How to Hunt Rabbits with an Air Rifle

The sticky, boiled down, concentrated essence of the first year of Hubert's rabbit hunting could be expressed as follows:

• If in the UK, get a rifle that'll shoot at about 11.5ftlb with a variety of pellets (because one that'll shoot 'just under' 12ftlb with the pellet you use most often will still send you to prison if the pellet the police happen to test it with pops the chrono 'just over').

• Get permission from a landowner. Ask around, dress smartly, knock on doors, don't show up drunk, don't bother asking by post or phoning (you'll just irritate them and lessen the chances they'll be friendly to the folk that actually bother to ask them personally). Accept refusals with good grace and retire politely. Keep going till you get one.

• Once you have a permission, don't bugger it up by being narky to dog walkers and hikers: one word to the police from an irritated Labrador owner and you are back to yearning fruitlessly over copies of  AirGun Weekly (or in jail). Look after the land that you have permission to shoot on: don't knacker the fences; don't leave litter; don't take a pop at that out-building gutter when you're bored and stay well away from any livestock on the land. You are an ambassador for hunting now and there are plenty of ill-informed people who would have the whole thing banned - so don't give them ammunition.

• Learn how to shoot the gun accurately before attempting to shoot your dinner. Practising on live quarry is an utter no-no. Join an air-rifle club or a Field Target club - but practise. You do not have to be pellet-on-pellet perfect at 75 yards but you will have to practise a good deal before you start hunting unless you are going out specifically to pointlessly maim wildlife (and you shouldn't be). If you can get consistent groups within one inch at thirty yards - from the positions that you'll be using in the field - then you've reached the minimum level to start hunting proper. There's no need to stay at this minimum level however, so do keep practising.

• You don't really need a full-body, army-sniper ghillie suit; drab clothing, greeny-brown in colour will do nicely. Don't go out hunting in your safety-orange work wear. Don't put highly perfumed fabric conditioner in your washing machine if you're cleaning your hunting gear.

• You don't need a scope that can shift focus between your outstretched finger and the surface of the moon when your effective shooting range is only up to 40 yards. In summer, you can go out mid-afternoon and find rabbits; in the cooler months however, dawn and dusk will be the best times to hunt and, because this is so, a scope that gathers as much light as possible will be helpful - as will an illuminated reticule. This isn't to say that you can't hunt at dusk with an unilluminated 30mm objective lens: you can. But something between 40 and 50mm will allow you to hunt for a good deal longer. If you can afford the light-up reticule, then get one.

• Consider using see-through mounts for your scope. These aren't that easy to get your hands on but I think they might well mean - for scopes around the 40mm mark - that you could use the iron sights as well as the scope, and this might well give you a little bit more flexibility about the shots you can take and the speed with which you can take them.

• If you can afford that Airwolf, great, (and while you're here, mister Moneybags, can you see that 'Donate' button to the left?) but you don't need to spend a grand on a gun.

• If what you want to do is get rabbits for the table and you can afford a pre-charged pneumatic rifle (and the kit that goes with it) and you are not too fussed about getting off more than a hundred shots in an afternoon's shooting (and dear God why would you want to?) - then get one. You will hear people going on about the 'romance of the springer' and 'Oh, it's so much more satisfying shooting with a spring gun' but PCP's are more accurate and will put more rabbits in the pot and that's why you're doing it, not for the joy of the action and the challenge (unless of course you are and in which case, good luck to you).

• If you can't afford a PCP then buy a decent springer and get good at shooting with what you can afford. A well-made springer, in the hands of someone who has learned how to shoot one, will do the job perfectly.

• Yes, Crosman 2250 Ratcatchers are cheap and nifty - sadly, they don't do the job.

• Those Chinese-made CO2 rifles are well made, affordable and can indeed, with a bit of fettling, rival the PCP's for accuracy. CO2, however, is not a free commodity and in cold weather you can get a considerable drop in pressure which will have a knock-on effect on accuracy (and not a good one).

• Dome headed pellets give the best combination of accuracy and efficiency. Cheap pellets are a false economy since they're inevitably less well made and therefore less predictable in flight. If you buy pellets on-line for economy then try to arrange it so that the Postie does not just pop them through your letterbox: the three-foot drop to the floor will render half the tin unusable.

• If you can afford the PCP it probably makes sense to get it in .177 calibre. There is more whack in a .22 but all the whack in the world will not put a rabbit in the pot if you miss - and it's trickier judging distance with the steeper parabolic arc of a .22 pellet. 
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• Yep, a .20 is probably a good compromise and no, you don't see many of them around second hand.

• With a springer, I've honestly no idea if there's much difference between .177 and .22 but with a .22 you can reasonably look to take pigeons as well as rabbits because a .22 will drop a pigeon (if you hit it) more effectively than the smaller pellet.

• Keep the safety on until it's time to shoot. Climbing over fences with a rifle that'll maybe go off if you drop it is a very bad idea: 11.5ftlbs on a pellet into an eye might very well kill you or your mate stone dead.

• Watch your background. Your pellet will not go half a mile - that's why you don't need a firearms certificate - but it will, if you miss, go straight through that nearby hedge. If you can't absolutely guarantee that there's no one on the other side then you should not be taking that shot. If you hit someone, or their dog, and hurt them, then you'll likely go to jail and you'll deserve it.

• Walk the land you have permission on; get to know it. Look for burrows; look for paths between burrows; figure out the distances from places you can hide and shoot to likely target areas. If you already know it's thirty yards to that burrow then you can reasonably expect, if you've zeroed at thirty, that you will be putting the pellets in the right place - otherwise you'll be estimating all the time and that takes a while to learn how to do well.

• Tread softly. Don't wear hob-nailed boots when you're out hunting: rabbits are very sensitive to vibration through the ground so wear light shoes and go easy.

