Shooting Times & Country Magazine
Who’s keeping score?
FGS raises his game to bag 20 pigeons with 22 cartridges, revealing that counting provides him with an added incentive to shoot well
parallel post-and-wire fences six feet apart, one at the top of the bank on the edge of the barley and the other bounding the meadow below.
It was a few minutes work to hack out some hazel sticks about the size and length of bean rods and when these were tied vertically to the fencing posts, there was the perfect framework over which to drape my ex-army camouflage netting — purchased last winter through an advert in this journal and hitherto unused.
Blending in
When garnished with a few bits and pieces of greenery, the hide seemed to blend into its surroundings pretty well, and its size and siting were ideal in the sense that one had plenty of room to stand comfortably upright, with freedom to shoot at any angle.
Sitting on a shooting stick, the surrounding area could be surveyed through the netting, while the ears of the barley growing above the bank in front were just a fraction above eye level. Whole rubber decoys perched on nearby fencing posts, plus a few more on flat patches of corn, completed the scene.
The first bird soon came in, flapping lazily from right to left, and crossed at 25 yards range, offering the simplest of shots. A second later I was cursing myself for a fool, after following it with the muzzle of the
gun, with all the deliberation in the world, and then poking hopelessly so that it flew on unharmed. Thank heavens no one was watching.
Ones and twos came within shot over the next hour and a half at intervals of 10 or 15 minutes. By noon, 12 cartridges had accounted for half as many kills. These birds were not difficult and with first-class shooting none would have been missed.
A glass of beer and a bite made a break that seemed to improve the tempo of events and the standard of shooting, too, for by teatime I had as many additional pigeon as I wanted to distribute via the village inn; a score exactly, and the knowledge that only a further 22 cartridges had been used added to the satisfaction.
I freely plead guilty to this counting business, which seems to excite controversies among shooting men whenever the subject arises; and the majority appear to be against it, although I am not quite sure why. To my mind it is harmless, provided it does not develop into a fetish and lead to competitiveness among members of a party, or boasting by an individual (although I could be accused of having just done that very thing ).
Slack habits
Its merits include discouragement of taking long shots in the borderline class, which must be a good thing, and an incentive to keep alert to do one’s best, whether in company or alone.
Most of us know only too well how easy it is for the lone shooter occasionally to slip into slack and careless habits, with no companion to chide him. Shooting against a self-imposed standard provides the antidote, rather like a golfer playing against bogey.
Whether the standard for pigeon shooting should be 50% kills to cartridges, or something more ambitious, varies with weather and other conditions. Speaking as an ordinary Shot (my 20 out of 22 mentioned above being exceptional), I reckon something better than
50% ought generally to be achieved over decoys. My 76-year-old father consistently surpasses this standard.
Such shooting, though interesting, is not usually particularly difficult, once one gets the timing right. In other words, judgement of the exact split second when the gun should be thrown up is far more tricky than the shot itself. This is vividly demonstrated when the odd rook or crow drifts over the pigeon hide, for the corvine’s uncanny eyesight is so acute and the speed of its evasive action so swift that premature movement by the shooter turns an easy shot into a very hard one.
An awful lot of nonsense has been talked and written at different times about pigeon being hard to kill, in the sense that they carry a lot of shot without falling, and references to supposed ‘armour-plating’ are far from uncommon.
Is not the truth that when a pigeon goes on its way, leaving a bunch of feathers drifting in the wind, it has usually been shot at out of range, or
“Counting seems to excite controversies and the majority appear to be against it”
else been caught by only a few stray pellets on the edge of the pattern?
Surely, with ordinary game loads fired from a normal 12-bore, any flying pigeon caught properly in the pattern at ranges up to 40 yards will almost always fall, and stone dead at that. Magnums and maximums can be left at home.
I fear I have digressed and what started off to be a descriptive article has developed into a defence of keeping scores, but I have wanted to get these arguments off my chest for a long time. I think it more important to try to shoot well than simply to kill as many head as possible, irrespective of the standard of shooting.
Lest anyone reminds me how horribly ill I shoot at times, let me confess at once that, even over decoys, I periodically have runs of about two with 10 cartridges. However, such performances, unless far and few between, signal an early visit to the shooting school to find out what has gone wrong.
This article was first published in Shooting Times on 8 September 1961.