Unlucky horseshoe — if you're a pigeon

Woodies are hammering crops at a time when British food production is vital and inspiration from Archie Coats means there are some pigeon breasts for the neighbours

- SIMON GARNHAM

The critical importance of domestic food security has been highlighted starkly over the past weeks. As supermarkets have run short of staple foodstuffs under pressure from panic-buying consumers, the significance of the 2020 UK harvest should be plain for all to see.

The Government has certainly noted it. The irony of farmers’ rapid elevation from “unskilled workers” in the Government’s post-Brexit immigration list, to “key workers” in response to the coronavirus pandemic has not been lost on the agricultural community. In crisis, food production and food producers are back where they ought to be in national planning: front and centre.

Spring is a vital and busy time for the process of growing successful crops. The recent run of dry weather has provided a blessed respite from an exceptionally wet winter. My neighbour Jim had planned to grow 40 acres of winter wheat. But the British weather had other ideas so it had to become spring barley. It was drilled early the previous week.

Jim dropped me a line asking me to keep an eye on it and on Friday I noted at least 100 pigeon and similar numbers of crows and rooks feeding in the midday sun. I didn’t wait for numbers to build and set up the following morning.

Jim’s land is criss-crossed by footpaths and is visible from a busy B road, so he is reluctant to use gas guns and he finds “scary birds” have a habit of flying away in the boots of cars of unscrupulous passers-by — hence why he likes the old-fashioned method of pest control.