• Don't cover yourself in eau de cologne before you go out. Rabbits have a very acute sense of smell. Don't chain-smoke while hunting, either - if you do, you won't be.

• You can camp or you can wander. Camping, settling down a useful distance from a place you expect rabbits to appear, will probably get you some rabbits - but you may need to earn it by sitting or lying silently for a long time - and there's no guarantee that one will appear. Wandering, walking the land in the hope of seeing a rabbit and approaching it by stealth, is much more interesting than camping, but 'interesting' in this context also means 'considerably more challenging'.

• If you're going to be camping and it's not high summer, dress very warmly: lie motionless on the ground when it's even mildly chilly and you'll soon freeze.

• If a rabbit pops out in front of you and sits on the edge of its burrow then you should not shoot at it. Rabbits need to be so far from their burrow that you can get to a wounded but still mobile rabbit quicker than it can get back to its burrow. This is important.

• If you can find a spot where you can watch down a burrow-riddled fence line, then that's good. If you can find a spot where you can look down two burrow-riddled fence lines then that's even better. Examine the intersection of fields: is there a little hidey-hole there you can use?

• If you're wandering, pay attention to the direction of the wind: there's little point walking towards an area that your scent will visit before you get there. Walk into the breeze if you can. Don't camp upwind of a burrow you have hopes for.

• Rabbits will not sit around while you approach them in plain sight - sad but true. It is possible, using all available cover from hedges, long grass, nettles, overhanging foliage or depressions in the grounds, to creep up on rabbits in daylight - but it is very, very difficult. Hold the rifle across the crooks of your elbows if you are crawling on all fours; advance when they are feeding or looking the other way and freeze if they look up. Don't try this in clothes you're not happy to get filthy because you will get filthy if you do it properly. Wear a hat. Don't be discouraged by numerous failures - it really is very difficult to do this and reading about it on the internet is not the same as learning how to do it.

• You should be aiming for the point where an imaginary line back from the rabbit's eye intersects with another imaginary line coming down from its ear. That's where its brain is; that's where you want the pellet to go.

• If you wound the animal and you are not sitting behind a multi-shot PCP with half-a-dozen pellets ready to go then you will need to get up quickly, get to it, grab it and dispatch it with the utmost haste. Take a sturdy trout priest with you or learn how to break a rabbit's neck (James Marchington demonstrates (to the Suburban Bushwacker) how to do this at the end of this video.)

• A dead rabbit will need to be - and this is, unfortunately, the correct term - 'thumbed' to clear the bladder of urine prior to gutting. You hold the rabbit by the front legs with your left hand (if you're right-handed), grab the animal around the stomach and, exerting pressure with your thumb, slide your hand down towards its tail; then you repeat the process till the job is done.

• Rabbits come with fleas. You may decide that hanging your catch on a fencepost for half an hour while they disperse is a good idea; you may equally decide to grit your teeth and get on with gutting the rabbit there and then.

• It's probably best to gut rabbits in the field. To do so, lay the animal on its back on the ground, pick up the fur just below the bottom of the ribcage and make a nick through the skin beneath. This done, insert the blade of your knife in the nick and, taking care not to slice through any of the revealed intestines (since this will risk tainting the meat), slice the belly open towards the back legs. Pick the rabbit up so that you're holding it with the front legs in your left hand and the back legs in your right and then - holding tightly - make an abrupt gesture away in front of you while turning slightly: the guts - all of them, if you're lucky - will fly out. You may have to tidy up with your knife afterwards. None of this is as pleasant as it sounds.

• Don't forget to clean your knife when you get home and don't risk cross-contamination by using the same knife for anything else food-related.

• Hey, you've got a rabbit for dinner! 

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Tags: Air rifles, air guns, shooting, fieldcraft, hunting, rabbits, shooting, stalking, hunting rabbits, how to, tips, rabbits, game

Makings of an Autumn Breakfast.

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.

I sat under this tree in the late afternoon with the idea that I'd take a shot at any wood-pigeon that came to rest in the branches above. I sat there for close on an hour, looking up at the sky and imagining the pleasures of a grilled pigeon for dinner - but I had no luck. There were birds flying past but non chose to land in the tree I'd picked to sit alongside. I hadn't made any great attempts to hide myself beyond being dressed in drab green and sitting beside a big clump of nettles, mind you, so perhaps the pigeons just saw a chap with a gun sitting below a tree and thought that a roost down the field a little way might just be a better bet? Who knows.

Autumn is nearly here; it'll soon be time for me to acknowledge that if I actually do want to get a rabbit then I'm going to have to start going out at dusk again. I did see one or two today, out in the slightly weak afternoon sun, but this seems like nothing compared to the dozens I'd have seen at this time of day a month or so back.


On the way home, I picked a knee-pocket full of damsons from the abandoned orchard to make a sweet purée with which to enliven tomorrow's breakfast porridge.

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Tags: stalking, wood pigeon, damsons, food, countryside, England

Air Rifle Fieldcraft: Breathing and Shooting

I took what felt to me to be a 'good shot' a few days ago. It was late afternoon and I'd just spent a while leaning up against a fence post and watching as the wood-pigeons came home to roost. I'd got up and walked across one field - patting a passing Labrador on the way - and then through a gate and down along the side of another. As I walked, I found that I was looking through a gap in the hedge at the bottom of the field at the land stretched out beyond and, squinting a little, I noticed that just visible in the green of the distant grass were two tiny patches of grey-brown.

I stepped sideways so that one clump of the old hedge would shield me from sight and kept on walking. There was a dip in the ground over the last dozen yards so I ducked down into this cover, dropped into a semi-crawl on my hands and knees, and managed to get to within ten yards of the hedge without the rabbits - perhaps another fifteen yards beyond in the next field - being able to see me.

