Pine Marten discovers that pheasants are just running boar that fly: thanks BSRC!

Pine Marten

Well-Known Member
Good morning everyone.

On Saturday I was up in Durham for my first driven shoot in two years, which the same friends have been generous enough to invite me on every year for over a decade, together with Mrs PM and YPM (spectating…). Now I’ve never been a very good shot with a shotgun, which is a bit of a problem as opportunities to actually shoot at something edible are few and far between. I’ve been using a shotgun, and one particular gun, for twenty years, but I was pretty much self-taught, not very good, and no talk of five-bar gates, footwork, tail-head-bang or anything seemed to make the slightest bit of difference to this. It was particularly galling for wildfowling as you work very hard and need a fair bit of luck to create opportunities, only to fluff them when they came.

This shoot (which I don’t consider counts as hunting in any real sense but is good fun nonetheless and free for me to boot) is useful in that it provides a more or less measurable benchmark for the quality of my shooting over the years. Two things were clear and I was resigned to them. The first is that over the course of anything from 4 to six drives, I always averages a cartridge to kill ratio of 7:1 at best, more like 12:1 at worse. This is also with a variety of guns and cartridges over the years, none of which seemed to make any noticeable difference. It’s never been a kit issue. But within those days, I’ve been all over the place too. I’ve had the odd great drive, but I remember also shooting 36 shots for 1 duck, and firing 25 shots at essentially the same crossing pheasant a dozen times before hitting one. These things are just dynamite for my confidence. Someone put it quite well once and said that I didn’t know what to do anymore because I had no idea of what success looked like.

Anyway, in the past two years, I’ve been attending the BSRC in Bisley regularly of not frequently, and making a point of taking my .22 for a spin on the running boar, and the running deer when it’s not busy. To my surprise, after some early help offered by one particularly kind gentleman getting on in years, I found that I could hit these targets. Not all in the heart or the head, but the vast majority on the actual target at least, most somewhere that would kill the boar or deer. And so I thought that I would have nothing at all to lose by just pretending that all the birds were a flying driven boar target. I was unlikely to do worse. I just had to remember to acquire the target with the muzzles, pivot around the muzzles to bring the gun into the shoulder, pull ahead of it, swinging all the time, and pull the trigger, hoping for the best.

Well I’ll be damned if it didn’t work like nobody’s business. I fired 92 cartridges for 20 birds (that I know of), better than 5:1 and so far better than I’ve ever done before. What’s more, I jotted down the outcomes after each drive, and it’s consistent all the way through: 6:1, 4.5:1, 4.5:1 again, oh, and again, and finally, finally… Eighteen shots for five partridges ENDING WITH MY FIRST RIGHT-AND-LEFT ON ANYTHING EVER!!

To say I am happy is a bit of an understatement, I had more or less completely given up on ever being able to do this. Now I’m hardly one of the Great Shots, but if I can keep this up, I am at least perfectly competent. So thanks to the BSRC and all the kind people who have helped me!

I’m shooting again next weekend with friends on a low-key walk-one, stand-one day, and now I no longer dread that it will all be a washout.
 
go to a shooting ground and have a lesson, it will be money well spent,

however if you start hitting birds you may not get an invite again.:lol:
 
go to a shooting ground and have a lesson, it will be money well spent,

however if you start hitting birds you may not get an invite again.:lol:

Oh I've paid for lessons, and it was good, but whereas I could learn to consistently hit the same few clays doing the same thing over and over again, it's not like that in the field, and you don't have a few practice pheasants to start with. The instructors would always send me on my way telling me that my shooting was fine. Except that it wasn't, I'd just learned to handle a small variety of targets on that particular ground.

I'm pretty sure I'll be invited again! My host awarded me a prize for best bird of the day, which he hadn't seen, but the old Geordie beater who's been watching me miss for ten years told him. It was a high hen pheasant over my to my right which I took behind. The beater shouted "Great shot!". "Thanks" I answered, "I'm quite proud of that". "Now just another fifty like that, lad".
 
Well done PM!
Sounds like you had a great weekend, we must get more practice in down at the BSRC, you seem to have cracked it on moving targets - maybe there is hope for me too............
 
Well done PM!
Sounds like you had a great weekend, we must get more practice in down at the BSRC, you seem to have cracked it on moving targets - maybe there is hope for me too............

Well, let's say that I am competent if not great. But the difference is that I now know HOW to practice! So if I had the time, I could grow better. That said yes, more use of the club would be good. Still waiting for that effing drilling to try out.
 
Still no delivery date sorted for that?!

Nope. Last I heard was a week ago when William Evans confirmed to me that the German dealer has everything he could possibly need from this end, so presumably he's still waiting for the German export permit. I say presumably because he doesn't seem to be a man who believes in communicating when there is no news. They don't work Mondays so I'll ask WE to badger them again tomorrow morning.
 
Another thing: I've been using my Brno 12 bore SBS for twenty years, and for the first time this weekend I bruised my jaw shooting it. Also for the first time this weekend, I shot perfectly well. I wonder whether this means that the stock just doesn't fit, or whether it's a coincidence.
 
