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. 
• 
  

• 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! 

_________________________________________________________


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
_________________________________________________________

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

The big question: .177 or .22 for Rabbit Hunting?

177 or 22? That - a swift peek at any of the popular airgun forums will quickly assure you - is most certainly the question.

To cut to the chase, the answer's 177.

Why? Well: it seems to boil down to trajectory - the parabolic path that a hopefully rabbit-bound pellet describes after it leaves the barrel of a rifle. It does not go in a straight line, I learned to my surprise, and then drop when it's tired - it inscribes, instead, an arc 'twixt gun and rabbit. But if it does that, then it's not simply a question of 'point and shoot' at all; distance becomes a crucial factor. How can you predict where in its arc your pellet is going to be when it reaches the head of the rabbit that you wish to shoot? Because if it's an inch too high then it will miss, and if it's an inch too low, then it will miss again. Nightmare!

177 pellets have a much flatter trajectory in the 40-odd yards after they leave the rifle barrel than 22's do. It's as simple as that. You can arrange it - I gather - so that in the area, say, between 20 and 35 yards (the crucial area within which the vast majority of relatively humane air rifle shooting is going to be taking place) the pellet will deviate from an imaginary straight line drawn between the end of the barrel and the rabbit's brain by a matter of only so little as half an inch or so. A 22 pellet, on the other hand, will be drawing a line that looks like the path of an amusing roller-coaster ride.

This I learned after I blew all the cash I had to spare on a 22 rifle.

If you want to have a gander at some parabolas, head over to http://www.chairgun.com/ or to the ballistic reticle calculator (superb name!) at http://www.hawkeoptics.com/brc/index.php and download the free software.

[In my time machine I revisit this post to leave a link to the future where I will write more upon this topic and my decision to opt for .177: http://austeritygrub.blogspot.com/2010/03/why-177-for-hunting-rabbits.html ]

The Midland Game Fair

So, yes, I went to the Midland Game fair and, yes, it was an absolutely superb day out. I'd never been to one before and had no idea what to expect - I didn't know if I was going to love it or be bored stupid and regret the whopping £17 it cost to get in. But I really shouldn't have worried, it was close to being Hubert-heaven. I could have spent one whole, happy day just sitting in the falconry arena and watching the beautiful, spooky, dappled-white-and-ochre barn owls swoop about; I could have passed an equally fine day just watching mesmerised while a pack of infinitely patient sheepdogs herded a flock of geese. There was so much I wanted to see it was just mind boggling; I left feeling that one day was nowhere near enough and if I were to go next year I'd pitch a tent and stay the whole weekend.

Getting there, though, was a pain in the bum. Like a fool I'd decided against the scenic but wiggly back-lane route and chosen instead to cycle down the fast, cramped and choc-a-block-with-4x4's nightmare that is the A5. It took me an hour and a half of sweaty pedaling and the tally of cursing at careless motorists came to about a half-dozen bursts of standard-grade swearing plus one fit of furious and obscene screaming (some bugger who missed me by a scant foot at 70mph).

I finally pedaled over the brow of a hill onto the site itself and was just gobsmacked by the scale of the place. I set off at once down Gunmakers Row and there I peered at rank after rank of shotgun & rifle stands and the unbelievable crowd of people. Then I gawped for a while at bloodhounds and ferrets before I realised I was absolutely shattered and needed to flop with a coffee & bun right then or risk keeling over. Nicely recharged with carbs, caffeine and tobacco I set off for the Air Gun quarter.

I spent hours there: marveling at the unreachably-expensive but gorgeous Daystates; admiring the tidy and determined-looking new BSA's; frankly coveting the Falcon PCP pistols; puzzling a bit at the Gunpowers (they do look bonkers but I'd still have one); shooting terribly on the ten-metre match range; pondering pellet lubes; chatting very happily, as ever, with Tony and Tracy (both worked off their feet) at the Sandwell Field Sports stand; seizing the chance to finally eyeball a Weihrauch HW75 - in other words, having a bit of an air-gun orgy. Knackered once more I was forced to sit down, gobble a pasty and gape at the milling throng of fellow air gun fanciers (including one dapper bloke sporting a suit & plus-fours all made out of Realtree camo).

