Pulling in the birds

After running out of luck with whirlers and flappers, Blue Zulu goes back to decoying basics and ponders on recycling his claret bottles

- Blue Zulu

My first set of pigeon decoys were homemade. The kitty didn’t stretch to the fancy, rubber, inflatable ones, which were pretty much the only commercially made option available. Mine were fashioned from cartridge paper, cut into pigeon profile, stapled at the bottom and painted with poster paints. They didn’t shine and could only be used if the weather and ground were dry. But they did pull in the pigeons, as did those formed from grey, plastic gutter pipes made by friends with better DIY skills.

Today, I have a sack of modern, flock-covered decoys that I dutifully throw into the back of the Suzuki Jimny because that’s what you do. Their profile is excellent but I judged the colouring incorrect, so I trotted off to the local Homebase with a dead pigeon and asked them to run up some paint that was an exact match. The shop assistant was too polite to say ‘weirdo’, but I saw it in her eyes.

A bloke in the hedge 

I wish I hadn’t bothered. Now I think they’re too light, but then real pigeons en masse can look pale or dark depending on how the light catches them. Whatever the reason, they don’t work, and worse, I suspect they actually signal to the pidge, “Don’t come anywhere near here as there’s a bloke in the hedge with a gun.”

Even so, I always take them because I’ve read Archie Coats’ books too many times and always hope that one day the pigeons will be ‘suicidal’ and just pour into my decoy pattern regardless.