Month: January 2017

Yesterday’s trip turned out much as expected. In the event, I nearly missed nine in a row, a fate happily prevented by my bagging one bird for the eight cartridges fired! Not a brilliant result by any estimation and my dissatisfaction with it has not yet departed. That said, the trip had its positive moments, in spite of the lessons which remain un-learnt.

Love Don’t Inconvenience Thy Neighbour

I may have mentioned in previous posts that there is an organized game shoot on one of the opposite some of the land over which I have permission to shoot. I arrived just as the beaters’ cart had dropped off the beaters for the drive situated across the road, so I unpacked quietly, not wishing to disturb them or the impending drive.

In fact, I ignored one straightforward bird which passed close to where my car was parked because, as you will have guessed, my plan was to await the birds displaced by the guns across the road. In return for not ruining their drive with an early shot or two, I hoped that the pigeons which would almost certainly be in the wood about to be driven, would loop back into the trees on my side of the road to take refuge, giving me the opportunity to bag two or three of them.

Alas, it was not to be. The drive went ahead, but the pigeons refused to take the “easy” option even though I was well-concealed in the trees, away from the road. The majority disappeared off into the distance, at a right-angle to the direction I imagined they would take; a handful of the remainder passed by at some distance, allowing me to take two speculative shots, but with hindsight, I shouldn’t have bothered: neither shot connected and they were probably too far out to come down cleanly even if I had been on target. You win some, you lose some.

Seeking Solitude

In the event, I skirted round the boundary of the wood to the bottom end and then walked back to the car through the trees, looking for movement. It’s not my usual practice to go into the wood, because of the difficulty in getting a clear shot on even nearby birds, unless of course it’s late in the day and the possibility of roost shooting obtains.

Yesterday, however, I was a little “peopled-out” for one reason or another and appreciated the solitude. I may never have been further than 30 yards from open fields and the boundary about which I’d usually walk, but ambling slowly amongst the trees, having always to watch my step for fear of turning an knee in a fox hole and all the while watching for birds felt genuinely like “hunting” in its purest sense. I had literally no idea what would happen and although the quietness and loneliness of the place was necessary and refreshing, I felt as aware and as “alive” as I have in a long while. I may repeat the exercise.

As I returned through the wood, a few birds scarpered in various directions, but only one was not so obscured by the dense cover that it presented a genuine opportunity. I took it and bagged the bird. By the time I reached my car, the drive on the other side of the road had long finished and I just caught a glance of the beaters’ wagon disappearing over the hill as I came out from the trees. I trust they weren’t too disturbed by my presence.

Subsonic? Sub-Par?

Feeling that I’d exhausted all useful possibilities on that farm, I moved on to my next “usual” stop about a mile down the road. Here, I unpacked quietly and – expecting that there might be some wood pigeons in the tree line very close to where it’s possible to park the car – put into my pocket a handful of the Eley “Extra Long” Subsonic cartridges that I have awaiting pattern testing.

The reason for abandoning the Eley “Trap” cartridges I’ve had good success with so far is simple – I’ve got almost none of them left and it’s a 70-mile round trip to the only shop I know of that can supply more of them. Until I finish testing all the cartridges I’ve identified as “possibilities”, I don’t want to invest time and money in driving to buy slabs of cartridges for which there might be a superior alternative.

Theoretically speaking, whilst the subsonic cartridges, with their 18g of #6 would need to be achieving a pattern density that I haven’t seen this gun approach, let alone achieve, to be on a par the the “Trap” load, I thought that they ought to pattern well enough for a couple of 20 yard snap shots at any birds that might emerge from the hedgerow I planned to walk. Wanting to save the cartridges I knew would be effective at what I consider to be maximum range for this gun, I took a chance that they’d work, if I did my bit.

As it happens, there were no birds at which to shoot, but it only now occurs to me, as I write this post, that I forgot to change back to the “Trap” load after I’d gone past the hedge, which makes me feel slightly better about missing two shots at a pair of reasonably “tall” birds a little further on, making the tally 1-for-5.