Hi Pine Martin
Please to hear that your shooting has improved, Pheasants are a deceptive bird they glide over your head and often look quiet slow, but the in reality they are going very fast and nine times out of ten you simply don't give them enough lead, Not sure of your location but the west london shooting ground offer a gun fitting service, they use a try gun which can be adjusted for stock length, drop, and cast, and you come away with a set of measurments so that your gun can be adjusted to suit, it cost no more than a days Stalking and is money well spent, in fact in can sometimes transform your shooting,
Regards geoff
 
Yes, that's a thing I'd like to do one day. Now that said, I suspect my Brno SBS is worth about £50 and although I love it dearly because it's the one I bought with my savings when I was a teenager, and because it has a pretty special design and aesthetic, I don't think it's really worth spending a lot on modifying the stock. But perhaps a detachable cheekpiece or something. The thing is if I have to choose between a day's stalking and something else, I'm going to spend the money on a day's stalking... Perhaps something I should hint towards as a birthday present.

Now that said, I've shot badly with every shotgun I've ever used, and just by chance some of them must have fitted me better than others, so that can't be all of the explanation. It's possible the stock is a bit short, I don't know. Still, I'll happily take the odd bash on my jaw in exchange for now being able to hit things.
 
Glad to hear you found some form, it is a delightful surprise, isn't it? And quite makes one's day!

I'm sure there's nothing wrong with your gun. For the most part gun fitting just makes the gun shoot where you're looking. This is clearly beneficial, but so long as you know where you're shooting it's not so very hard to aim off. So shoot it at some paper. Mount the gun, lift the muzzles slowly onto the centre of target until you feel they're pointing at it, then shoot. Repeat this a few times and you'll have a pretty good idea of how high/low or right/left it is shooting.

As for knowing what success looks like, you're spot on about the importance of this, so think back on any successful shots. Recreate the shot in your mind as often as possible, from immediately afterwards and over the next few days, until it is clear in your memory.

This will foster success, but if you ever get "lost" again, here's a suggestion: put everything else out of your mind; watch the bird's head; say "go" to yourself when it feels right to do so; and then just shoot "at" it*. Not always, but often, leaving it to instinct in this way will produce results that estimating lead or focussing on keeping the gun swinging will not.

The principles that work when one is learning or practising are just that - principles for learning and practice - but they have to be ingrained before they're much use in the field, where thinking too much about a shot is often inhibiting or distracting.

I feel unprecedentedly qualified to give advice right now because I had a sudden burst of form on Saturday, taking 12 birds for 18 shots, including 2 "made sure of" with the second barrel (so 12 for 16 really!) and one of the best high birds I've ever accounted for. Of course if I go all quiet after my next outing you'll know that either my advice was utter tosh or I forgot to take a proper dose of my own medicine!

*Your mind will not actually let you shoot "at" it, and if you give yourself only just enough time to get onto it there won't be time to stop your swing.
 
As for knowing what success looks like, you're spot on about the importance of this, so think back on any successful shots. Recreate the shot in your mind as often as possible, from immediately afterwards and over the next few days, until it is clear in your memory.

Well this is it, I've been using a mental film of shooting running boar targets and the only difference really is that you need to pull further ahead with a shotgun. I mean I know it's not the same thing, but thinking about it that way works for me, and nothing else ever has, so I'm sticking with that. I've had the odd day before where I've shot well and as you say, it's been instinctive, I've had no real idea why this was the case. There was no consistency and I wasn't able to summon it up again. This is the first time I've shot consistently well enough during an entire day, at all sorts of different targets, and it's all linked to imagining they're flying pigs. Weird perhaps, but there you go!

Now one day I may have a chance to shoot actual running boar so I'll perhaps have to pretend it's a massive hairy partridge.
 
Nice read PM and I know what you mean about hitting moving targets, I am next to hopeless with a shotgun!!

Hi Pine Martin
Pheasants are a deceptive bird they glide over your head and often look quiet slow, but the in reality they are going very fast
Regards geoff

I lifted a couple on my way to work the other morning which then glided alongside my car for about 50 yards, long enough for me to clock them on my speedo at around 30mph!! Very deceptive when they are coming straight at you with wings wide open!!

Stratts
 
Nice read PM and I know what you mean about hitting moving targets, I am next to hopeless with a shotgun!!

I went on a more low-key walk-one, stand-one day on Saturday with a couple of friends, and I'm glad to say that in the end, I'd shot 13 cartridges for a woodpigeon, a hen and a cock pheasant, which is the exact same ratio as last week. Just to add to the pattern, the pheasant were a right and left! With hindsight though I wish that I'd shot at the woodcock that went past me rather than just shouting "woodcock" so that the bloke to my left could shoot it. I hadn't shot a pigeon for years through lack of opportunity so I was disproportionately chuffed with that. And of course that two right-and-lefts in as many weeks. You wait 20 years for one and they all come at once...

View attachment 49766

Now just another three weeks until I go stalking again and finally perhaps make pioneering use of those DL1 bullets on UK deer.
 
Now that said, I suspect my Brno SBS is worth about £50 and although I love it dearly because it's the one I bought with my savings when I was a teenager, and because it has a pretty special design and aesthetic, I don't think it's really worth spending a lot on modifying the stock.

I was wrong. Mr Holt thinks it's worth £80 to £120: http://auctions.holtsauctioneers.co...salelot=S0115+++2849+&refno=+++41848&saletype=

So considerably less than the cost of modifying the stock, then.
 
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