I was reading a thread on an air gun forum last night about shooting with pre-charged pneumatics (
here) and so I went to sleep thinking - well, among other things, sure - about accuracy in the field. The folk in the thread are discussing the pellet-on-pellet performance that can or can't be expected from an out-of-the-box Weihrauch
HW100 - and in terms of what they wrote and how it compares with the sort of thing that I can produce with my old springer, well, I might just as well attempt to hone the rabbit-stopping properties of my critical thinking as attempt to match the precision of these things (I quote):
"At 30 yards once you've found the the right pellet it should be 1 single hole."
[At 30 yards]
"You should be getting ragged one hole groups at that distance.""Both me and a mate was out the other evening perfect conditions, he too shoots a HW100KT and he shot a rabbit at 51 yds bisley magnum, and I shot one at 54 yds logan penetrator. Both shots were premeasured with laser rangefinder both perfect head shots instant kills. Neither of us are annie oakley but these rifles are deadly accurate if running as they should."The image at the top of this post is my last zeroing effort a few days ago with my, as ever, boingy old HW80k. I'd taken about three shots the day before - thirty-yard shots, all - and missed every time. So in something of a funk, since I'd zero'd about two days before this, I went and fired off the first group (top left in the photo) from an unsupported sitting position at thirty yards (with H&N field target pellets).
And yes, the group showed that I was, indeed, out. So I dialled it up two clicks and fired off another set (top right). O.K, a little too
high this time, so I took it one click down and fired off the third group (bottom left).
Well, O.K. That'll do, I thought. The last group did show a little bit of a left drift, but that could just have been the wind perhaps. The first two groups weren't to the left so I didn't adjust on the basis of the last one being a bit
skewiff left-wise.
I certainly do wish that I could dependably hit a rabbit at 54 yards - but it would be crazy for me to even try. Twenty to thirty is about my limit and - even then - I miss a good deal.
Sometimes, when faced with an ideal like this against which I can judge myself, I can tend to think,
'ah, gawd, I shouldn't even be out shooting if this is the best I can do'. I suppose that what I then do is remind myself that I'm not going out shooting in order to try and win any accuracy competitions, I'm actually going out because I want to try and get my dinner.
It's also becoming clearer to me that if I think that zeroing is something I need to do every couple of weeks, say, then I'm kidding myself; I ought to be doing it more or less every time I go out hunting.
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I went along to the mid-week market at the nearby village of Penkridge today. There was an auction of local produce going on; hens, ducks and geese were to be sold and the cages with the animals inside were stacked up to form the walls of the outdoors auction room. Laid out on trestle tables all around were cardboard boxes and plastic trays all full of damsons, plums, cooking apples, tomatoes and many different types and sizes of eggs. Underneath the tables were dozens of rabbits all laid out on cattle-feed sacks or in boxes to be sold at auction as well.
I sat at the base of a tree today and looked up into the branches of another one close by. There was a rise of ground in front of me and, just on the brow of the little slope ahead of me was a red-brown pile of earth that'd been thrown out by a badger expanding its underground home. I've been told by a dog-walker that knows this field that sometimes the badgers dig up bottles and push them out onto the mounds by their front doors; I'd like to come across a badger-excavated old marble-stopped pop bottle above all things, I guess.
Today, I went and sat in a field.
On my way home, I took a photograph of the nettles and the grass in the late afternoon sun.
