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

Why a .177 over a .22 for Hunting Rabbits?

Bpaul wrote in a comment recently:

I'd be curious on the numbers your gun is putting out if you get a chance to shoot it over a chrony.

Also, your decision to go .177 from .22 -- did you blog about that? Be curious to hear why...

Hi Bpaul,

I went for all this, basically, because the opportunity presented itself and the argument about the flatter trajectory of the .177 finally convinced me. With the roller-coaster trajectory of the .22 at 12ftlb there's the constant difficulty of trying to estimate where the pellet will be in its arc when it reaches its target point.

If you zero at 35 yards with a .22 there's a variation over, say, 40 yards of about three inches up and down through an imaginary line from the end of the scope to the target. The pellet starts two inches below this line, climbs up to about an inch above it and then immediately after 35 yards drops below it again in its downwards fall. So there's a three-inch margin for error depending on where the target is and constant adjustments up and down need to be made in the reticule to accommodate this while aiming. (The graphs below are from ChairGun Pro available free here.)

With the .177 at 12ftlbs however, the arc of the lighter pellet will stay within one inch from about 10 right the way out to about 40 yards (.177 RWS Superdomes weight only 8.3 grains against the 14.66 grains of .22 H&N Field Targets). So in theory that means that if you can judge that the rabbit is at a distance anywhere between 10 and 40 yards then you can be fairly confident that a shot at the intersection of the scope's cross-hairs will result in a pellet hitting the target area. If you compare the length of the different pink kill zones on the two graphs you can see that they do bear this out.

My distance estimation is not so great but even I can tell if a rabbit is between 10 and 40 yards; so purely on the basis of this there's a much stronger case for going with a .177 for fieldwork.

To get the pellets out at anything up close to 12ftlb a .177 needs a spring with a few more coils on it than one in a .22 - and you can feel the greater effort needed to cock the rifle now. (The rifle was of course chronographed before leaving the shop and it was doing a healthy and legal 11.78ftlbs with the RWS Superdomes I'm using.) I've heard it said from people commenting here that with this stronger spring the increased release vibration in a .177 would act against any gain that the flatter trajectory could provide. This did seem to make sense to me but (and I can only speak about my rifle, of course) thanks to Tony at Sandwell Field Sports, if anything the gun now fires with perceptibly less spring judder than it did before the work was done.

My damn cold is still hanging around so I suspect I won't be going out today to see if all this theory on paper translates into a greater incidence of rabbit on the table - but I'm hopeful for the future.

Cheers,

HH
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Tags: accuracy, 177, air rifles, pellet, sandwell field sports, shooting, Springer, hunting, trajectory

Fieldcraft: In Need of Support...

I was feeling quite pleased with myself yesterday because I'd come up with - what seemed to me, at least - a nifty way of supporting the rifle while I sat and peered from the cover of the orchard. I'd put an old fence post up against a tree a while back and this had provided some support - but I still had to hold the weight of the gun and stop it sliding to the right and down the post. Sitting there yesterday, it occurred to me to loop the strap from my gun slip over the top of the post and rest my hand and the rifle in the 'V' formed by the slope of the post and the hanging, rolled-up slip. This felt comfortable and it also felt as if I would still be allowing the rifle to move when it was fired. It's important, I gather, not to rest springers on a hard surface when you're firing or their recoil will bounce the gun up before the pellet leaves the barrel and cause the shot to go anywhere but where you would have liked.

What an resourceful chap I am, I thought, and, in celebration, fired off a couple of 'noble hunter' self-portraits with my camera phone.

But soft! What's this? A rabbit had appeared at the far end of the hedgerow and had started to hop, skip and jump towards me (I'm much obliged to them when they do this, it always makes me very happy). It stopped at a convenient thirty yards and then turned to look at the field and present me with its profile. I sighted up the shot - marvelling at the steadiness of the view through the scope and congratulating myself once more - squeezed in the first stage of the trigger, breathed out and, as I reached the steady point before breathing in again, increased the squeeze for the second stage of the trigger pull...

And realised that I'd forgotten to break the barrel and cock the rifle. Whoops! By the time I'd finally done this and stuck my head back round the tree again, the rabbit had scarpered.

