Taking it on the chin

High winds add spice to an afternoon in a beech and fir wood, where Tom Payne gets his eye in

- Tom Payne

My great friend, Alex Keeble, who writes the Gamekeeper column for Shooting Times is blessed with classic old beech woods. Ever since I first visited him on the estate he works on, the huge tall spinneys dotted around the rolling country have never been far from my mind. Regular readers may remember a feature last year when we had a real red-letter day at Alex’s due to a hefty beech mast crop. Once again this year the woodland floor lay thick with mast and, as a result, Alex’s spot was like a sweet shop full to bursting with children who have been released after lockdown. When pigeon find beechmast they can become addicted to it; obsessed to a level of greed.

This can come back to bite them as they gorge themselves on it. I believe that when pigeon gorge like this on rough-shelled foods they can actually damage and tear their crops. This makes them vulnerable to the bacterial infection of canker, which is common when the wild harvest of acorns and beechmast is heavy.

There would have been at the peak upwards of 15,000 pigeon on the estate from November of last year to late January. We missed it by about two weeks but we still got close to the 200 mark in gale-force winds.

It was a Sunday morning in March — before the countrywide lockdown due to COVID-19 — and I was sorting out pigeon kit when the phone rang: Alex had pigeon on his patch, though nowhere near what we had last year. But he invited a couple of my friends and me to join a small team he’d put together for a good afternoon flighting and roosting.

Wrong track