Then I set about trying to say hello to some of the writers I hoped would be there. I was in luck: I had the great pleasure of a conversation with the editor of Sporting Shooter, James Marchington.

James' Blog is simply the place to look if you're at all interested in reading a serious, intelligent and often very funny treatment of the contested politics in the UK shooting scene; he's a great advocate for shooters, has a fund of great stories to tell and I would have nattered with him gladly for hours.

After saying cheerio to James, I spent a while chatting with the friendly folk at the new Airgun Shooter magazine: with Mathew Manning (whose nice-looking book Hunting with Air Rifles: A Complete Guide has just been published) and with Nigel Allen - the editor - about the pro's and con's of paper versus net publishing for airgun writers (yes, it's a shame, he thinks, that so much great writing languishes in unreachable magazine archives but putting it on the net at the moment seems like a vast amount of work with very little obvious financial return for the writers). Then I wandered over to talk a while with Jim Tyler, the veteran shootist of AirGun World who was kind enough to give me a few photography tips (don't try stalking rabbits with a huge digital SLR round your neck, for one).

For me - a gonzo amateur airgun writer - this kind of chance to speak with so many professionals in one place was worth the sweat and cursing of the journey all by itself.

With the day almost done I threw myself back into the crowded streets of the fair; caught a display of gun dogs joyfully pulling dummy birds from a lake; gazed at something like a hundred magnificent hawks, falcons and owls; considered the sharp-suits, cut flowers and champagne on tap in the 'Weath Management' marquee - then found a shooting range.

I'd never fired anything beyond an air rifle before but here - after deciding against ten shots for a tenner on an AK47 - three quid bought me an enjoyable eight shots on a bolt action Marlin while a fairground PA thundered out, of all things, Jefferson Airplane's 'White Rabbit'.

I rubbernecked a while in the knife stalls in the hope I could find a little folding Fallkniven near the reach of my wallet (not a chance) and then found my eye taken by the work on one of the smallest stalls. A young chap called Oliver Davison had, he told me, built a propane forge in his own back garden, taught himself the craft and was now producing fine pocketknives that seemed perched half-way between utility and jewelery. Lovely things.

Shiny objects aside, a lot of the day's pleasure came from pure people watching. Much of my past was spent in cities so it's still fascinating for me to get glimpses of lived lives that I wouldn't have been able to guess at while I was crammed in the Tube under Oxford Circus: blokes from farms in their Sunday best; falconers from Devon comparing scars; flawless tweed on landed youth and camo-clad lads from Shropshire towns - all of this is fascinating for me. And everyone had a dog, or more often had five dogs - and it seemed to me that no one there would have so much as batted an eye at the notion of someone bagging the odd rabbit for tea...




Near the end of the day a bloke packing up his stall said, 'Hey, do you want some beer?' He pointed at a crate of John Smith's, 'I'm off now and I don't want it - help yourself!' I thanked him sincerely and did what he said.

Really knackered by then - and dreading the A5 - I sat down to stoke up on hot chocolate and jam butties. Munching, I cursed myself for not bringing a map to help navigate the back lanes when suddenly I remembered - of course! - I had a Sat Nav on my phone.

So, recalling the great day I'd just had and vowing to go to another one soon, I cycled home smiling along the peaceful lanes of the Staffordshire countryside - pausing for a beer half way - while a nice lady robot told me which turnings to take.

Air Rifle Shooting: Still learning how to zero, hold, breathe and fire...

Hunting a couple of times a week over the last eighteen months I've now got this shooting thing sorted, have I? I must have learned how to shoot by now, surely?

Well, no. Learning is still something I do every time I go out - as my session yesterday made clear.

A beautiful day. Out in the fields I plonked down against a fence and - soothed all the while by the pastoral music of the M6 motorway directly behind me - popped fifty-odd shots thirty yards across a field into little A5 paper targets I'd pinned to the base of a tree. I'd scrawled a series of biro circles on the paper, all roughly an inch in diameter.