Lying flat and raising the scope I saw that my approach hadn't gone completely unnoticed as the rabbits were sitting quite still and alert, holding their heads up high above the grass to look around.

I could have snatched at the shot but I decided - in the hope that an accurate shot in a few seconds time might yeild more than a quick but wobbly one right then - to take a moment or two and steady my breathing.

Looking through the scope I watched as, with each exhalation, the falling pressure of my breath lessened the push of my shoulder against the rifle stock and caused the cross-hairs to rise on the target. The sights climbed with my out-going breath and reached their peak in the momentary pause before the next inhalation which, increasing my shoulder pressure, would again force the reticule down.

In the cycle of two breaths I made tiny adjustments to my support of the rifle so that the peak of the sight's climb on the next exhalation would hopefully leave it paused - in the stillness before the next breath - on the head-shot aim-point just back from the eye and beneath the ear of the still-motionless rabbit. As my breath left me and the sight rose I tightened my squeeze on the trigger; the shot gave out much as I'd wished and the rabbit disappeared.

I scrambled through a gap in the hedge and made for the place where the rabbit had been and found it, to my surprise, head-shot and dead right there. I stood for a minute or so almost baffled at how well the shot had gone and pleased that, once again, I'd managed to get some food for the next few days.

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Tags: stalking, rabbits, scope, fieldcraft, hunting, shooting, air rifles, photography, rural, England

Fieldcraft: The Twenty-Third of May

A mesmerisingly beautiful afternoon in the fields today: blackbirds singing, warm sun on my back (snuff plastered all over my nose, ants walking up my sleeve) - and then a rabbit hopped out at thirty yards. I took a shot at it and it disappeared.

I'd taken another shot about half an hour earlier and, though I'd seen the rabbit leap into the air and disappear from my sight in the scope, I hadn't been able to tell if it had jumped because of the noise of the rifle or because it had been hit. I climbed out of my cover behind a bank of nettles and scoured the field. I found plenty of dried cow pats in the grass but I didn't find a rabbit. I must have missed and it had scarpered.

So this time I just lay there and looked around. Further down the fence-line I could see three or four reddish-brown, long-eared heads peeking out and looking around but I couldn't see anything at all where the rabbit at which I'd fired had been. I assumed that I'd missed again. I went back to gazing across the field at the patterns that the sun was making in the grass - deep, wonderful greens criss-crossed with bands of shade and everywhere dotted with buttercups and the seed-heads of countless, gently-waving dandelions.

Quite happy, I got up after twenty minutes of dreamy dozing and decided that before I walked home I'd have a quick check up the field where I'd fired. To my surprise, I found a freshly-killed rabbit.

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Tags: field craft, hunting, HW80k, stalking, rabbits

Hopeful Green Stuff Woven

I took two great snorts of Wilsons of Sharrow Gold Label Snuff and headed out for the fields this afternoon. Padding - in a narcotic fug - across the green approaches to the area in which I can legitimately shoot, I became absorbed in the visual splendour of the luxurious new spring grasses underfoot. Whitman - that glorious, prophetic madman - was surely onto something in his hymn to the grass:

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is, any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer, designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say, Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic;
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white;
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you, curling grass;
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men;
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people, and from women, and from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps;
And here you are the mothers’ laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers;
Darker than the colorless beards of old men;
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death;
And if ever there was, it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

All goes onward and outward—nothing collapses;
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

I lay down beside a fallen tree and, through the scope, watched a rabbit - oh, sixty, seventy yards away - too distant for a shot by far, hopping and peacefully nibbling. My silenced phone went off in my pocket: Buzzzz Buzzzz, Buzzzz Buzzzz - I left it alone and carried on watching the rabbit.

A flat expanse of grass lay between us - hopeless to crawl across. I considered the hopelessness of crawling across the grass and then commenced to crawl across the grass; slowly, very slowly; moving the rifle ahead of me and then inching forward with my toes, grabbing handfuls of the green stuff to drag myself along, inch by inch and all the time keeping an eye - squinting through my spec's - on the animal and trying to nudge forwards when it was looking away from me only; five yards; ten yards; fifteen yards.

My phone went off again: Buzzzz Buzzzz, Buzzzz Buzzzz; I pulled it out of my pocket and turned it off; the little animal kept on nibbling.

The rabbit ambled through the fence into the next field and disappeared from view; suddenly sleepy, I lay there in the spring sunshine - this Easter Day - put my head down on my arm and closed my eyes. Time passed.

I got up and walked towards the next field; great, shaggy, long-horned cattle in there, all giving me the serious eye; well, I thought, I shan't be making my way across there - remembering a herd of bullocks that had eye'd me similarly, a year before on a fishing trip, before they'd given chase and forced me to leap - terrified - over a barbed-wire fence into a dense and welcoming cloud of nettles.

I sat on the stile that led out of the field and - looking across at the cattle grazing in the sun - listened to my phone messages. Then I called it a day and walked home.
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Tags: poetry, snuff, stalking, Walt Whitman, hunting, rabbits, England

Hit and Miss - PCP versus Springers

There's a discussion over on the Airgunbbs forum (here) at the moment about PCP's versus Springers - and, as is often the case, it's a very interesting one: pro's and con's all over the place. My ha'penneth worth amounts to little beyond, 'Well, I've got a springer and I've not got a PCP, nor, for that matter, the readies to buy one with'; so while all this is interesting, for me it's a little academic. If Bill Gates were to browse this blog and, overcome with philanthropy perhaps, he decided to deposit a large sum via the Paypal button to the left, then that might well change: I'd buy myself a Daystate Airwolf quicker than you could say "Daystate Airwolf". At the moment though, I'm still lugging the mighty HW80k around and, while I'm certainly managing to miss things with it, I'm definitely developing my upper body strength (since it weighs a ton).

