I complained about them last autumn and now I'm being driven barmy by them this spring. Keeping pesky pigeons off oil seed rape is dominating my life at present. And the size of the flocks is enormous. You set off bangers and gas guns and put up scarers but all that happens is that the birds flutter over to the neighbours rape fields until your back is turned and when his banger bangs they flutter back again.
With rape seed worth £340/t next autumn you can't afford to give up. But chasing around the district with a gun and letting off cartridges to frighten them is a soul destroying business. And inviting local shooters to come and knock a few of them over for fun is counter productive. All they do with their decoys is attract more members of the blue feathered fraternity. Nor can you rely on the shooters to be there in the early mornings when the pigeons first drop into the crops. Having relied on a couple of locals and seen how ineffective they have been I think we'll ban them in future.
The trouble is we've had such mild winters for the last few years and there is so much food around for them to eat that many more have survived than previously. And the flocks bothering me now will shortly start to incubate more clutches of eggs. So what can be done?
Years ago, in my youth, we used to have organised pigeon shoots at this time of year with someone in every wood or roosting place ready to shoot them as they came in for the night. If my memory is correct we even had subsidised cartridges. Did this reduce numbers?
It seemed to do so a bit, although this may have been an illusion. I remember being told at the time, by an experienced ornithologist, that the key to numbers was the amount of food available for the birds through the winter.
If that is true then there will probably be even bigger flocks of pigeons in the future. And that would be intolerable. We clearly can't even think of poisoning them because of the domino effect on other species that might eat the carcasses.
But it seems to me we desperately need some form of mass control that would reduce pigeon numbers to manageable proportions. Could they be fed on bait that sent them to sleep, I wonder, so that we could collect them and dispose of them leaving any other species to wake up and fly away?
I really hope someone has an idea that will work and be publicly acceptable because I've had a belly full of chasing them.
Comments (2)
I recall an article in New Scientist a few years ago with a simple solution. Many animals killed as pests worldwide are edible - even locusts apparently. While this may outrage some, why is there never outrage about the effects of Myx and RVHD? The former in particular is obscenely cruel and shockingly wasteful, yet there have even been suggestions in some quarters that a new strain be re-introduced.
Obviously rabbits need to be kept off cropss, but if climate change and other threats jeopardise future food supplies, we might yet be glad of them if only as an emergency backup. Many people who lived through WW2 were very grateful for the extra protein.
Posted by Iain Climie | March 1, 2008 12:38 PM
Posted on March 1, 2008 12:38
David,
You're not alone - see here:
http://www.fwi.co.uk/Community/blogs/arablebarometer/default.aspx
Posted by Andrew Blake | March 3, 2008 4:00 PM
Posted on March 3, 2008 16:00