My first effort appalled me: a ragged, two-and-a-half inch spattering, low and to the right, with flyers out to four inches. A thoroughly miserable group. Clearly my zero had drifted but I was still all over the place in terms of group coherence.

I took off the scope adjustment covers and gave it two clicks left and two clicks up. This is lazy of me - it's better to do the horizontal and vertical adjustments separately but it's just not the way my head works.


Well, O.K. That's a little better. Slightly tighter, somewhat closer.

As I carried on shooting I began to become more aware of how I was holding the rifle and how I was breathing when I let go of the shot. My instinct is to hold the gun tightly - left and right hand both - hold my breath at the point that I fire and use the whole fleshy pad of my index finger to pull back on the trigger. For me that's natural, it's instinctive - but it's all wrong. Tony at the Penkridge Air Rifle Club has several times said to me, 'You've gone blue, lad!' when I finally drew in a great whooping breath after a rigidly tense and airless ten seconds of trying to get a shot off.

I began to make the effort to keep the cycle of my breathing regular as I watched the cross hairs rise and fall on the target - trying to pull the trigger in the pause between my breaths rather than manufacturing a longer interval by ceasing to breath at all. Things started to get better.

Another two clicks up. Another two clicks left.

I began to think about my grip on the rifle and the way I squeezed the trigger. I've learned that it's vital to let springers rest on your hands and move freely when you fire them - fighting the recoil by holding tight only makes things worse. So I tried to pay attention to how I was holding the gun. When I'm firing groups the idea 'God, I'm a lousy shot! Gotta get better!' usually ends up making me hang on for grim death, tense as hell. So with each shot now I tried to loosen my mortice-like grip on the stock and relax while I fired.

Once again, the group got a little better. Two more clicks up; two more to the left.

Tony has also mentioned trigger-finger placement to me at the club, 'Just use the tip of your finger,' he'd said, 'right at the base of the trigger - that's all you need.' So each shot I took I tried to notice how I was touching the trigger. 'Rekord' triggers on Weirhauch rifles are famed for their sensitivity - they really do repay your attention and the less force you exert on the trigger, the less you make the gun wobble when you shoot. The less it wobbles, the more accurate the shot.

Still a little bit shy of the centre mark, I gave the scope adjusters one click up and one click left. Then - relaxed as I could get, holding the rifle loosely, breathing evenly and using only the tippy-top of my finger on the end of the trigger - I fired off five shots.


Whoa! A heaven-sent group, a thing of beauty! You'd better stop shooting right now, I thought, and get your camera out before you put a flyer in there and mess up the pretty picture...

Pistols & Histories

I watched a television programme recently in which the editor of a popular satirical magazine was asked about 'opinion' on the Internet. 'The blogosphere!', he exclaimed, 'You think I should consult the blogosphere? Where everyone writes very quickly about Hitler!' I went to sleep with this on my mind and the next day I woke up and thought, 'well, yes, perhaps it is cranky of me to relate things so quickly to the Second World War?' I went to a post I'd written here a week or so before, found a part of it that contained a reference to WWII German army uniforms and deleted it. After all, I thought, I don't want to be a crazy man that writes about Hitler on the Internet.

This morning I was thinking again about the Record Jumbo air pistol I'd bought in Bristol in the 1990's; I selected the text 'Record Jumbo', right-clicked to do a search and found that the gun was designed by a man called Fritz Barthelmes. (http://tinyurl.com/yf45bc9)

'The company Barthelmes KG was established in Oggenhausen (district Heidenheim/Württemberg) in 1948 by Fritz Barthelmes. The manufactured products were inscribed and sold with the registered trademark "RECORD”. Mr. Fritz Barthelmes worked over 20 years as a successful senior designer in the arms factory Walther in Zella-Mehlis. He was owner of numerous patents and the designer of the famous Walther P 38.' ( http://tinyurl.com/ylng86e)

I searched for 'Walther P 38' and found: Walther P38 is a 9 mm pistol that was developed as the service pistol of the Wehrmacht at the beginning of World War II. (http://tinyurl.com/yep37at)