Today I went back to the same part of the field where, the day before yesterday, I'd had such unexpected luck. I camped down in the grass at exactly the spot where I'd got the last rabbit and waited. A mere ten minutes later one popped out and, after taking careful aim, I missed it completely. Remarkably, the rabbit didn't leg it (this may well be a testimony to the efficacy of the Weihrauch moderator I've got stuck on the end of the rifle: this does increase the length of the gun to the extent where I may be mistaken for a pole-vaulter when making for the fields but it does, also, seem to do a good job in reducing the crack from the shot). I broke the barrel to put another pellet in, however, and this did manage to frighten off the rabbit.

I lay there for another twenty minutes and got bored enough to check my emails via my phone (all the time thinking, 'Ye Gods, this is a ridiculous thing to be doing while lying in a field'). I saw a rabbit emerge at the end of the field, about forty-five yards away, but it quickly scarpered. I decided to crawl up the field a way so I'd be handy if it reappeared and I'd just settled down there when two rabbits came running out of the bushes - they sat for a moment at forty yards and then set off to run again. I thought that they would run away from me, but no, they ran straight towards me and then stopped at about twenty-five yards. I took a shot at the nearest one and it went down at once without so much as a twitch.

Taking a look at it, I noticed that I'd managed - more by luck than design - an almost textbook-perfect head shot. I've tended to think that shots of this kind are the preserve of supremely clinical pre-charged pneumatics only; in truth, I do tend to think that much of the talk on forums about hair-splitting accuracy tends to come from people that are able to shell out for a PCP and this can, I think, give those who can't afford one of these things a misleading view of what to expect from their humble springer. But this shot - forgive my immodesty - was, I think, a pretty good one.

Acting on a - for me - most unusual charitable impulse, I gave the rabbit to a neighbour. They were chuffed - and I was chuffed meself at how chuffed they were.
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Tags: accuracy, air rifles, hunting, HW80, HW80k, pre-charged pneumatic, Springer, stalking, rabbits

Fieldcraft: Doing the Crawl.

I went out yesterday afternoon to find that the farmer on whose land I hunt was grazing his cattle on the fields in which I most often look for rabbits. Seeing this, I set off away from the herd, towards a part of his land where I've not hunted before. I didn't do this in the expectation that I'd have any luck; there's a pleasing novelty at finding one's self in terrain that's less well known, but, since so much in hunting seems to depend upon a detailed knowledge of the land, fresh fields seem like a real challenge.

I climbed a fences and then - after using the trunk of a fallen willow as a bridge over a brook - started to walk cautiously up into the field. I've become more aware, recently, of the runs that rabbits create in the grass around their burrows - the indented highways they make by running over the same paths in the fields; and so, when I noticed, up ahead, a convergence of runs towards a burrow under a fence, I decided that here might be as good a place as any to lie in wait a while. I lay down on the ground, downwind of the burrow and used the roll of my camouflage gun slip as both a prop for the rifle and a partial screen to hide myself behind.

Hunting in mid-afternoon still feels like a strange thing to be doing; despite having had a good deal of luck at this time, of late, I still can't seem to fully convinced myself that it's not a complete waste of time to lie in a field in broad daylight. Thirty minutes of lying still and seeing nothing later, I was again beginning to think that this was folly. To relieve the tedium, I sat up and cast my eyes around. Over on the far side of the field I noticed a wooden fence running up a rise in the ground and, in a dark area between two clumps of grass, saw a little reddish-grey lump that raised my attention. I swung the rifle round and peered through the scope to find that - about a hundred and twenty yards away - there was indeed a rabbit sitting there, placidly looking out at the field.

The ground was completely flat between myself and the rabbit and I was in plain view - so attempting to move closer for a shot was hopeless. I decided I'd get up, double back and then cross the field to the bottom of the fence line and try and work my way up towards it. When I got up, of course, it vanished straight away; I was hoping that, after it had recovered from the shock of seeing me, it might venture outside again after I'd moved myself to within shooting range. Once I'd got there, however, I realised at once that there was no good place to lie; twenty five yards downwind from that burrow was a muddy area in a gully from which I would be able to see almost nothing up ahead of me. Giving up on this spot - and close to giving up all together - I started to walk up the rise towards the corner of the upper part of the field.

As I started to walk I noticed, up the field ahead of me, the flash of a white tail hopping away. I crouched and looked through the scope and saw that this rabbit had come rest just beyond the brow of the rising ground. I realised that its position would work in my favour if I crawled up the hill towards it since, by staying close to the ground, I could stay below the level that the rabbit could see. I dropped my bag, lay down flat on the ground and, cradling the rifle across my arms, set off up the hill by moving my elbows and knees to propel me.

I've not done much crawling in fields; the weather up till now has meant that the ground has been too muddy to do this without getting covered in mud and cow dung. But yesterday the ground was fine - keeping away from young stinging nettles was the only real problem. As I've not done much stalking on all fours with a gun, I'd not really figured out how to do it all that well, but yesterday, after about thirty yards, I found that I was learning how to get a good rhythm going and cover the ground at a decent rate. I stopped now and then to check through the scope that the rabbit hadn't moved and also to try and figure out, using the distance-guide reticule in the scope, how close to it I'd got.

I managed, eventually - and all the time feeling quite astounded that I'd not scared the animal away - to close the distance to thirty yards. Sensing something perhaps, it hopped a little further up the field away from me and I raised the rifle to judge its distance again. Just then, another rabbit hopped out from under the fence straight ahead of me, about twenty yards away. I took a shot at it at once - rather hurriedly - which didn't quite do the job, so I got another one off, and quickly, which thankfully did.

