DOVE SHOOTING IN SOUTH AMERICA.

 

I have never done it  but I am not sure I get Dove Hunting South American style. I fail to see the appeal. To me it just seems to be clay shooting with feathers on it. There is no particular struggle to get under the birds. You hand over your money, get driven to the ground, have your gun loaded for you, your lunch cooked for you, your arse wiped for you (ok, maybe not the last one) and a seemingly endless stream of doves pours over. From what I understand you struggle not to get through 1000 cartridges a day. Where’s the challenge? I suppose the challenge is like any pigeon/dove shooting - the shear variety of targets; the speed, the angles, and maintaining consistent performance under the sustained pressure of fatigue. Is it any different to buying a day’s pheasant shooting in the UK something I have done myself? I paid my money, got driven to the ground and shot reared pheasants driven over me, had my lunch cooked for me. I suppose not – so where does my uneasiness come from?

It may be that the shear gluttony of numbers would for me dull the appetite. When shooting reared driven pheasants or partridges I do not want to see the sky full of birds and to pick the best one. I want the anticipation of a bird perhaps coming my way; the prospect of rotating through the numbers so that on one drive during the day I might be in the bung hole. That is the excitement – the anticipation. I don’t want to shoot every bird I see, but I do want to kill cleanly every bird I shoot at and for them to be quality birds. This is one reason I really enjoy taking a 16b hammergun (aside from the fact that the gun it the best handling gun I have, a lovely calibre and a restoration project of mine). The invitations to shoot driven game are few and far between and cherished when they arrive. It’s not about pulling the trigger it is about the spiritual connection with the landscape, the people, and the history of the environment and the endeavour in which you are immersed. It flows around you and if you connect properly the physical act of shooting seems to flow with it. The connection is deep rooted and almost inexplicable to those who have never done it.

I have never been part of a team that shot over 400 hundred reared birds in a day I have no desire to change that. The largest bag I have ever shot of Woodpigeons is 310 but it was all my own work and hugely satisfying for it. (Worth missing dinner with my wife’s friends and the fearful bollocking that resulted!)  

To be honest clay shooting bores me and I think high volume dove shooting would too. It may appear to have all the elements – but somehow it lacks soul.

GUNFITTING - THE DEFINITVE GUIDE

GETTING IT ALL THERE AND GETTING IT ALL BACK AGAIN – KEEPING YOUR CAR FREE OF BLOOD IN THE PROCESS

When it comes to kit I use one of the most useful things I have is a plasterer’s bath. This blow moulded heavy duty plastic bath is designed to stand rigorous use. Everything goes into it and it is dragged to the site of the hide. Because it is flat bottomed with rounded sides it has little friction and does little damage to low crops. At the front I have drilled two holes either side and have some rope with a length of hosepipe to stiffen it and act as a comfortable hand hold. Step in, put the hosepipe up to your hips and walk on or off the field – a little like an Arctic explorer.

If it doesn’t fit into the bath – it doesn’t go with me. I know one shooter who has a quad bike and a trailer to hump all his kit – that might mean he has too much gear – there is a limit.

Also on hot summer days the birds I shoot go into the bath under a fly net with a bungee keeping it sealed. On days such as this I pick up every 25 birds and put a layer of ice packs (crushed litre water bottles from the freezer kept in a cool bag) on the bottom, a layer of pigeon, layer of ice, layer of pigeons, and so on. This is the best way I have found of keeping flies of the birds and getting the temperature of the carcasses down as quickly as possible. Also just step in to walk the whole lot of the field at the end of the day. (I go back later for the kit apart from my gun and cartridges).

I also use this as a deer carcass tray. It catches the blood and washes out with no nooks or crannies for bacteria to fester in – I would be lost without it now.

£32.99 inc P&P from Transtools on Ebay – and delivery was fast too

Follow this link: Transtools plasterer's bath

EASY DIY NECK PROPS

So following Wally and his one decoy using neck props on dead birds to get their neck collar to look right is to my way of thinking the best decoy. The most simple neck props are from wire coat hangers and you can cut four from each hanger. Just remember to collect them when you pick up your birds as combines don’t digest them well. Also pick up you birds by the wing rather than the neck to preserve that collar as it is the flock recognition symbol they use when feeding. Also only can you carry more birds this way. Don’t have all the head bolt up right as that will look like a flock about to leave the field and you want to give the impression of a flock busy feeding. The top spike goes straight through the base of the head into the skull. You can carry them in a old plastic bottle to avoid running you hand through as you reach into your pocket to get one out (I've been there and you can have more fuN than that in your life).

A BIRD IN THE RIGHT PLACE BEATS A DOZEN IN THE WRONG ONE 
I remember being taught a valuable lesson when I was 16. A friend and I had been decoying on a farm for a year or so and had always been the 4^th or 5^th to shoot any promising field. Determined to be ahead of the game the next time we got to a field of freshly drilled barley earlier than the boys on the farm this included an old roguer called Wally. Wally had been shooting this particular farm for 40 years (legally and otherwise) and he was none too pleased to see us on the field before him. Despite this he did something he had never done before and offered us some useful advice. As he never gave anything away for free and it puzzled me at the time. We moved our hide as he suggested and Walter retired to the other side of the field. He had no kit with him other than his trade-mark roll up glued to his bottom lip, his old side by side, two belts of cartridges and a game bag with some extra cartridges in it. He shot one pigeon as it got out of the oak tree on his way to the other side of the field – this was his only decoy. He set it out the other side of the field and shot 84 pigeons that afternoon gradually building his pattern as he went. We shot 14.

Wally knew his subject and he had learnt it from a lifetime of observation. Looking back now I believe the reason he offered his advice was because he knew we were in the wrong part of that field and that he was about to teach us a lesson. It was the only time I ever saw him smile.