I certainly missed the birds, but if I’d known I’d had the subsonics in the gun, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to take them on. Until I’ve seen whether a cartridge patterns well on paper – these should and I don’t doubt they’ll kill pigeons if I do my bit – I never feel I can have complete confidence in it. In fact, I tend always to imagine the wilder possibilities of performance, not least because I’m all too aware of the breadth of variation in shotgun behaviour with what most folk would call identical or near-identical loadings. Evidence, for me, is key.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also often wondered what kind of difference in muzzle velocity a human can detect as “different”. Is it 200 feet per second? 300? 500? As someone who more often over-leads birds than misses behind (I told you I was weird, right?), I’d have thought a slower cartridge might even bag me one or two birds I’d otherwise have fractionally missed, but perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

Characterizing My Shooting

Moving on from my double miss (or trying to), I walked for about 1½ miles around the boundaries of the farm before I raised the gun to anything else. Subsequently failing to spot the slow-moving, crossing bird which emerged from the tree line at a little above head height, fifteen yards in front of me, and then – having done so – completely failing to respond to it by shooting it (or even attempting to do so) my confidence took another hit and I decided to turn back towards the car and head home. Sometimes it is better to just not to carry on rather than use up 20 cartridges in frustration, trying to hit anything and everything.

As readers will be becoming aware from these accounts, I’m an instinctive shooter who does best when I’m sure that I’m in good form and my gun and cartridge are well-matched and suitable for the job at hand. I am capable of shooting at a very good average, provided I don’t think too much about what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, I rather like thinking about shooting as it’s a colossally interesting and broad subject, worthy of much thought, which means that whilst I’ll sometimes be in very good form, I’m not capable of “forgetting” enough to ever be truly good at it. This is why I tend to go through cycles of shooting 1-for-2, then falling to bits with a couple of 1-for-9 days and then returning to 1-for-2 again. It’s a practical response to the amount of confidence I have in my shooting ability: I shoot well so I take on harder birds. I then miss the harder birds, drop my average and lose confidence. Then I shoot well again, because I don’t expect to hit anything and – without putting myself under pressure – everything falls into place again. It’s been like that for some years now.

Trigger Happy

Astute readers will recall that I mentioned firing eight shots yesterday and that, so far, the running count is five. The penultimate two blasts from the .410 were in the direction of an pigeon passing overhead, way out of range – at least for my shooting ability and certainly for the .410 – but to which I raised the gun anyway, in another example of my on-going battle with myself over shooting at distant, unmanageable birds. I’ve covered this bad habit several times in my previous posts and except to say that I often display it more when I’m tired and despairing of my shooting ability, I don’t intend to rehash the reasons for it here.

The final shot of the day was at a bolting rabbit. Unusually for me, I put the pattern well behind the bunny. I don’t often take a shot at rabbits, unless I’ve been specifically asked to try to control them as they aren’t my favourite quarry to eat. Other members of the association like to shoot them with air rifles and the farmer doesn’t mind us leaving them as it helps the foxes (which deal with most of them) survive, so overall the numbers tend to stay very low.

This time though, in my despondent, but apparently slightly trigger-happy mood, I thought it might be a nice change to bag one for the pot and had a go. Unfortunately, I suspect I only managed to put a pellet into one of its back legs or tail, as it squealed momentarily at me and continued to sprint towards its burrow, apparently unhurt. That made the bag one wood pigeon for eight shots.

All in all, it probably should have been 1-for-5 or 1-for-3 if I’d restricted myself to the straightforward opportunities and I’d like to think it could have been 2-for-4 at best, if I’d taken the easy crossing bird but, as usual, my keenness and over-confidence are my biggest handicap. Once again, I think it might be good to try to get to a clay ground, both for some practice and for the sake of simply letting off 100 cartridges at targets, to make pulling the trigger that little bit more boring – I’d probably waste fewer cartridges if it was.

As a final aside, I’ve recently discovered that Falco make a 24-gauge side-by-side and that Fiocchi still load ammunition for that gauge commercially. Brass cases are also available. I think it may turn out to be my next gun. You see them every now and again on the continent, but in England? A 24-gauge? Now that would be something special and quite an asset to a website like this one, I suspect…

On peut rêver.