I gutted the rabbit and thought for a while about staying on to try and get another one from this - as it had turned out - very promising new field, but I decided against it and started for home.

I'm out of work at the moment and, looking at the local job market, there's little to feel enthused about; it's easy - for me at least - to become rather gloomy about this. So what a welcome and happy tonic it was to walk home from the fields with dirt on my elbows and knees and a rabbit for dinner; with the feeling that today, in this endeavour at least, I'd achieved something.
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Tags: crawling, field craft, hunting, rabbits, stalking

Fieldcraft: Elmer Fudd

Yesterday, after I'd been lying flat on my belly in a field for something like forty-five minutes, I was fully engulfed in the dilemma of the air-rifle rabbit hunter: Do I get up and move on to somewhere where there might be some damn rabbits, or do I stay here and capitalise on the fact of my recent immobility and the potential that this has for lulling rabbits - in theory at least, nearby rabbits - into the conclusion that all is placidly calm beyond the burrow and thus the ideal condition for some outdoors sunbathing and feeding? I was lying right next to a wire fence that had posts at eight-yard intervals and this was handy place to be since it gave me a fine way of reckoning the shooting range of any rabbit that did appear - but none had appeared and I was getting increasingly uncomfortable (as well as more and more aware of the pint of tea I'd drunk before setting out).

Just then a rabbit popped into view, on the other side of the fence to me, at a startlingly close eight yards - certainly the closest I'd ever been to a wild rabbit. The tricky thing, I soon realised, was that, what with me lying so close to one side of the fence and the rabbit sitting equally close to the other side, looking almost straight down the line of the thick wire mesh as I was meant that there appeared to be an all-but-impenetrable metal sieve between myself and the peacefully nibbling animal.

With all the stealth I could muster, I managed to shift the weight of the gun and bring the scope to my eye (moving so heavy a gun with my right arm at full stretch in front of me when I was lying flat on my stomach was in itself, quite difficult, but holding its eleven-pound weight up off the ground with one hand, when I'd done this, was enough to bring me out in a sweat). I'd left the scope focused at about 25 yards - this was the distance to the burrow that I thought, when I'd lain down, would be the most likely one for a rabbit to appear from - looking through it at a target eight yards away, however, I could only just manage, wrongly adjusted as it was, to wrench my eye so that it could focus on the the gaps in the wire and rabbit's head beyond. It looked like it might just be possible to get a shot through, but if I was to do this I'd need to turn the parallax adjustment ring so that I could focus on the rabbit and, so as to get the pellet cleanly through the wires, see the aiming reticule as well - since, as it was, I couldn't see the cross-hairs at all.

Shifting my grip on the gun to hold it by the scope, I tried to turn the adjustment ring with one hand; these rings on Hawke scopes are quite notoriously stiff and my scope is a good example of this - with one hand I just couldn't budge it at all. I lay the gun down on the grass again - all the time trying to make these movements minutely slow so as to not startle the rabbit - and shifted, ever so gently, so that I could bring two hands to bear on the recalcitrant ring. This time, I could just manage to make it turn.

But when it turned, because a couple of weeks ago I'd managed to get a few grains of sand between the ring and the barrel of the scope, it made the tiniest scratching noise - and that was it, the rabbit was gone.
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Tags: field craft, Hawke, stalking, rabbits

Fieldcraft: Judging distances

I thought, Well, I'm freezing, but I'll just have one more poke at getting a rabbit and then I'll call it a night. So I started to walk down the field to a corner I know where I stood a good chance of at least - with the aid of a nearby street lamp - seeing an early-evening rabbit. As I was on the way there, though, the wind got up and I realised that it would be blowing straight over me and towards the burrows - clearly no good. So I doubled back, hopped over a fence, nipped across the same field from which I expected the rabbits to emerge, walked down the line of the fence a little way until I was at - what I estimated - was about thirty yards from where I thought they might emerge. I clambered through the fence (with, I expect, a noticeable absence of cat-like grace) and then flopped down and stuck the end of the rifle barrel through the fence. After all this palaver, I thought, I'll be lucky to see anything - but at least the wind was now blowing into my face.

A couple of minutes later - rather unexpectedly, given my clumping across the same field a little while before - a rabbit emerged, roughly from where I expected, and then dashed some distance away from me and sat down.

So then I set about to trying to figure out how far it was away from me. Is it thirty yards? No, it's more than that. Is it forty yards. Well, yes, maybe - it could be forty yards. I knew that the fence across the field from me was thirty yards away because I'd walked it in the past so I mentally picked up the distance from where I was lying to the fence and plonked, it in my imagination, across the distance between myself and the rabbit to see how much was left over. Well, maybe it is an extra ten yards on top of the thirty, maybe it is forty yards? Forty yards is pushing it for an accurate shot for me so I lay there and looked at the rabbit for a while in the hope that it would hop a bit closer to me. Ten minutes passed and I was getting colder - the rabbit stayed motionless. Take a forty yards shot? Well, if it's a head shot and it misses, then there's a good chance it'll just be a clear miss and the rabbit will scarper unharmed - and having a go, at least, seems much less depressing that just getting up and going home.

I moved the scope so that the forty yard points in the reticule were over the rabbit's head - but the reticule was too brightly illuminated and I couldn't see the rabbit any more beyond the glow of the cross hairs. So I tried to dial down the stiff brightness adjuster - only the batteries choose this moment to start to run out and the reticule started to flicker alarmingly on and off like the lighting in a horror movie. I twiddled more with the adjuster and it stabilised a little; I found the forty yard point in the reticule, steadied the image of the rabbit in the scope, squeezed off the shot - and watched the rabbit run back to its burrow unharmed.

