wheat field beside a stripped cover plot that had recently been a draw for the pigeons.
The chance of getting any birds to decoy was unlikely, but I hoped the pattern would tempt enough birds to do a fly-by to enable me to make a dent in their numbers. I wanted to be set up and ready to shoot for nine-ish, but Karen’s call soon put paid to that. On her way to work she’d spotted two fallow bucks in a nearby field that had managed to get themselves attached by the antlers to some netting. Even worse, they were near a busy road.
Only option
As the gamekeeper on the estate, these sorts of things are my job to sort out. The long and short of it was, after following the attached bucks around and moving them away from the road, it became very clear that no matter how hard they tried, they weren’t going to separate themselves. Sadly, there was only one option left to me.
I hoped that shooting one of the bucks with my rifle would allow me to cut the other one loose, but in the end the standing buck was just dragging the dead one around and didn’t offer me any chance of getting at the netting. By the time I’d gralloched the two beasts and hung them in the chiller, it was 11.30am. Not the start to the day I’d intended, but unavoidable.
Anyway, I finally arrived at the field and set up my hide with some fir tree cuttings as a background. By now it was midday. I’d taken the fir branches up to the location a few days earlier when I first spotted the opportunity and this gave the pigeons a couple of days to get used to the cuttings. I would have shot this location earlier and preferably the day before, with the wind holding the flightline firmly along the wires. But heavy rain for the previous two days made that impossible, so this was going to be the day.
The weather was set to be sunny with a slight breeze but the wind had swung round 90 degrees from a southerly to a westerly from when I did my reconnaissance. In a perfect world – and if I’d arrived when I wanted to – I’d have spent time watching the flightlines to see what difference the wind change had made, as I always instruct in my articles. I’d spent some time watching pigeons track along the wires the previous day but there was nothing in sight when I arrived. I had to give it my best guess and hope placing decoys out under the wires would pull birds close to the hide to get them in range.
Slow start
It was a very slow start and, worryingly, a flightline seemed to be developing further to my right. I could also see a large flock feeding on a rape field across the valley on the neighbouring estate too. It didn’t look good. The flightline was well out of range, but the odd bird did deviate up the hill to have a look at the decoy pattern, which was to the left of my hide and would have been under the day before’s flightline. Oh well …
I assumed the majority of the birds simply weren’t seeing the decoys. I didn’t have