The Middlesex Woodpigeon Club & Home Counties Wildfowlers Association offers a free service for Pigeon, Rabbit and Vermin control. We aim to provide a pool of experienced Pigeon Shooters available to cover crops when the birds are on them.
The Middlesex Woodpigeon Club & Home Counties Wildfowlers Association was formed in 1963. The original pigeon shooting areas were under what is now Heathrow Airport. There was also permission to shoot in some of the London Parks. Much of the shooting in Middlesex, Surrey and Kent was over arable land and market gardens. Over the years our Shooting areas have come closer together. Now all of our shooting is in Surrey as are most of the Members. As the shoot areas have changed so has the nature of the crops we protect. Whilst it is still arable land for the most part with the traditional wheat and barley. There is now a vast acreage of oilseed rape to be shot over. We only have one market garden now, with those old market garden lands that we still shoot over now given over in the main to horses and livestock.
With farms run as livery, landowners are concerned about injury to their charges from rabbit holes and burries. As well as the predations of the rabbits on the pasture needed to feed the horses. So quiet methods of rabbit control are the order of the day with lamps and air-rifles, longnets and ferrets. We now have members who only ferret and have no interest in pigeon shooting.
For many years those interested in wildfowling made frequent trips to the Wash. Pontoon Wash being a favourite. In more recent years we have seen teams of guns from the Club away to Kintyre and Dunblane for up to a week at a time for the Geese.
From the Club’s inception until the early eighties we ran a monthly open Claypigeon Shoot at Ceasar’s Camp in Aldershot. Along with Annual Charity clayshoots for the Surrey Young Farmers. A change of usage by the Ministry of Defense put paid to the Caesar’s Camp shoot. Since then we have forsaken the running of Clayshoots and directed our energies exclusively to Fieldsports.
Over the last few years we have been restricting the intake of new members to those able to shoot on weekdays. To make sure that there are shooters out and about on a Wednesday as well as the Weekends, we have been concentrating on the retired and shift workers