August-December is the season for flying north and trying your hand at grouse. For the other months, how about Scotland’s superb pigeon shooting?
At one short of his 100th point-to-point win, you may have a certain expectation of a shooting invitation to Scotland from Major Dominic Alers Hankey (Retd). You may hope you’ll be going to a gothic revival lodge in Perthshire and be numbering your bag by the brace and in the hundreds. You might expect to be in the company of merchant bankers and clean-boot farmers. You could consider shaking the moths out of your tweed suit and wondering where to borrow double guns.
But Dominic is also ‘Dom’, ratter and owner of a Beretta semi-auto and a lurcher called Stuka with a bent tail. At Dom’s invitation, his friends drove and flew their guns from the South of England to Edinburgh and then Fife, slab of shells in 30-gram to 32-gram loads and drove out at 8.30am to our various locations on the cut rape and wheat with which Fife is filled. Fish was my ‘butt partner’ (so to speak).
The hide was a work of art. Fish and I settled ourselves in front of the decoys. Alan had set up the pattern 20 yards out from the hide with a battery-powered decoy that spun its wings on a variable timer just like a bird coming into land. The deeks were in a teardrop pattern with the ‘flutterer’ at the top, furthest away from us.
To begin with, there was some activity. Birds came in to have a look. It depended on timing and direction, however. Birds coming from straight ahead of us, seeing the flutterer and the decoys ahead of that, liked what they saw.
Birds coming from other directions were less impressed. And some even veered away from the pattern 300 yards out. Fish and I kept our heads down and motionless as birds came in, peering through the mesh of the hide.
By the end of the day, our average had improved. In one notable pack, we had three dead in the air at the same time. However, by the end of the day we were still a lamentable ratio of birds to cartridges of 17:1. On some grouse moors, that’s enough to ensure you aren’t asked again.
Bed and board at £54 each night either side of a stonking day out. Some 14 of us stayed at the comfortable Lomond Country Inn in Kinesswood, overlooking Loch Leven.
The night before, we laid wagers on the bag the following morning, the best shooters and the number of cartridges fired. We would do the reckoning at lunchtime and then shoot again until 7pm: 11 hours of shooting heaven.
Experienced gameshooters, this was the first time in a pigeon hide for many of the guns.
Guesses on numbers of birds went from 50 to more than 1,000. Guide Alan’s record pigeon day was 1,400 – but he is used to hosting parties for the best pigeon shots in the country, not hams like us. The party to follow us, for example, included a Spaniard who is the current world champion live pigeon trapshooter.
Alan and Des did their best for us. They had scouted some of the tens of thousands of acres they have at their disposal in Fife. They found a likely-looking two-and-a-half mile arc of fields across the wide valley of the River Queich.
They were underway at 6am the next day to seek pigeons and set up hides, decoy patterns floaters and rotary devices.
Dom insisted on calling the hides ‘butts’ as a nod to grouse shooting. Each of us picked up a Des Cochrane sets out decoys
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