When you buy your cartridges you should bear in mind that shot sizes vary in the different parts of the world. 0.3mm may not seem like much but there is a difference in lethal performance between UK 7’s and UK 7.5’s at different distances. The charts below give a useful round up although there are differences between them.

HOW THE CHINESE MIDDLE CLASS AFFECTS THE PRICE OF YOUR CARTRIDGES

Rumour has it the chattering classes in China are buying 38000 cars a day. Cars need batteries, and batteries need lead. That is one of the reasons the price of lead on the London metal exchanges shows no sign of returning to earth. Cartridges are getting more expensive but it should not be an excuse to cut corners with your ammunition. A box of any old rubbish shows no respect towards your quarry – fine for busting clays, but we are dealing with a living being here and you are trying to be as efficient as possible.

Cartridges kill cleanly (rupturing the major blood vessel and organs, see previous post) by a combination of 2 factors.

Pattern and penetration (P&P). Many things affect these two overriding factors and there are trade offs with different combinations. To start with we should define some terms.

• Pattern – the collection of individual pellets that make up the shot weight (oz or grams) and act in a similar way to a spurt of water from a hosepipe
• Penetration – the depth to which those pellets travel within the carcass having gone through atmosphere, feathers, skin, tissue, and bone to reach vital organs and vessels
• Shot size – the diameter of the individual pellets that make up the shot weight
• Choke – the constriction at the muzzle of the shotgun that regulates the spread of the pattern at any given distance
• Wad – the part of the cartridge that provides a gas seal for the burning gunpowder moving the pattern up the barrel in a uniform manner – falls away quickly after leaving the barrel.

Moving away from dictionary corner we will start with pattern.

The law of averages says that the more pellets you have in your pattern the greater the chance of damaging one of the vital areas and killing cleanly. This is true – up to a point. The more pellets, the heavier the shot weight and the more the recoil (push a heavy weight forward at high speed and a greater force comes back into your shoulder – Newton 1^st Law once more). That’s why I only ever had one customer who bought 36gm 6’s for decoying pigeons. That cartridge is simply not comfortable to shoot all day. The usual choice is no less than 28gm and no heavier than 32gm. I could not shoot 32gm all day – I don’t have my dentist on speed dial. (George Digweed I know shoots 35gm 5’s all day long, but then George is a more substantial chap than I am, uses a heavier gun and is the finest shot of his or any other generation. He alone has the talent to shoot at the ranges he specializes in, and he does it well. He has spent years perfecting the setup he uses, practicing the art, and it is not for us to try the same.) 28gm of 5’s will contain fewer pellets than 28gm of 7’s because of the diameter of the pellets. So here is our first trade off – 28gm is a very comfortable load to shoot but does it have the required pattern at a further distance?

More has been written about choke (and I bet W.R. Pape and W.W. Greener are still slugging it out in the afterlife as to who invented it) than we have room for here and most of it is boring, analytical, impractical guff so read around if you want to. What choke you use affects the pattern a shotgun throws. Different barrels will behave differently with different cartridges. It is up to you to test your barrel, choke, cartridge combination by pattering it (subject of a future post). Essentially the tighter the choke the more constricted the pattern down range and the higher the odds of a clean kill. The trade off is that very tight choke can alter the pattern in unforeseen ways. Put your spray nozzle on the end of a hosepipe to see what I mean – main jet goes further but drops of water split off more than an open end – the uniformity changes. Also bear in mind that a pattern plate isn’t what actually happens when you shoot a moving target – try hitting a wasp with the jet from your hose to see what I mean.

Shot size and penetration are intertwined – the larger the shot size the greater the mass. The greater the mass, the greater the retained energy at distance. Bigger pellets punch through the surface layers better than smaller ones to reach the vital areas. This also feeds into the trade off as I said – bigger pellets, fewer of them, fewer pellets less chance of damaging the vital organs.

The type of wad can also have a (smaller) bearing. Fibre wads are more environmentally sound but throw slightly more open patterns than plastic (or photodegradeable). Plastic wads according to some commentators throw less uniform patterns. There were rumours around a few years ago of someone developing a vegetable starch wad but I have heard little progress and nothing has yet come to market.

My own preference is for Rio (Spanish made) 28gm 7.5’s (actually 2.37mm - an English 7+) in my more open barrel (1/4 choke) and Rio 30gm 6’s (which are actually 2.75mm - an English 5) in a tighter barrel (5/8ths) – this gives me the best of both worlds. This way I fire a greater number of the more comfortable cartridge, but still have the ability to deal with the very testing second bird of any potential right and left.

THE THEORY BEHIND A CLEAN KILL

This should always be our objective but how do cartridges do it? What separates a good cartridge from a bad one?

The cleanest, quickest death possible in pigeon shooting is always achieved by rupturing one of the major blood vessels or vital organs. This leads to a sudden and fatal drop in blood pressure – death is instantaneous. To achieve this pellets must damage either the blood vessels in the brain, the neck, or in and around the heart/lung area. Pigeons are difficult to kill because none of these areas is very big. If you put both your thumbs together and imagine another thumb top joint in the middle the top joints are roughly the size of the heart/lung area. Imagine a thumbnail a few cms above that and you have a rough idea of the size of the vital areas you need to hit to kill cleanly – 35 meters away – doing 45mph.

A pigeon directly over head also gets considerable protection of those areas from their large chest muscles (the tasty bits). If they have been feeding on sugarbeet tops in the winter, a full crop can protect the major vessels in the neck like armour plating. That’s why some guns go up shot sizes and weights for this type of pigeon shooting. The next post will explain why. Conversely if you are shooting pigeon with an air rifle the cleanest kill is shooting through the back between the wings – a direct line to the vital organs and vessels.