The first feathers

Shooting in snow doesn’t always work, but Tom Payne enjoys a terrific afternoon on pigeon

- Tom Payne

I’ve managed a few outings and a bit of roost shooting but otherwise it has been a quiet winter. Thanks to Mother Nature, there’s been wild food everywhere, which has kept the destructive rural pest off the crops and out of harm’s way. There was a good beech mast this year which kept the pigeon occupied for a bit. Then the acorns dragged on and lately I’ve been seeing pigeon devouring ivy berries, but the numbers have been sparse and I do wonder if we may have lost a population of birds to France. Perhaps they are down there in those vast oak forests. It’s speculation but I think there might be truth in the theory that due to a lack of winter rape as a holding crop and major food source through the tough months, they start to cross the Channel.

The lack of rape has been compounded by reduced game cover — due to severely wet weather rotting any goodness in the maize. Since the snow in early to mid-January in the bottom half of the UK, I have seen the few birds that are around switch on to what little rape there is.

There is another theory that you can kill hundreds of pigeon in the snow, and every year I hear people say things like “clear a patch on a rape crop and birds pile in”. Sadly this is not the case. In thick snow birds will not move. They become snow blind, with all of their land features disappearing, making navigation to a food source very difficult. In a light dusting of snow, or when it melts to reveal the landscape again, their normal behaviour returns.

Surprising bag