WOODPIGEON hunters in southwest France returned home in gloomy mood this weekend after a season blighted by global warming, class conflict and unco-operative birds.

The 100,000 or so hunters have been frustrated as the pigeons basked in high temperatures in central and northern Europe instead of migrating over the Pyrenees to Spain.

Their absence has been greeted with despair in a region where hunting enjoys a status equivalent to football in Liverpool. “I know a guy who hasn’t left the woods for a month,” said Olivier Maury, creator of the internet site www.palombe.com, which offers recipes on how to cook the birds. “He even persuaded the fire brigade to deliver him a water tank. It’s not a passion. It’s a religion.”

In a good year for hunting, several hundred thousand woodpigeons are trapped. But observers have counted about 1.5 million over the Pyrenees this autumn, compared with 2.5 million last year.

Claude Feigné, an ornithologist from the Gascony-Landes Regional Park, said that global warming was keeping the birds in their summer nesting grounds for longer.

Hunting methods include throwing decoys into the air, which the woodpigeons mistake for birds of prey and fly low to escape — straight into nets. This year a row erupted between two villages after one, Ordiarp, said that rich hunters in a second, Musculdy, stationed themselves behind its nets to shoot birds drawn down by its decoys.

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