Today was the first time since I acquired the little Yildiz that I’ve wished for my usual cartridge containing 28 grams of number 6 shot. I’ve mentioned my tightly-choked 16 gauge gun in previous posts and today’s pass-shooting at small groups of jittery wood pigeons would have suited that gun and cartridge very well.

This morning, however, in the interests of continuing to learn to shoot the new gun (and in the absence of a supply of perforable material for further patterning work), I persisted with the .410 and can report some success, finishing with three birds for six shots from my hour-long walk around one of the quieter bits of the Cambridgeshire countryside.

It was a qualified success, however.

Settling Down

I’ve been unwell this week and have felt rather unsettled with it. Medications for the colds / influenza have come on remarkably in the last twenty years and one can now acquire formulations that knock viruses for six and make all of the symptoms disappear. This is wonderful, in so far as one can maintain one’s usual routine, go to work, live life and so on, but the anti-histamines they include tend to make me drowsy whilst they’re working and leave me feeling somewhat disjointed afterwards until I’ve had a good night’s sleep.

This morning was the first morning this week that I’ve felt well enough to get up and not immediately take the medication for relief from those symptoms. On that basis, I decided to push myself to go out for a wander in the cold, to blow away the cobwebs, so to speak. It was the right decision – glorious, blazing winter sunshine, beautiful clear skies and some good opportunities were my reward.

I arrived at the farm just as the driven shoot next door had started their first drive. I wasn’t in a hurry to get out of the car, since I wasn’t there to act as impromptu “back gun” – until I saw a low-flying flock of 100 wood pigeons displaced from the wood through which the beaters were presumably making their way, at which point I got out, fumbled two cartridges into the gun and – flustered – missed two attempts before I’d gone 20 yards from the car. This was not the beginning to the morning for which I’d been hoping.

Once again, my excitement – the same excitement that makes me shoot that aforementioned 16 gauge at 60-yard birds I haven’t a hope of hitting – got the better of me and two wasted cartridges were the result. Now – one could argue that unless I’d fired those two shots, the opportunities that followed, of which I “converted” three of four, wouldn’t have happened, but I’d still rather have come home with four empty cases than six.

I tried to compose myself and carried on.

Driven Wood Pigeon!

I hadn’t walked much more 20 yards further before I had my first real chance. Having discharged both barrels in the manner described above, I moved into the treeline along which I was walking to await any birds which circled round to return to their original roost. I moved up slowly through the wood, thinking that it was worth staying concealed for a while and kept an eye on the field. My instincts were rewarded when a pair of birds circled back a few minutes later and I was able to take a bird perhaps 20-22 yards up, flying into the wood, just higher than the top of the tree line.

Unfortunately, in spite of having the luxury of a second or two to line up the shot and take it (and in spite of the pigeon bouncing hard off a tree trunk on the way down) when I retrieved the bird, it needed a blow from a priest to complete the job.

I suppose it makes sense that, as someone who does not usually shoot driven birds, that one of the presentations I find most troublesome is the “straight towards you, constant height” bird, not least because, face on, one has to block out the bird with the muzzles of the gun and trust one’s instincts about where and when to pull the trigger. Ordinarily, I’d try to turn sideways and take it as a high crosser, but in this case there wasn’t time and I ended up putting the shot up the right side of the bird and winging it.

Although my shooting was, in this case, less than perfect, I believe that this was the only one of the three birds I bagged today that I missed, in the traditional shooter-points-gun-in-wrong-direction sense. Unfortunately, it transpired that I also had a hard lesson to learn about exactly what this little .410 is and isn’t capable of.

Pulling the Envelope

I don’t want anyone to think that I’m mistaking a clear failure to point the gun in the right direction with cartridge inadequacy, which – apart from generally wanting this blog to be a true record of my experiences with the .410 – is why I’ve been honest about wounding the bird in the way I described above. I fired a bad shot and wounded a bird. It’s not great and I don’t feel good about it, but it happens to everyone who hunts, from time to time (and no doubt a lot more than people will admit !- Ed.). That said, the fact that it’s unavoidable doesn’t (and shouldn’t) make any of us feel comfortable about failing to cleanly kill our quarry.