I walked the distance across the field to see how far the shot had really been: fifty yards. Not forty, fifty - and fifty is too far for me to stand a chance of getting an accurate head shot. If I'd known it was fifty I wouldn't have taken the shot - but, thinking about it - even forty is too far for me. I suppose I need to stick to shots that I know I've got a chance of landing - that's to say at between between twenty and thirty five yards. But it's difficult to estimate distance and it's difficult, also, to look through a good, clear scope at a rabbit that you put can put right between the cross hairs and not take the shot - because even though it looks close, it's not.
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Tags: field craft, shooting, stalking, rabbits, air rifle

Bringing home the... daffodils.

I was sitting in a hedge earlier on today with a gun on my lap while reading a text message from Mrs. Hubert. In response, I took a photograph of myself - sitting in a hedge with a gun on my lap - and sent it to her by way of reply.

I've been out shooting a lot recently - almost every day for about a week - and I've had no luck at all - nothing: much dispirited trudging home has taken place. The best catch from the whole week so far was a bunch of daffodils that I found growing in secret, hidden away on a railway embankment. I hacked the whole bunch off with my knife and put them in a vase at home: the virile hunter returns with a bouquet of wild flowers.

The flowers brightened my Lenten lounge up a treat - but they didn't manage to brighten the gloom in which I contemplated my shooting abilities. This is all a nonsense, I thought, you should be reconciled to buying your meat in pink plastic packets from the supermarkets and give up this barmy fantasy of shooting damn rabbits.

Nonetheless I found myself, once again, in a hedge this afternoon, the first day of Spring and a glorious day to boot. Looking out at the brilliant sunshine form home I remembered something I'd read on the Net about rabbits coming out in the day if it's very sunny so I thought I'd go and camp out a while in the field and see if anything was happening. So I sent Mrs. Hubert a doubtless impressive self-portrait and then went back to looking at the rabbits I could see about a hundred yards away up the field. They had indeed come out to enjoy the sun, But they might as well be on the moon, I was thinking, as a hundred yards away since I can't shoot anything like that distance and I'm no good at stalking.

I sat and watched them a while and thought, Oh well, I'll try and crawl up there just for the hell of it - I'd never managed to stalk and shoot a rabbit before - I'd never got close enough, or I'd scared them off or I'd just missed the shot every single time I'd ever tried, so I set off with little belief that I'd do anything more than waste my time again.

I set out, crawling most of the way but also - when the rabbits had ducked back into their burrows for a while - advancing in a crouch to cover the distance faster and then dropping back to lying down again and checking the burrow through the scope. I could feel a gentle breeze blowing directly into my face all the time so I knew I was well set with the wind carrying my scent - and some of the noise of my crawling - off behind me downwind and away from the rabbits. I worked my way closer, had another peer through the scope and then scurried or crawled a bit more. I settled down finally in a little grassy depression about twenty yards away from the burrow and propped my rifle up on the rolled-up camouflage material of my gun slip and waited.

Nothing happened for quite a while -then suddenly a rabbit bounded out of the fence line and sped across the field before I could so much as raise the scope to my eye. Oh well, I thought - and settled down to do some more waiting. Just as I was gearing myself up for another empty-handed walk home a rabbit emerged from the burrow, hopped up the fence line towards me and sat down.

After I shot it I carried it back and walked the distance to where I'd shot from: 21 yards. I'd aimed via the thirty-yard cross-hairs in the centre of the reticule rather than at the twenty-yard mark a little bit above - but the shot had still been on target. I remembered the trajectory path I'd been looking at earlier in the week that had suggested - for the pellets and gun I was using - that there'd be an almost completely flat flight-path between twenty and thirty yards. If I'd read the path right then this shot seemed to bear that out: I'd aimed at a thirty-yard impact point and the pellet had hit exactly where I'd aimed it on the rabbit - but at 21 yards instead.

Pleased with myself and chuffed that I'd finally managed to stalk and shoot a rabbit - rather than just lying in wait and, as it were, ambushing them, I reflected that if I'm going to carry on being rubbish at estimating distances then perhaps I could try to be rubbish more often at distances between twenty and thirty yards.
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Tags: distance, hunting, stalking, rabbits, air rifles, Weihrauch

Hunting Fieldcraft: Mapping your shoot

I find estimating distances in the field to be really tricky. I've missed a few shots recently where - when I've thought them over to see what went wrong and paced out the distance of the shot afterwards - it's become clear that, on most occasions, what's happened is that I've just been plain bad at figuring out the distance. The worst one recently was where I was suddenly confronted with a rabbit at close range through the scope and I decided to aim the shot via the '20 yard' spot in the reticule. The shot did not do the job and, when I put the rifle down it was obvious why: the rabbit was closer to ten yards than it was to twenty. Which has shamed me, really, into making more of an effort about this.

In order to try and get better, I've done some walking around where I'll pick an object which I guess is 30 yards away and then I'll pace up to it to see how close my guess was. Doing this over and over again does seem to build up the ability to assess distance more accurately - but I really do need to do this a lot more, since my skills at this are so poor.

In an attempt to sidestep this difficulty for the meantime I've taken to learning some fixed distances around my shoot. I've found a few spots to lie low in the fields where I've previously measured the distance from my hidey-hole to the nearby rabbit holes. I've illustrated one in the photo above (please click on it to see an enlarged image) : I know that this distance - from the hole in the fence (where I lie) across the next field to the burrows at the base of the fence there - is thirty yards. So if a rabbit - after it has sat on the lip of its burrow, as they often seem to, and sniffed for a few minutes to see that there's no obvious danger a-foot - hops a few yards away to start feeding then I can at least reckon on being able to work out their actual distance from a point which I know to be true. If the rabbit hops five yards towards me, say, then I know - at least in principle - that to aim at the mid-point between the 20 and the 30 yard points in the scope reticule will not be wildly inaccurate.

