A very different field

A lot has changed since Archie Coats’ heyday, but one thing remains constant — the threat to crops posed by pigeons, says Tom Payne

- Tom Payne

As I turned the pages in Archie Coats’ book, Pigeon Shooting, I came across the phrase ‘rabbit clearance society pigeon poking programme’ — quite a mouthful and certainly something you wouldn’t hear in the 21st century. However, it got me thinking about how things have changed for the modern Gun.

Archie’s book is regarded by many as the pigeon-shooting bible. The tactics Archie used have become the basic skills for all pigeon shooting and the phrases he coined are still used as part of the pigeon shooter’s idiolect.

Old Shooting Times articles and books such as Archie’s are the only forms of literature that offer an insight into pigeon shooting back in the 1940s and explore how things have changed over the past 75 years. Though there have been many changes throughout that time, the effects have been both positive and negative for pigeon populations and the shooting there of.

Habitats and breeding were affected by the cutting down of large areas of woodland to support the war efforts in the 1910s and early 1940s. At the time, there would have been an immediate effect on the rural populations of woodpigeons, with the removal of large blocks of woodland, but the recovery of those populations was swift. The planting of young fir woods provided superb habitats if they were mixed in with hardwoods, such as oak and beech. Certainly, the modern forestry methods of the time really helped improve habitats for the woodpigeon. Indeed, in Archie’s day, there was a big shift in agriculture, with a swing away from livestock and towards arable farming. This improved pigeon numbers and made certain counties pigeon ‘hotspots’.

“The introduction of winter rape was transformative”

Ever adapting