That’s why, in case you were wondering, I’m not more triumphant about achieving a 1-for-2 ratio with a .410 I’ve only owned for a month or two. Don’t get me wrong – I’m pleased – to a degree. The gun appears to fit and when I shoot it, I am actually hitting and bagging some birds with it. I am starting to learn the lessons of appropriate (.410) range and – doubtless – if I’d been shooting a 16 gauge today, I’d have still wounded that first bird by taking a bad shot.

Unfortunately, if I had had my 16 gauge with me, I suspect I wouldn’t have wounded the second and third birds also.

I said earlier that I find the “driven” presentation difficult and that’s true. One that I don’t tend to struggle with however, is the crossing bird, so when I later saw a small group of wood pigeons flying above the wood, 30-40 yards in, only a few feet above the tops of the trees, it seemed entirely natural to raise the gun to them and take a shot.

The shot connected, as expected, and the bird barreled down into the wood. When I got to it to pick it up, I learnt my first hard lesson about the limitations of using #7½ shot on live quarry. The pigeon had both wings broken and wounds in its neck (crop) and side where pellets had entered but failed to penetrate through to the vitals. When I later breasted it, I counted six obvious pellet strikes, but none of them had been immediately lethal. I could, of course, have “missed”, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Although testing has shown that the Eley “Trap” cartridges will produce an adequate pattern at 40 yards, I suspect that when folk say that #7½ runs out of steam at around 35 yards – at least in small loads like these – they may be right.

If one “pushes” the envelope to work outside the normal boundaries and limitations of a situation, then I very much need to “pull the envelope” and bring the ranges I’m shooting at down even further than I have already.

Curbing One’s Instincts

I hope that whoever it is out there that is tasked with “keeping score” is at least chalking up a mark in my column for being frank about my failings, even as they delete them for my sins.

After bird number two had been dispatched and put into the bag, I switched over to the Eley “Extra Long” Subsonic cartridge to see what their performance would be like in the field. Although they’re 400fps slower than the “Trap” cartridges I’d been using, I’m afraid I can report no significant differences with any other cartridge in terms of muzzle blast or noise levels (though I always wear ear defenders to shoot, so perhaps two versions of really, really loud are hard to tell apart).

When I heard a bird departing the tree line behind me, whirled round to see it and instinctively took a shot at it, I’m afraid that it did not occur to me that this gun, loaded with #6 shot would have no pattern to speak of at 45 yards range and what, once again, would have been a cleanly killed bird, had there been 280 pellets in the pattern, came down flapping because, in the event, there were only 170.

The shot was, basically, good. It was an easy-ish quartering bird by the time I was on it, felt good as I pulled the trigger and followed through and – even by my mediocre standards, was a pretty straightforward shot.

Unfortunately, despite the best piece of advice for good shooting basically being “don’t think about it”, hunting with this gun does require thought: one must curb one’s instincts and remember that the quantity of lead thrown into the air by a .410 is extremely limited and that this alone – without considering all of the other complications of small bore shotgun internal ballistics – brings its maximum range down into the ranges attempted regularly by the “ordinary” (or mediocre) shooter.

A Stand Against Prejudice

I’m sure that the events I have just described will serve only to cement in the minds of some readers the idea that the .410 is a wounder of game. The way I used it today – instinctively and to take the some of the same shots as I would have a 16-, 12- or 10-gauge – certainly goes a long way to making that belief true. I am not proud of this.

However, it is my belief (and my wish to prove to myself) that, used within it’s limitations, the .410 is still a perfectly adequate small-to-medium game gun. I know from others’ experience that it is possible to tune a .410 to give 40 yards of usable range and that, with appropriate self-restraint, one can use it as well as any other shotgun out to that kind of distance.

I have learnt already with this gun, to ignore the 50-yard-plus birds and to some degree, even birds which are much closer but which have presentations too difficult for a shooter of my standard. The very fact that I can record three birds bagged for six shots fired (and not, for example, 30) is testament to that improvement. It will serve me well if and when I return to shooting my larger-gauge guns.

That said, I must train myself better to ignore not just the out-of-range birds, but the borderline ones too. The challenge with this gun (which I am finding remarkably easy to get on with), is now not what I can hit, but what I can leave.