Hunting Rabbits is difficult!

Yesterday I set out about four-thirty, about an hour and three-quarters before dusk. Rabbits - as far as I know - don't seem to emerge in numbers before dusk so going out early was more for the pleasure of being outside and walking around in the fields than anything else.

I chose one sheltered spot at the base of a tree in the hopes that the view into the next field would yield early rabbits and that the neighbouring trees would be places where wood pigeons might roost. I sat there for a little while but soon saw that my view of the trees and the field was actually rather cramped - so I set off again.

I sat under another tree with a view through a hedge across another field. At once two rabbits emerged and began to hop along the line of the fence fifty yards away across the field. This was too far for a shot so I watched them through the scope instead (and took a picture - whose blurriness is not due to the scope optics, but to the difficulty of focusing a camera with one hand whilst holding and pointing an 11lb rifle with the other). After a while, one of the rabbits stopped nibbling grass and ran - to my surprise - straight across the field towards me before ducking through the hedge and emerging about fifteen yards away from me on my left. Green jeans, I decided, a camouflage jacket, an olive-drab baseball cap and a mottled-green scarf round my face must have concealed me very well, but this rabbit was now so close that it seemed to me impossible to turn and point my rifle at it without making it aware that I was sitting there. I began to move as slowly as I possibly could - but it was no good, the rabbit fled.

I walked across the field to the fence where I'd seen the rabbits and lay down beside it, looking along the line of the wire down the field. My approach had startled them into hiding but fifteen minutes later the commotion of my arrival had faded enough to allow one rabbit to pop out in front of me at - again - fifteen yards. This rabbit seemed much more interested in eating than it was in me so I could take some time to steady the shot and try and gauge an aim point. My scope - a Hawke SR6 Nite Eye - is calibrated to offer .22 calibre air rifle aim points at between 20 and 60 yards -but at fifteen yards I was forced to guess the position - relative to the 30-yard zero - that my pellet would be in its arc. So I chose a point just above the twenty-yard mark in the scope and squeezed off a head shot. This missed completely and the rabbit - utterly unharmed - tore back to its burrow.

I pondered this for a bit as the light died: perhaps my scope has drifted in the last week - maybe I needed to go and make sure that it was still zeroed correctly? More likely, it was just that I'd judged the distance or the aim point wrongly - or wobbled or failed to follow through. Dispirited, I got up and walked down the fence about a hundred yards and then lay down again.

There's a distant street lamp that throws some light over this corner of the field and, as dusk became dark, I waited for it to turn on - only yesterday it didn't come on at all. Thoroughly miserable by then, I lay there in the dark for a while before getting up and trudging home for a (vegetarian) supper.

Air Rifle Hunting & Wandering

I went out shooting early today. I wanted to walk around some parts of the fields that I've been neglecting and get to know them a bit better. I was also trying to see if I could spot any Wood-Pigeons coming back to roost since I've yet to shoot one of these and I'm keen to add them to the cook pot. Quite early on in the afternoon I settled down beside big tree - well sheltered from view by some dead nettle stalks - and watched the field next to it, to see what sort of rabbit activity would go on while it was still light.

After fifteen minutes I saw two pop out, run a bit and then sit looking warily around - but I ended up deciding, after spending a while trying to figure out what distance away they were that - despite being nicely concealed - my position was no good. The rabbits all seemed to be showing up at about fifty yards away from me. At this distance through a x6 magnification scope this always looks to me like a target I can shoot at, but appearances are deceptive - fifty yards is just too far away, for me at least, to stand any chance of making a humane kill. So I wandered off again.

I found a little, dense, shrubby green wood which, in one part, was carpeted with old bottles - a glass dump for the farms out this way, I guessed. I lay down near the edge of the wood and looked out onto a stretch of field where I've seen rabbits before, I lay there for fifteen minutes or so but I think that while there was very little wind this afternoon, what there was might have been taking my scent towards them and keeping them in their burrows. There was obviously nothing doing there, so I moved on again.

I've taken to lying just along the boundary of a field right up against an overgrown wire fence in the hope that rabbits hopping out of their burrows further down the field will not notice me. So I lay there for another twenty minutes and, while I certainly saw a few rabbits again, they were at a hopeless sixty yards. I decided to move down along the fence a little towards a corner of the field that gets a little illumination from some street lighting not too far away. The little bit of extra light there makes it possible for me - if I'm looking down the field towards it, at least - to see rabbits in clear silhouette for some time after dusk has turned into early evening. I lay there for a good while, starting to get rather cold and aware that the happy, good spirits that I'd enjoyed all afternoon had started evaporated into a fog of impatience.

A little more of this and I was reaching the point where I was starting to be more occupied with cursing my own ineptitude than I was with noticing my surroundings. Sometimes I can just shrug off off a fruitless hunting trip but this evening I was becoming increasingly cross with myself for having failed again as well as stubbornly unwilling to make the walk home with empty hands. This - for me - is a recipe for a very unhappy state of mind and one that it's difficult to get out of.

Right then, about twenty yards away, two rabbits hopped through the fence into the field right in front of me. Moving extremely slowly, I inched the rifle up and brought the scope towards my eye - and took a head shot on the nearest rabbit.

I felt a fool for feeling proud, walking home with a rabbit that I'd shot, but I did feel proud - and happy that there was some meat for the pot tonight.

Hunting Ethics: Learning from experience

Some excellent advice here from the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC) on hunting rabbits with air rifles:

http://www.basc.org.uk/content/rabbit_shooting

http://www.basc.org.uk/content/airriflepractice

The BASC says that rabbits must not be shot less than two metres from their burrows. This is so as to prevent the possibility of a wounded rabbit getting back to its burrow before you can dispatch it. This is very good advice.