A loudly-mooing herd of cows came into the field just then and - spotting me - came cheerfully towards me to say hello and moo some more. There was no more shooting to be done in that part of the field so, instead, I had a couple of refreshing, citrus-and-bergamot-flavoured sniffs of snuff, took a few more 'noble hunter' snaps for good measure - and then wandered home; empty-handed but, inexplicably, rather cheerful.
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Tags: field craft, shooting positions, Springer

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

The Joy of Springers?

There is a 'return to springers' going on, I understand. Bored with the monotonous regularity of being able to predictably and silently hit target after target, rabbit after rabbit, with terrifying, military precision via the shock and awe technology of the high-end, pre-charged pneumatic, multi-shot air rifle, people - nostalgic perhaps for the rosy days of recoil, loud noises and missing things - are tossing aside their grands-worth pneumatics in favour of guns with great big boingy springs in them.

I can see the point, I suppose. I've only ever had the chance to fire a couple of shots with a HW100 and it was a bizarre experience. After getting to grips with shooting via the great, snorting, hefty howitzer that is the HW80, the 100 seemed like a trip with Alice to Wonderland: You are looking through the scope at the target, you apply a degree of pressure to the trigger and you note - whilst doing so - that, inexplicably, the target appears to have developed a small hole at precisely the bullseye point. Casting around in order to find a cause for this anomaly, you are forced to consider that the all-but-inaudible 'fhut!' a second ago was the 'report' of the gun in your hands as it fired. This seems ludicrous at first because the gun has sat utterly motionless in your arms and has clearly not 'fired' at all in any sense that you are familiar with. But no, it's true, the damn thing actually has gone off!

I can see how this would get boring if the gratification you were seeking in the act of firing the gun was simply the pleasure of firing the gun and no other. If acquiring a rabbit for the pot or not acquiring a rabbit for the pot was a matter of indifference to you then I can see that the satisfaction found in wrestling with the difficulties of the springer might well - then - become the main event, as it were. I can see how this might be the case, but for me it isn't the case: meat is crazily expensive, I can't afford to buy it but I am resistant to being forced into vegetarianism - so I want those rabbits in the pot.

So, yes, cast aside those tiresome pneumatics and return to the blue-remembered-hills of spring-filled joy (but when you do cast them aside, please, cast them in my direction...).

My Weihrauch HW80k

I'm new to all this. I only started trying to figure out how to get rabbits for the pot a few months ago, at the end of Autumn last year.  I could see a period of being absolutely skint heading my way and - before it got to me - I decided I'd spend a little money and see if I could learn how to get some of the free-range rabbit that I saw scampering around in the fields nearby.

The first guns I picked up weren't remotely right, but I think I needed to get them in order to do a bit of plinking and see this for myself. So I bought two cheap, second-hand Crosmans: a 'Ratcatcher 2250' and an 'American Classic 1377'. Both of these had their strong points, but a bit more reading, a lot of target practise and some first attempts at trying to get get some experience in the field led me to understand that, coupled as they were with my non-existent stalking skills, neither of these were going to do the job.

I had a tiny budget and I'd need sell both of these gun if I was going to get a better one and I really wanted to get going as soon as I could. So what gun was I going to be able to get? What was within my price range and good for shooting rabbits?

The obvious answer was a Weihrauch HW80. They came equipped with a reputation for being almost indestructibly tough, accurate, well-made, dependable and powerful. Good, clean HW80's were still beyond my price range though. A search at Guntrader will still show HW80's starting just shy of £200 and heading up to around £400 for highly tuned guns in fine condition.

After haunting sites like this for a couple of weeks I saw an HW80k come up for £120 in a private sale a little north of where I lived. I rang him up. The gun had previously been modified for a ten-year old boy to use by having had an inch and a half sawn off the stock. Well, that's no good then, I thought. "But I've still got the piece that was cut off", he said, "and you could put it back on again easy enough."

'Well, OK then,' I thought, 'why not?'

I drove up there. The gun was in great condition; the guy who was selling it was clearly honest, friendly and trustworthy; the stock had been very cleanly shortened and, just as he'd said, it looked like it would be very easy to repair. I bought it on the spot. It didn't have a shoulder strap so I went into a charity shop a mile or so up the road and found a good quality, thick leather belt for a couple of quid.

Bingo: I had a proper rabbit gun.