Rachel Carrie breaks off mid-sentence. She leans forward slightly and narrows her eyes. Far across the wheat field that abuts her garden, a wood pigeon has fluttered from a copse to a power line.

“See, I’m still watching the pigeons now,” she says, “thinking: ‘I could have shot that, landed it there, and we could be barbecuing now.’”

I hadn’t noticed them, but I follow her gaze. There it is, setting itself down next to two pigeons that were already resting on the cable, just heavy enough to make an indentation in its gentle curve.

“They always follow the same flight line. So the way that that one came in,” she says, still looking, “and you saw it turned off – it’s because it saw us. But if I actually sat out here on an evening, I could sit and shoot them so they fall into this grass.”

And then she’d leave her garden via the gap in the low wooden fence, find the bodies, and carry them home. Then she’d pluck them, butcher them, cook them, and serve them to her fiancé and son for dinner. Maybe it’d be a wood pigeon salad, with scarlet strips of breast lying on a bed of watercress, sliced fig, and crumbled feta. Or maybe she’d sear the meat on a grill and dip it in barbecue sauce. Carrie often feeds her family with game she’s shot herself, and over the past year, she’s served roe, fallow and muntjac deer, pheasant and partridge, duck, and pigeon. Plenty of pigeon.