Travelling light to flight

The weather is atrocious and the ground’s a quagmire but the pigeon still need to be controlled, so Tom Payne goes flighting

- Tom Payne

Enough is enough. I had the eighth person come up to me in the pub asking: “When do you think we will be shooting over the spring drillings?” The ground in many counties is going to take a long time to dry enough so that you can get machinery on to it, let alone drill a crop.

It’s not making the pigeon shooting job easy. Many farms and estates won’t let me on due to the state of the ground and even if I could get somewhere in the area, the transfer of kit and birds becomes a headache in itself. I don’t mind a long walk across a field, but when it’s overground so wet, you could be looking at very long and tiring distances. Even using quad bikes and so on to get around has become impossible because of safety or tearing the ground up even further.

However, I’m not one to be beaten. As a form of crop protection and pigeon management, flighting birds is a tactic I increasingly employ. If you do your reconnaissance and know your fieldcraft and weather, flighting a good line is probably the most reliable form of pigeon shooting.

And it is the one form of the sport that needs the least kit. You can happily venture out into the woods with a gun and a pocketful of cartridges and make it a successful outing. For those uneducated in the art of flighting, it is basically putting yourself between the birds’ home and their feeding ground.

I constantly make the mistake of making it sound far too straightforward. Tactically it could be the trickiest because if you get it wrong or put yourself in the wrong place, you might as well settle down for a snooze. Even a few yards out could be curtains.

False lines