Shooting

Circumstance has at times forced me to hunt with people who seem to feel compelled to fire at every bird that gets up, no matter how far out or at what angle. I often have enjoyed the companionship, but I don't appreciate the attitude.
I came by my distaste for this sort of nonsense early on and, I believe, honestly. When I was a kid, my father and I had to travel about a hundred miles to hunt pheasants. There were no pheasants to speak of where we lived-and in fact there was no pheasant season in the two southernmost tiers of Iowa counties. It's different now, but that's how it was then. So we'd drive north to Cedar Rapids, hook up with an old friend of Dad's and drive even farther north to some little towns that probably don't appear on a current map.
Dad's friend shot a Browning A-5 16-gauge, which in those post-war days was the ne plus ultra of guns. You just weren't with it if you didn't shoot an "automatic." And Dad's buddy shot his at everything that flew, no matter how close or far. His comment always was, "You gotta get the lead in the air." And he was a lousy shot. I can't remember him killing more than one or two birds in all the years we went up there. At 12 years old, I was no dab hand with a gun, but I certainly was better than he was. Still, he persisted in blazing away at every bird in the air. Lord knows how many he nicked or wounded just out of blind chance. It didn't seem right to me.
You wonder how these things begin. Having spent 50-odd years pondering the question, I think I can identify some of the causes. One simply is the mindset that reasons: Fire enough shots, and odds are you'll hit something sooner or later. The laws of probability would support that. Unfortunately.
During a shooting lesson a few years ago, my student made a thoroughly inept move on a target and hit it. He seemed crestfallen when I told him that I wished he'd missed it entirely.
"I thought the point was to hit targets," he said.
"No. The point is to hit targets by design and not by accident. You made a sloppy gun mount and looked at the barrel at least once. You hit it by accident, and that can put the wrong thing into your head. Forget about that one, and concentrate on what I'm teaching you. Learn the technique and there won't be any more accidents."
Sometimes, what seems to be success is utterly misleading.
Similarly, the fluke long-distance shot breeds false confidence. Sheer luck can put a single pellet into the head of a pheasant or duck crossing 60 or 70 yards out. Down it comes, and the shooter gets all puffed up thinking, Hey, I did it once; I can do it every time. Thus, skybusters are born, much to the annoyance of anyone hunting nearby.
I know it can be frustrating to shiver all morning in a blind or tramp endless miles of cover while birds persist in passing or flushing out of range, but that's why it's called "hunting."
So what's "in range?" It depends upon the gun and ammunition you're using and how well you can use them. The great majority of upland birds die within 25 yards of the gun, wildfowl often a bit farther away, but not very much farther. It depends, too, upon judgment. My old quail-hunting partner Danny Foster put it quite well in a conversation we had not long ago. Danny's a deadly field shot within his comfort zone, but he knows exactly where the boundaries are. "I do not fire at a bird that I don't expect to fall," he said. When he's behind the gun, most of them do, but he doesn't attempt silly shots. Better to let them go off and fly another day.
There seem to be two divergent schools of thought on what constitutes a proper gun and cartridge. One is devoted to the concept that bigger is always better. For this the ammunition industry has given us some doozies, from the 3" 20-gauge to the 3-1/2" 12 to the utterly ridiculous one-ounce 28-gauge "magnum." This apparently is fueled by a persistent hope that you can buy a substitute for skill. And shooters aren't the only ones who step into this quagmire: fishermen, bowlers, golfers-you name it. Bottom line is that if you don't own the ability to put a charge of shot where the bird is, it doesn't matter how much of it you fling or how hard you get smacked by recoil.
The same thinking, or lack of it, would argue that Extra-Full choke automatically turns a duffer into a 70-yard predator. Nonsense. Shot cartridges are so efficient nowadays that choke is all but obsolete. The less of it you have, the better you'll shoot. But it still boils down to the simple requirement of putting the shot where the bird is.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who want to believe that technology has advanced to the point where anything that fires a shot swarm is capable of killing birds at any distance. This, too, is nonsense. I gardened a rant in March/ April about my contempt for the .410-bore and implied, I hope, my reservations about what the other gauges can do, so I won't go through it again. I will say that the shotgun is by nature a relatively short-range instrument and that attempts to overcome that fact are largely doomed. Try to exceed the capability of your equipment and you're courting failure.
This is also true of attempting to exceed your capabilities as a shooter. Long-range gunning is a specialized skill that most of us just don't have. There's a reason for that, partly athletic and partly psychological. I can cook the athletic part down to a single word: practice. We don't typically practice long shots. We could, but we don't, and if we don't, we have no reason to suppose we can hit them.
Psychology takes over those who fall victim to a tacit separation anxiety. Hitting a far-distant target requires more daylight between gun and target than some shooters can handle. For them, swinging a gun the length of two boxcars and a Volkswagen Beetle in front of a moving object is just impossible. It doesn't mean they're stupid, only insecure when they can't see gun and target at the same time. They can overcome this with diligent practice but not without it-and not without surrendering to an act of faith. Don't worry about it; just take a dally in your need to shoot at everything that flies, find your own comfort zone, and discipline yourself to stay in it. Who cares if the sight picture you need to see measures two axe handles and a bar of soap? Leave the boxcars and Beetles to somebody else. Or practice until you can do it, too. Those really are your only options.
I'm about as far from being a football fan as anyone you could find, but I do understand some of the lingo, like the Hail Mary pass. It's when a quarterback is about to be smeared way behind the line and rifles a pass as hard as he can throw in hopes that somebody wearing the right-colored jersey will catch it. This seldom works-actually no more often than Hail Mary shots put a bird in the bag.
The Hail Mary prayer serves a specific purpose-a good one, to my thinking. A Hail Mary shot serves nothing. I've been a hunter and a shooter for a long time, and I've never noticed that divine intervention played any real part.