I was able to get out to the fields for a couple of hours this afternoon. I took the Yildiz with me and a pocket full of cartridges and went to see what was about. In short, not much. I shot a wood pigeon just before the end of the afternoon and found it’s crop full of what looked like peas – but I thought that probably they were probably some kind of seed or berry from a hedgerow, given the time of year. I couldn’t identify where it would have been feeding, at any rate.
The Yildiz performed well enough, although the chap behind wasn’t necessarily up to standard. I had four attempts on other birds earlier in the afternoon but found that the lightness of the gun was making my swing through difficult to control. I missed three of them in front! I sometimes have the same problem with my (equally light) 28 gauge – so this is a familiar problem on which I need to keep working.
The bird that I downed needed a little help on its way as I didn’t place the pattern on it properly and winged it, but it went in the bag pretty quickly after it came down, so I’m not too ashamed of that. It was well within 30 yards, so it was a bad shot rather than an out-of-range shot; some of the others I took may have been a little optimistic, but as I’ve said, I’ll keep working on that too.
I didn’t have a chance to do any patterning work today, but helpfully a friend has offered to pick up a box of everything he can get when he visits a major cartridge dealer next week, so once Christmas is out of the way, he and I will be doing some pattern tests and finding out what this .410 likes best to eat!