Shooting Times & Country – 17 July 2019

Pigeon control

The fi eld

of dreams

Every so often the gods smile on you and the

pigeons pour in — Patrick Galbraith heads

to Warwickshire where fl ocks of birds are

devouring an unlucky farmer’s barley

diff erent agricultural age, when

money could be made from small-

scale farming, but when I used to

stand behind it in August the only

thing I was thinking of was pigeons.

Every half an hour or so, a grey bird

would fl y low over the fi eld like a

grouse towards my old friend Charles

Osborne and me. At least that’s what

I thought grouse were like. It was

some time before I ever saw one.

One late summer’s day I drove

home in my Suzuki Jimny with a

total of nine pigeons in the footwell.

“Mum,” I announced when I walked

into our kitchen, “I’ve had a seriously

bi g d ay.”

Some weeks ago, I drove to

Warwickshire for a day of shooting

pigeons over barley. Rob Swift, who

I

’ve heard it said a number
of times that the average bag
achieved by pigeon shooters up
and down the country comes
in at a grand total of 12. There will
be people reading this who can’t
remember when they last chalked
up such a paltry score, but there was
a time in my life when the idea of
shooting 12 was a giddy fantasy.
In my teenage years, except for the
occasional foray to Perthshire, my
pigeon shooting was mostly limited to
south-west Scotland. About 10 miles
outside Dumfries there is a pretty
village called Moniaive and beyond
that up in the hills, near a thick wood,
there is a tumbledown dyke.
Looking back, I suppose that
J. ALEXANDERforgotten wall was a trace of a

16 • SHOOTING TIMES & COUNTRY MAGAZINE

farms in the area, thought we were

going to run into quite a few, so

I packed a whole bag of cartridges.

“Where are the rest of your squibs,”

asked Tom Payne, who was also with

us, as we were building the hide.

“I’ve got 100 in the bag,” I replied

cheerfully, “and just in case, I’ve got

a spare 50 in the car.”

Two hundred pigeons

Tom shook his head, lit another

cigarette and climbed into his smelly

Land Rover — he was shooting in a

fi eld up above us with Rob Swift.

My hide companion for the day was

Matt Taylor, a scrap metal dealer

from Hertfordshire, who told me

reassuringly he hadn’t cleaned

his Beretta in six months.

Pigeons were descending

on the fi eld in their dozens,

offering plenty of shooting