Anna Shepard, Eco Worrier

James Banbury hates pigeons. They make a mess of his father’s barns and eat the crops. He does what he can to reduce the local population, but there’s not much interest in eating them and he usually dumps the corpses in a hedge. So he finds my quest to shoot, cook and eat one faintly amusing.

At this time of year, it’s a shame pigeons are not consumed more enthusiastically. As well as being cheap (you can get them from an online game suppliers or Waitrose, which sells a bird for £2.99), they are fat from feasting on corn left behind by the combine harvester, plus all the berries and seeds around. Once winter has properly set in, and the ground freezes, they’ll be forced to fly farther afield to find food, which will turn their fat into muscle. For now, though, they are plump and ripe for roasting.

As the sun sinks behind the Devon farmland, I take aim at a wood pigeon flying low towards the trees. Expertly, my 17-year-old shooting coach has shown me how to move my entire body to follow the path of the flying bird, while squinting down the barrel of the gun. I aim just in front of a pigeon’s head, so that by the time the shot reaches the bird it hits the head and leaves the body intact. With pigeon breast being the main bit of meat (in fact, the only bit), it’s important not to blast it to smithereens. That’s the theory, anyhow. In practice, by the time I’ve heaved the 12-bore shotgun into position — nestled against my shoulder to avoid its vicious kickback — I’m so desperate to pull the trigger and get the ordeal over with that I miss by a country mile.

After a few attempts, it’s obvious to everyone, including the pigeons that swoop overhead, unperturbed by my mission, that I’m not going to fill tonight’s pot. Banbury tactfully points out that ponderous pheasants would have made easier targets.

Luckily, the top Devon chef Tina Bricknell-Webb, who runs Percy’s, an award-winning country hotel and restaurant, set on a neighbouring 130-acre organic farm, has a back-up plan. Anticipating my incompetence, she asked Banbury to bring down a brace of birds the day before. When we return to her kitchen, we get to work plucking them. With black labradors yapping at our heels, leaping to gobble the feathers, I’m soon feeling like a female Ray Mears.

Percy’s is not a place for the faint-hearted. There’s a pig’s head in the oven and a pile of trotters in the sink. I can just make out a pig’s nose peeping out of the top of a stock pot. Almost everything featured on the menu lives, grows or flies around here, and not a scrap is wasted. READ MORE ON TIMESONLINE