The page that I read about the P.38 didn't contain any reference to Barthelmes, so I followed another link and found: Fritz Barthelmes, born in Zella St Blasii in 1899, deserves to be remembered as the designer of the Walther P. 38, developed in the 1930s when he was chief engineer of Carl Walther Waffenfabrik of Zella Mehlis. The relevant British patent for the locking system is, after all, granted jointly to Barthelmes and Fritz Walther, and it is clear from the testimony of surviving employees that the concept was due more to Barthelmes than Walther. Fritz Barthelmes escaped from what was to be the Soviet Zone of a partitioned Germany in the summer of 1945, settling in the village of Heidenheim, where, ironically, Fritz Walther's fortunes also began a post war recovery. There he formed 'Fritz Barthelmes KG' to make metal goods and, later, starting and signal pistols. Barthelmes died in 1973. (http://tinyurl.com/yh8n73u)

While I clicked these links another set of links and associations started to open up for me; not between items of data on different servers this time, but between the thoughts and memories that occurred to me when I read phrases like 'designer of the Walther P. 38', or 'service pistol of the Wehrmacht'. I wondered about Barthelmes' escape from the advancing Russian army: what must it have been like to live in Zella-Mehlis at this time? I found a piece about the American 778th Tank Battalion in 1945: On the 11th Division drove. It was almost impossible to keep up with cities and towns reached and passed: Schleid, Rosa, Suhl and Schleusinger all by April 10. Enemy resistance was crumbling; everybody in the battalion who wanted a Nazi souvenir had one, from shiny new pistols to helmet and flags. Suhl and Zella-Mehlis had plants that made hand guns and machine pistols. The plants were full of weapons and parts in bins. The G.I.'s had plenty of ordnance to trade and sell to the Russians at war's end. (http://tinyurl.com/yjvyt7y)

I thought about how strange it was that the gun I bought in Bristol in the 1990's was designed by the same man who'd designed weapons for the German army. At this point some things that my father had written about his time in France during the war came to my mind; he'd been the pilot of a Lancaster that was shot down on its way back from having bombed the V2 rocket site at St. Leu D'Esserent in June 1944. He'd parachuted out of the burning plane and, separated from his crew, had spent some days and nights hiding on his own in the countryside. He was discovered eventually by a group of farmers and Resistance members. I remembered what he wrote about hiding in a corn field: 'I stayed there all day. I had a drink and sucked some Horlicks tablets. The children passed again going home and they still didn't see me. Being summer it didn't get dark till late. I could see a wood in front of me so I went for it. It was an eerie wood with big holes like graves with stacks of wood in front of them, (I realised after they were made as trenches to hide in) it was nearly dark and the wood ended abruptly, one pace and I was out in the open. I stopped dead, someone was standing on the railway bridge about 100 yards away. I didn't move. I stood for minutes hoping that he had not seen me. He moved away. To the left there were some cottages and to the right there was a farmhouse. I decided to cross the railway lines and go across the next field. I was halfway across when I heard a shout, three men were running towards me. In my jacket I had my gun, a Smith and Wesson 38 bore revolver. I took it out. I didn't know what to do. The man whom I had seen on the bridge was the leader of the men, he was the leader of the resistance in that area. With his second-in-command Bernard and the farmer they were the three men who had come to help me. (I was limping quite badly with my knee I had hurt landing). He had been worried when he had seen me because the train on the railway lines I had crossed had been full of German troops.'
My father stayed with the farmer and two members of the Resistance. 'I helped them make the arm bands they wanted for their unit which was about 200 strong, stamping them and painting them with the tricolour & the Cross of Lorraine. Then they realised I was a trained armourer so they dug up all the old guns they had hidden in the church yard next to the farm house under the grave stones in the cemetery and I cleaned Lugers, German and Italian automatics and shotguns which would have blown up if they had ever been fired.'
'The farmer's dad was a baker by trade and he baked bread every day. The trains on the line stopped outside the farm gate, they dropped off coal and he threw loaves into the cabin for them. Other trains traded in tobacco from Belgium. At the back of the château was a wire enclosure about as big as a tennis court with wire dug into the ground. It was full of rabbits (wild ones) so we had lots of rabbit pie.'

