AIRBORNE INVASION

My heart sinks when the owner of one of my permissions tells me he’s “‘overrun” or “infested” with pests, because I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve turned up with plenty of pellets and spare air only to be left disappointed.

But when my mate Gareth, himself an experienced hunter and pest controller, invited me to one of his permissions to shoot a few crows telling me “you won’t have seen anything like it”, I was a little more confident.

Any lingering concern that he’d exaggerated the number of corvids disappeared the second I pulled into the farmyard and was met with swarms of crows, jackdaws and rooks. They were in the cattle sheds, on the