This evening I stalked up to a warren where I could see some rabbits. On my approach they went back to earth but I lay flat and waited for ten minutes. One emerged slowly and sat just above the entrance to its burrow and in plain sight for an easy 30-yard shot. But a shot rabbit on its burrow will very likely- even if it's killed outright - just fall straight back down the hole and be lost. This rabbit paused and then ran straight across the field to enter another burrow on the other side. I carried on waiting and five minutes later another rabbit emerged. Again, it waited, then it hopped a couple of metres away from its hole - and then sat up and offered me its profile. I had plenty of time to sight and stabilise; I took the head shot and it went down instantly and lay still. I got up to go and retrieve the rabbit - utterly confident that the shot was a good one -but then saw to my distress that it was not in fact dead - it had started to struggle back towards its burrow and it made it before I could get there or take another shot.

I can certainly testify that this is a very bad feeling: knowing that the animal is probably seriously wounded and also that there's nothing you can do about it. I walked back home across the fields sick at heart and angry with myself for having perhaps grabbed too greedily at the shot.

Crosman 2250 Ratcatcher

I wish I still had the Ratty. I had to flog it to get the cash for a full-power gun that might at least allow me to get the odd, inattentive rabbit. Crosman air guns come from the factory as very basic but highly customisable guns and there's a giant network of people who specialise in building on the basic forms of the bog-standard Crosman. Here's a few links:

Crosman Airgun Forum (new)

Crooked Barn

Custom CrosmanParts and Spares

AirgunMod - Custom & Modified Crosman Airguns

Even six months later when I've learned a tiny bit more about stalking and suchlike, I'm still not at all sure that I'd be any use with a Ratty - even one with a souped-up range. The furthest I got into the world of Ratty-customisation was to get a set of springs which lightened the fairly hefty single-stage trigger pull and pushed the internal hammer a little bit harder in its flight toward the CO2 release pin - thereby releasing more gas and generating more push behind the pellet. So, more poke, but less shots per cannister as more gas was used in each shot.

My memory of using the Ratty after rabbits is this: I'm crawling between cow-pats, cold, slightly wet around the kneecaps and trembling with anticipation: there is a rabbit in the field ahead of me. I edge up to a steel fence and - trying not to breathe too loudly - edge the Ratty through the bars of the fence and plonk my head alongside so I can see through the scope with the gun pointing rabbit-wards. I wait - cold and nervous - while my breathing settles down and watch the rabbit looking around - he's presenting me with a perfect profile for a head shot and I'm aiming exactly at a point where an imaginary lines reaching back from its eye would intersect with one coming down from its ear, bang on the creature's brain for (what's known as) a humane kill. My breathing has settled, I'm spot-on on target so I squeeze the trigger and....

There's a 'phut'. The rabbit looks round, unperturbed and completely uninjured, decides that the present company is - by and large - unwanted and then proceeds back towards its burrow at no great speed.

In my excitement, I'd wildly misjudged the range and the looping trajectory of my heavy .22 pellet had resulted in it burying itself in the muck ten yards or so short of the rabbit.

I repeated this several times and started doing lots of searches on Google for "good air rifle for hunting rabbits".

Let me Google that for you.

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Tags: air rifles, crosman, Ratcatcher, hunting, rabbits, shooting, stalking, trajectory

On the Crossman 2250: No More Ratcatcher

This is the gun I do not use to go hunting for rabbits.

Trying to figure out how to do this hunting thing is far from simple; it's a complicated learning process and one that I'm still very much involved in. This gun, then, is a snapshot from an early understanding of what was needed to get a rabbit for the pot.

It's a modified Crosman 2250 Ratcatcher. These guns are economical to buy new and can be very cheap second hand: I picked this one up (minus the scope and sound moderator) for £70 via the Pigeon Watch Forum. This was a good deal because the gun was in fine condition and had been modified with the addition of a steel breech. Ratcatchers come from the factory with a plastic breech and, if you want to achieve any sort of stability for your scope you'll definitely need to discard this and get a steel breech with proper scope rails (the Ratty does come with a scope of sorts when it's new, but it's very close to being a purely comical addition and little use for anything other than backyard plinking). Since this breech work had been done and the gun was in sparkling condition I was delighted with it for £70.

I picked up a second-hand scope from another online air-gun forum (£20 as I recall) a Nikko Sterling Silver Crown 4 X 32 (which seemed to me at the time perfectly adequate) and then a sound moderator from another forum (second-hand & made out of a high-tech plastic called "Delrin") for another £30.

The Ratty runs on CO2 - little cartridges that you can buy at gun shops or online - and fires a .22 pellet at about 7.5ftlbs. Though it's worth saying that it fires at 7.5ftlbs in warm or mild weather - in cold weather the numbers will go down a great deal.

I liked the Ratty: it was extraordinarily light and easy to carry - you could wander round the fields for hours with this thing on your shoulder and practically forget that it was there; with the scope set up it was accurate: after a good deal of practise I was getting good-enough groups at 30 yards to justify using the thing to hunt with. So start to hunt I did.

And I got nothing. I couldn't hit a damn thing. And the reason? It's not about the gun, I learned, it's not about the gun.

The finest, most ludicrously expensive, blinged, polished & smartly-equipped air rifle available (shooting under 12ftlbs as per the demands of the law) will, I eventually learned, get you absolutely bugger all for the pot if you don't know enough about the business of hunting itself.

The Ratcatcher, if you can stalk and if you know about how to conduct yourself in the field whilst out after rabbits, will probably, at close range (that's to say up to 30 yards) almost certainly help you fill up the cook pot. But if you don't know how to stalk (I didn't and I still don't) then forget it. If you can't get very close, then it just doesn't have the poke for the job.

I spent a few weeks getting this into my thick bonce and then bit the bullet and bought another gun.