Each year, I collect a team of guinea pigs who put aside common sense, regular mealtimes and British tea in favour of adventure in more or less civilised corners of the globe. This year, we got our shots and headed for South Africa in pursuit of a heady mixture of bird shooting, plains game stalking and fishing.
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Our destination was a game lodge some 5 hours south of Johannesburg, just outside Kimberley in an area famous for diamond mines and agriculture. If you follow me on Twitter, then you’ll know the journey was…eventful. We were treated to some of the best of African driving including exhibitions of weaving at speed and sweet talking policemen. The lodge was a welcome sight, nestled down a 3km drive in 3,000+ acres of veldt (the African equivalent of Salisbury plain, complete with bustards).
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Like farmers everywhere, the Christiana agriculturalists view (African mourning and ring necked) doves and (speckled or rock) pigeons as pests. Having tucked ourselves into the edge of maize fields and taken cover in hides on peanuts, it was only too easy to see why. The kit and the tactics here are the same as on British soil with our wood pigeons: decoys and pigeon magnets are deployed to great effect. Just make sure you get the polarity right when you hook up your battery: reversing birds may be amusing, but are unproven as a strategy even for attracting antipodean fowl.
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While not quite Argentina, the birds came in thick and fast. At their peak, even with two in a hide we couldn’t load fast enough. If the tactics are the same, the quarry are quite different. African mourning dove jink like a snipe and are pretty similar in size. The rock pigeons are slightly smaller than wood pigeons, and fly in a less predictable pattern. We managed to cram three pigeon expeditions into our five days of sport, firing more than a thousand between the six of us. The birds that didn’t end up on the lodge’s dining room table went to locals who welcomed the extra protein with open arms.