'I had two bolt holes, one was through the back window and under the foundations of the house, it was about 18 inches square. The Germans that patrolled the railway line had decided to inspect the property, they did not expect to find anyone, it was just a nuisance trip. Two Germans saw the farmer in the farmyard and stopped to chat to him, we heard a shot so I went to my bolt hole in the back through the window, Bernard followed me and removed the slab and in I went. I had to crawl in some 15 feet and turn the corner so I was out of sight if anyone flashed a torch. If I had been found the Germans would have shot everyone in the house. I could hear things scratching about, I didn't know if it was rabbits or rats. It was very frightening. It turned out that the German soldier had been playing with his gun and when he had put it back in its holster he had fired it and hurt his foot. Bless him.'

So these pieces of writing come to my mind; some are are easy to think about and some are less so. It's easier, perhaps, for me to dwell on the objects than it is to think about the people that were caught up in all this; so these links hinge around the kind of question - were the guns that the German soldiers carried Walther P.38's? - that I see to be at a certain remove from the life of the situations themselves. Or is it perhaps that these things come up because they are linked in my mind by the word 'pistol' and each set of ideas is connected to this central point like spokes to the hub of a wheel? Whichever way it is, when I read about the career of Fritz Barthelmes, this is what comes to my mind. So thoughts about very ordinary objects - about an air pistol - do seem to link very swiftly for me to material that is tightly bound up with events in the Second World War - events that I can only say have for me the most vivid personal interest. Perhaps it's easy to underestimate how much this might be a shared experience for those of my generation? If this is so and we get a glimpse of this through the preoccupations of those who write on the Internet, perhaps this genuinely startles us?

Or I should we accept the view that we're crazy to be drawn into questions like this? These things, after all, did take place more than sixty years ago, twenty years before I was born; perhaps I should be embarrassed that the threads of my associative life are so knotted up with these supposedly distant things?

But embarrassed or not, surprised or not, these links are there; and up to what point, I wonder, is it admissible to publicly confess that this is so? Beyond what point exactly does it become an indicator of a suspicious irrationality to acknowledge the material that does in fact concern us?

There is a risk in disowning these things too quickly, I think; because perhaps it goes so far for us that these associations are not merely things that we have, not just things we possess - like an air pistol, a knife or a pair of shoes; perhaps there's more at stake? Following these links, on the Internet and in memory, it occurs to me that aside from what I have - my things and my thoughts - there's much of what I am that's bound up here too; perhaps these associations are so foundational as in some way to be the material from which we are actually made, the threads out of which our lives are woven? If we dismiss the seeming strangeness of our own particular memories and associations, embarrassed by the insistence of our personal links and concerns, maybe we run the risk of somehow disowning ourselves?

My father never spoke during my childhood about his training as an armourer - not one word; he wrote these things only a few years before he died in 2006; so, in Bristol in the 1990's, I knew not the first thing about them when I found myself compelled - for reasons that were far from clear to me then - to buy an air pistol designed by Fritz Barthelmes.

_________________________________________________________
Tags: blogging, psychology, rifles, pistols, Walther P38, WWII, Internet, History, Lancaster Bomber, Parachute, War, memory

Out Hunting: Bees, the Catechism and the Oral Object

I found the papery remnants of a beehive when I was out wandering over the fields the other day. After I found it - and rather unwisely perhaps - I looked around for the place it had come from; spotting it, I stuck my head into the hedge where the rest of the hive was hidden. Perhaps I thought that there would be a few bee-free combs full of golden, glistening honey in there that I could pluck out with my bare hands? I'm sure that I had something like that in mind; I love honey, love sweet things, love anything, in fact, that I can cram into my mouth and, when it comes to getting hold of stuff with which to fill my cake-hole, I rarely let anything as trivial as moderation or common sense stand in my way.

