Pigeons, rats with wings?

A bit earlier than I had hoped BUT the .22 air rifle is coming out of mothballs!

I planted a whole row of lettuce for the feral menace, now devoured, so they've turned to my climbing french beans!

Hopefully they'll be sufficiently fed to provide a decent supper!

 

Hi Vince

Cant you use netting instead I hate guns plus if you dont kill them properley its the suffering they go through

Spruce

 

I've seen pigeons eat used teabags and even vomit from pavements

we have some strange looking ones in cambridge ... many have one foot that has no toes and there are even some that have a mohecan style hairdo?

I very much doubt that I will ever eat pigeon again ... they are a bit of a pest here and cr*p all over the place

 

Thought of you at lunchtime Dim, went for a ploughmans in a local pub & they were selling packets of Biltong at the bar.

 

I quite like pigeons, but they are a bit of bother. For example, if you don't cook them right they are bitter and tough, and there's so little meat on one that they're hardly worth the bother at all.

 

Loads of pigeons around here but mostly of the city type, am I right in thinking its the wood pigeon that attacks crops?

We have some wood pigeons but they never seem to eat any of my stuff.

 

They get worse & worse every year, now having to net over lots of stuff they never ate before (like spring onion seedlings - another reason to plant out instead of sowing direct), as well as needing perimeter fencing around it all to keep the rabbits out.

When I shot pigeons/ate meat I'd just cut off the breast meat, nothing else is worth bothering with. Nice in a puff pastry pie with mushrooms I seem to recall.

 

Loads of pigeons round here too. My brassicas would be devoured in no time if I didn't keep them netted, they're also quite partial to fresh green pea shoots as well,

...and don't you just love it when one of them sits on your chimney pot at 4 o'clock in the morning and makes a loud cooing noise which then reverberates down the chimney and around the whole house.

There's a local company which specialises in 'wild' meat round these parts, they used to do pigeon burgers, which were actually very tasty.
Then they had to stop making them due to some daft EU regulation.

 

Was the regulation concerning them being made of real meat & therefore disqualified as a burger?

 

nice one! ... not sure why it's not made here ... with a beer, it tastes better than peanuts

 

They could use the Bills & Tongs from all those Pigeons instead of throwing them away.

 

That's burkas they've been banning in some European countries, not burgers!

 

Ahem, I'm a good shot, usually takes just one pellet between the eyes......

Pigeon breast for us, the rest for the ferrets (no waste).

Pan fry my pigeon in garlic butter with parsley, delicious with a beer

 

The cheapest place I've found for the type of pigeon proof netting I use, which is fine rigid black plastic mesh crop & pond netting (not the 'diamond' shaped mesh plastic netting that needs stretching out and always fights to contract back to the condensed form it sold in) is at QD Stores where it's £2.49 for a 2 x 6 metre sheet. It's the same stuff that Wilkos used to sell in 2 x 4 metre sheets.

Google "crop and pond netting" and see how cheap it is compared to other places.

http://www.qdstores.co.uk/corporate/storefinder.asp