Two of my regular pigeon shooters are Christian and Soren from Denmark. These guys often come to the UK to shoot wood pigeon during early summer. It seems to fit in well with their numerous hunting trips around the world. Both are successful businessmen and both love their shooting trips.
Sometimes when shooting good numbers of woodies I would love to see bags of enthusiasm from them but I have learnt not to expect too much from the Danes, they are very laid back.
If it's not going so well Christian will soon let you know about it, but when it's going well and the birds are decoying well, It's just "OK!"
On one of their visits a couple of summers ago we had been having good success on clover fields, the clover being drilled into grazing meadows for organic dairy heards. The pigeons go crazy for the clover during April to June and this coincided with the two Danes trip to Norfolk for woodie shooting.
Not bad at all!
I had ear-marked one such grazing meadow for Christian & Soren as it had been a favourite restaurant for large numbers of woodies over the previous few days.
The guys wanted to share a hide on this particular day and that was good for me as this meadow of perhaps 20 acres had a small wood at one end of the field which would accommodate a double hide very well.
"I returned to the field to view an unbelievable number of dead birds laying amongst the decoys and far beyond."
Having erected the hide, set the decoy pattern and rotary I left the area to look for birds for tomorrow. As usual I would phone the guys throughout the day and if it was not going well Christian would soon let me know.
Each phone call met with the response "It's OK". By 5.30pm I returned to the field to view an unbelievable number of dead birds laying amongst the decoys and far beyond. As I climbed from the 4x4 I said "Wow, there must be over 100 birds laying here". Back came the reply, "We have lots more in the hide" I looked over the hide netting to view an enormous pile of dead woodies at the back of the hide.
200 Woodies
My dog Beau did his customary pick-up from the wood and surrounding hedge rows and we laid the birds out and to my amazement we had in excess of 200 dead woodies.
