For love, not money
When I was a boy — which is starting to feel like a rather long time ago now — pigeons were relatively predictable. Barley was harvested in mid to late August and pigeons went mad for the grain that was left among the stubble. In recent years, though, with the weather getting increasingly warmer, harvest often begins as early as late July.
For all that pigeons love barley stubble, there is something they go even wilder for, which is wheat in its early stages of development when it’s all milky. If you’d told me when I was young that barley stubble would often be devoid of pigeons in the decades to come, I’d have thought you were mad, but it’s happened a lot over the past few years. When the combines start rolling on the barley, the wheat still has a long way to go and the pigeons are gorging themselves on its milky goodness.
