The 200-pigeon hope that became 78 hard-won birds, and why a footpath and a pheasant pen decided it

A pigeon flightline watched for a week over a field of harvested beans looked good for a bag of more than 200 birds. On the day, a public footpath, a pheasant pen and a row of houses ruled the field out, the decoys were refused in hard sunshine, and the three Guns finished with 78 hard-won pigeons shot like driven birds from a willow-lined ditch. Writing in Sporting Gun, its managing editor Matt Kidd describes a day with the magazine’s guest editor Dan Thor on the Hertfordshire and Essex border that any keeper or farmer who shoots pigeons over crops will recognise: a day on which where you may safely and sensibly shoot decided the bag long before the birds did.

For the working countryside reader the interest is in the decisions rather than the numbers. Thor chose to give up the best field of the week rather than shoot beside a footpath, disturb a neighbouring pen or trouble the houses at the bottom of the ground. That is the calculation every shoot and every farm makes in September, and the piece sets it out in full.

What had Dan Thor found on the beans?

Thor, a tree surgeon who has spent most of his life pigeon shooting and holds around 20,000 acres of permission across some 10 farms, had watched the line build for about a week on a 2,000-acre family farm on the Hertfordshire and Essex border. The beans had been combined and the birds were on the spilled feed, some of them travelling three or four miles to reach it. He thought a bag of more than 200 was not out of the question, and by the end of the day the three reckoned they had watched more than 2,000 pigeons cross the surrounding countryside.

“Reconnaissance is the most important part because you can have all the right kit, but it means nothing if you are in the wrong place,” he told the magazine. “In a really good year I could be out every week and shoot between 50 and 100 pigeons each time.”

Why could the bean field not be shot?

Three things stood in the way, and Kidd sets them out plainly. A public footpath ran alongside the field; even with safe angles away from it, walkers might misread the shooting and call the police. A pheasant pen occupied part of the adjoining wood, and Thor wanted no disturbance there. And a row of terraced houses stood along the bottom edge of the field. He had notified the police that crop-protection shooting was taking place, but decided the residents should not be troubled. The beans, the best position of the week, were left alone.

“When you can see that many and do nothing to stop them, it drives you mad,” Thor told Sporting Gun. “They are totally fixed on the beans.”

Where did they set up instead?

The next best thing was a safe place under the flightline: a ditch lined with mature willows that split a 10-acre field from a 14-acre field of wheat stubble, with tall poplars at one end, a small plantation and a pond at the other and a café and farm shop to the right. The safe arcs of fire were forward and to the left only, and the line crossed through the willows. Hide poles went up wide enough to conceal three people, three guns, cameras and the tea-making kit, under a camouflage umbrella against the sun, with hawthorn cut from the hedgeline and stuck into the netting.

The weather was against them from the start: bright sunshine and barely 8mph of wind, nothing like the conditions Thor had planned around.

Why did the decoys fail?

Two rotary decoys went out to the right and about 20 Enforcer plastic decoys in a pattern to the front and left. The pigeons veered away from them as though repelled, Kidd writes, and carried straight on to the beans. Under shooting pressure the rotaries seemed to act as warning beacons, and the plastic birds looked shiny in the hard light. The rotaries were given about 15 minutes before they came in; the plastic pattern lasted half an hour longer, then it came in too. “We will never pull them off the beans to the decoys, so our best chance is to split up and shoot whatever comes within range like driven birds,” Thor told the magazine.

How did the driven approach work?

With the ground cleared, the three split up along the line. Thor pushed about 100m to the right and tucked into the hedge. Kidd and James Elliott, Thor’s friend and hide companion, stayed in the hide beneath the willow, Kidd taking anything crossing to the left, Elliott anything to the right and the two taking turns on whatever came through the middle, before Elliott moved out again to the base of the last willow, some 75m to the left of the hide. The pigeons began crossing in direct lines to the beans, the movement built into regular droves by 1pm, and the bag started to grow. With no wind and shots now coming from three separate positions, the birds spread wider and climbed higher as the afternoon went on, most of them 30 to 60 yards out, and there were no cheap shots. All three shot steel loads from Lyalvale Express.

They finished with 78 pigeons. “They were tough birds and we should probably have had more, but you cannot hit them all,” Thor told Sporting Gun. “Most were challenging birds from 30 yards out to 50 or 60. It was not the biggest bag, but it tested us and we all came away very happy.” Kidd writes that the figure mattered less than having secured a worthwhile result from a position chosen around safety, public access and the pheasants, and the three agreed that the repositioning, the range judgement and the committed shooting at wild birds had made the afternoon more testing than most driven pheasant or partridge days.

What does it mean for keepers and farmers who shoot?

Thor’s own verdict is the lesson most worth carrying to the next field of stubble. “Knowing what I know now, I would have started with three hides covering the line straight away,” he told the magazine, and he added that the bean stubble would only be his first choice again once the pheasant and public-access concerns were settled. For the keeper with a pen near a feeding field, and for the farmer shooting to protect a crop beside a footpath or a village edge, the piece is a worked example of getting the order right: notify the police, weigh the footpath, the pen and the houses first, and let the bag follow from wherever it is safe to stand. On the day that order may have cost 100 birds or more, and it produced the more satisfying shooting.