Eradicating pigeons!! Need Help!!

last time i took on this species it wasn't much of a challenge. 14 of them in a machine shed. My grandpa and i stormed in and closed the doors. I shot them 1 at a time with a .22 pellet gun @800ish fps /w laser site. Most of them were instant kills with wadcutters. The the ones that were still flopping my grandpa had fun with lol
 
i second the air rifle.
when i was a kid i killed thousands of pigeons with one: unlike crows (which ive seen survive .22 subsonics to the chest) they are very fragile animals and die pretty much anywhere you shoot them. just aim centre mass.
theyre fat and stupid too, so you dont have to be carlos hathcock to hit them, its hard to miss even if youre a horrid shot.

i used to snipe them off roofs of neighbors several houses down the street with a spring piston .177 air rifle and crappy rimfire scope. stray cats took most of the corpses but my neighbors were always wondering why their houses were surrounded with dead pigeons :)

id never attempt this nowadays though, id either have PETA activists or the RCMP show up at my door a few minutes later.
 
At home all of our barns are pretty tight so they don't get inside much but when they do I go during the day and turn off all the lights then I remove the screen from a fan in the barn and turn the fan on, works great. With guns the quickest way to clean up is with a 12 guage and 71/2 but not too close to the tin. I've found the 22 bb shots to be pretty useless. A 1000 fps air rifle works well for shooting them off a roof peak and if you miss by chance the pellet won't penitrate if you're shooting parallel to the roof tin, it will skip off tumbling and quickly lose steam. At our place the 1 barn is right against a hill side so I actually go into the second floor of the adjacent barn and shoot them off the peak with a 22 LR, just make very sure to not hit the tin. I've gotta say the falconing sounds really neat too.
 
Falconers for the win. They like to excercise and train their birds, you get a really entertaining day. Learned falconry from a teacher in high school. He had a geyr-saker cross that flew like a bullet on meth. Dove on a crow when it first learned how to wait on (when they fly really high then wait for birds to be scared into flight then dive on them) and the crow just came apart when it got hit:D.
 
I have had success with the 22 shot shells (#12 shot, 1000 FPS, 31 g). Knock out pigeons at 30 feet. Not always a perfectly clean kill at the further distances, but they do come down where you can wring them. No worries of damage to wood or metal roofs. It has been my choice for a number of years.
 
Beeman Crow Magnum .22 pellets have solved many a pest problem for me. Seriously drops crows one shot, so I don't think pigeons stand much more of a chance. I use a Crosman 2289, which maxes out at 500 FPS.
 
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