ROOST SHOOTING PIGEONS
I would give up all other forms of shooting if I could still flight pigeons into a wood on a February afternoon. It’s where I began; where I grasped the need for effort to understand my quarry. Where I learnt to watch for patterns of behaviour, for preferred roosting trees, and how pigeons adjust flight lines to the wind conditions. Pigeon shooting, in general, is perhaps the best grounding for anyone looking to understand the essence of hunting with a shotgun. The added difficulty of the height, speed and angles of roost shooting pigeons make it a real examination of one’s ability and there are no guarantees of success.
NO PLACE FOR EGO
Roost shooting is not an exercise in high self-esteem. It is very difficult to shoot consistently well at this most sporting of birds. Occasionally driving through the countryside you will have a pigeon fly down a hedge alongside the car. Only then do you realise that their cruising speed is between 45 and 50 miles per hour. In average weather conditions when they open the throttle to avoid danger, their acceleration and agility are quite astonishing. When they lift a wing to catch the power of a February gale heading for the leeward side of the wood, it is not worth wasting a shot. I prefer simply to admire such aerobatic skill.
WHEN TO MOVE
Most game shooting coaches will tell you that getting your feet into the correct position is vital for successful shooting. Most roost shooting advice focuses on keeping skill. Move; don’t move. The contradiction is obvious. How should we satisfy both those requirements?
Not moving one’s feet is a very common cause of poor shooting. As styles of game shooting have changed the coaching methods have had to adapt. When I was learning to shoot it was very much ‘nose over toes’ (left toes for me as a right-handed shot) and push your body around with either your left toes or right toes depending which side you were shooting. This front foot style of shooting is fine for traditional partridges driven over high hedges. With the desire for shooting higher quarry, some game shooting coaches advocate moving both feet towards the point where you want to kill your quarry. This allows your body to unwind into the shot promoting a natural swing and follow through. It is a subtle change of technique but particularly useful when shooting higher targets.
STARTING FROM THE GROUND UP
All good gun swings start from the ground up. Your swing should be powered by the larger muscles of the lower half of the body and the core muscles of your trunk. Your arms should control a consistent gun mount and the line of the swing. It sounds simple. It’s very hard to achieve when pigeons are flicking above the tree-tops at all angles, rarely maintaining a consistent line for very long.
If the advice is not to move until the last moment, how can we possibly bring our best technique to bear if we are going to be spotted by this bird’s phenomenal eyesight? Camouflage and concealment can help. If you are fortunate to be shooting in a wood with a thick understory of rhododendron then there is little problem with hiding your movement. The best roosting wood I know does not have that luxury. I have to improvise.
THE PROBLEM WITH HIDES
The problem with building a standard hide in a wood for roost shooting is that once you have built it there is a natural tendency not to move because of the effort you have gone to with your construction. I will sometimes move three or more times of an afternoon if flight lines change or wind directions alter, or both. Also, a standard pole and net hide whilst fine for decoying, does not offer much concealment from the angle at which birds come into roost. Add to this the fact that they tend to be looking down for other birds with whom to roost and that you are directly in their line of sight. When coming into decoys they are looking at landing spots in a field 20 yards out from your hide and you are not in their focussed vision.
What we need is a convenient tall bush directly under the flight line in each of the positions we might be in during the afternoon. But life, as we know, is not that accommodating. Is there any way we can artificially create a screen of foliage at an angle in front and above us that both masks our foot movement and shields us from the birds until the last moment?
FILMED INSPIRATION
The inspiration for an answer to this problem came from an unusual source. There is a famous scene in the film Platoon where Charlie Sheen’s character first goes on patrol in a rainstorm in the jungle of Vietnam. Waking up with a start and brushing the ants off his neck he gradually becomes aware of the jungle beginning to move as the hitherto unseen enemy soldiers carefully continue their own patrol. Their ability to remain unseen fascinated me and I began looking into how they managed such excellent use of local foliage for their concealment.
SIMPLE INGENUITY
What I discovered was the simple ingenuity of the North Vietnamese Army. They developed a camouflage ring system the design of which could not be more straightforward. Two outer rings of bamboo of about 30cms diameter, and two inner rings of about 15cms, are both supported by a cross of bamboo. Any foliage can be threaded through at any angle and held fast by this system. The rig was then secured to the soldier’s webbing with cloth ties both on his front and back. Cheap, simple and variable to any country or terrain.
In the absence of bamboo, I had to alter the design with the help of my local garden centre. Instead of a bamboo ring, I used a section of brown plastic trellis netting the squares of which are each 5cm x 5cm. The replacement for the stiffening support of the bamboo cross was the carbon fibre rod from my children’s ripped pop-up tent which had been rough and tumbled beyond repair. The carbon fibre rod was then threaded through the outer squares of the trellis netting to give me a church window shaped panel about 1m in length. The panel is supported by one of my old, aluminium lofting poles weaved through the middle of it, and a hazel pole goes into the lofting pole so I can vary the height. You could use a good, long pole of hazel on its own. If the ground is too hard or too soft then a tripod of other lofting poles (again, hazel would substitute) is used to support the main pole and to keep the camouflage panel above me.
MOBILE, NOT ROOTED
When I get to the wood I use some small ivy branches cut off the trunk of the bigger trees. Ivy is particularly well-suited as firstly, it has some foliage even in February as an evergreen. Also, it is a common sight in most woodland at a lower level and the short branches are easy to weave through the squares of the netting. When weaving it though it is useful to keep the upper part with some gaps that you can see through and the thicker coverage on the lower part to cover the foot movement. The advantage of this contraption is that it is mobile at short notice. The collapsible tripod and the long-poled panel can be carried together under one arm easily. There is no point standing there wondering whether a move would be a good decision. You must decide either way. The portability of this system doesn’t get in the way of that decision. Instead, it opens new possibilities if the best place to shoot has little understory and you fear you might be spotted too easily.
It is, of course, possible to just drape a camo net over the panel and prop that up and on a still day that may work. However, if conditions are right and there is a good wind, man-made nets tend to flap in unnatural ways when they are not secured with the tension of hide poles. I prefer natural foliage from the wood itself.
MODERN SCRUTINY
The need for pigeon control these days is under scrutiny like never before. Knowing the cropping and drilling plans of the local farmer he was more than happy to have some help in keeping the birds honest to his gas guns and flags. As soon as it dries up enough my chosen wood will be surrounded by drilled barley and peas.
Having satisfied myself as to the need for lethal control, it was time to put plans into action. I like to get to this wood at about 1300 not only because it gives me a chance to see where some birds might already be sitting but also, I know the first hour or so will be relatively quiet. This allows me time to assess where the preferred line of flight will be for the busy period between 1430 and 1630. Most of my decision making should be done before 1430 and I should have got myself into the position that will give me the highest chance of shooting some of the most testing birds available to any sportsman.
THE ULTIMATE TEST
Pigeon shooting is the ultimate test of the shotgunner's art. Not only do you have to understand your quarry’s habits and movements at different times of the year to get yourself into a position of firing some shots, you then must shoot well, sometimes for many hours at a time. It is, for me a source of endless fascination.