When birds banquet over the boundary
“You should have been here yesterday.” It’s an all-too-familiar phrase which, for anyone with a fondness for shooting and fishing, never loses its sting no matter how often you hear it.
The yesterday in question was the day a farmer friend had called me to say a field of recently drilled peas was carpeted with pigeons and crows. Unfortunately for me, I was bogged down with work and couldn’t move with the speed which is usually required to exploit the brief but often very fruitful opportunities that can present themselves to decoyers at this time of year.
Arriving the day after my friend’s tip-off, things looked rather different from the scene he had described. Most of the birds that had been ignoring his bangers for the past