What I found, though, when I stuck my head in the hedge was a hole in the ground filled up with more of these old comb fragments and a few disconsolate bees ambling around on top of them. Perhaps, it occurred to me at this point, there might well be a more lively hive beneath the remains of this older one? Perhaps, if there was, the inhabitants might not take kindly to my great ugly mush hovering over them? With this thought, I pulled my head out of the hedge and made off.

Then I sat under a tree for an hour waiting for pigeons and thinking - with little enthusiasm - of the vegetarian meal which awaited me at home if I didn't bag any birds. I'd taken a little book out with me so as to have something to read during these times when I'm staking out a tree in the hope of harvesting wood -pigeons. Opening it, I found myself reading these words by the Dominican friar Herbert McCabe:

We exercise the virtue of temperance in the matter of eating and drinking by, characteristically, taking and enjoying what is sufficient for our health and for the entertainment of our friends.

We may fail (in the exercise of temperateness in this area) by indifference to the enjoyments of the table; by eating and drinking that is totally divorced from either friendship or the requirements of health; by eating what is merely superficially attractive at the expense of a reasonable diet, by drug abuse and by all forms of gluttony.

After about three-quarters of an hour and two missed shots I gave up on the pigeons and went to sit under another tree in the hope of rabbits. The light was fading now and, as it did, so grew my dissatisfaction at the idea of a meatless meal. I must have meat! I thought, I must!

After another half-an-hour, and in near-full darkness by then, a rabbit hopped out from a burrow about five feet away from me and sat there with its back to me. With the scope on the rifle I had no chance of getting a shot at a target that close and so all I could do was sit there and watch it. After a few moments, still not having noticed me, it ran away up the field and kept on running until it was too far away for a shot.

In complete darkness, then, I went home and - with much satisfaction since fruitless hours in search of meat had left me with a great appetite - ate my, in truth, perfectly pleasant vegetarian supper.

_________________________________________________________

Tags: food, hunting, air rifles, shooting, catholic, Christian

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.

_________________________________________________________
Tags: stalking, rabbits, scope, fieldcraft, hunting, shooting, air rifles, photography, rural, 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.
__________________________________________________________

Tags: accuracy, air rifles, hunting, HW80, HW80k, pre-charged pneumatic, Springer, stalking, rabbits

Hunting Ethics & Politics: A Reader Writes

Reading this entry I can't help wondering, where do the stray shots go? What if this blog catches on and we're all at it, stumbling around the fields, missing rabbits and shooting one another! [...]

Wishing you and the next rabbit well, JB.

Thank you, JB, all comments are much appreciated - that anyone takes time out of their lives to read this stuff at all is a tremendous compliment and one for which I'm very grateful.

Where do the stray shots go?

Well, since this is a 12ftlb air rifle we're talking about, generally, those stray shots - at rabbits, anyway - end up burying themselves in the turf about ten foot behind the animal that has just been missed. That's one of the - on the one hand - limitations, and - on the other hand - strengths of the 12ftlb air rifle: the pellets do not go a long way before they run out of puff. If I was taking pot-shots at rabbits - or indeed, at anything else - with, say, a rim-fire rifle the story would be very different: rim-fire bullets can go on for as much as a mile before they give up the ghost and fall earthwards. I'm not likely to be given the opportunity to threaten the local wildlife with a rim-fire any time soon; for one thing, a stringent assessment from local police firearms officers is obligatory before any of us citizens can - in search of their dinner -legally wield one of those.

What if this blog catches on and we're all at it, stumbling around the fields, missing rabbits and shooting one another!

Rabbits - along with Wood Pigeons and Rats - are classed as vermin, not least because of the tremendous damage they do to crops every year. Farmers, up until very recently, had an obligation to take extensive measures in the attempt to rid their land of infestation by these creatures. If shooting rabbits became more popular - and I'd be delighted if it did - then arable farming in the UK would benefit greatly.

Air rifles - although much less powerful than powder-driven rifles - are certainly not toys: people can get injured or indeed, on very rare occasions, killed by them - if they are mishandled. Last night when I was out shooting I took a shot at a wood pigeon - which missed, of course - but it was only after I'd taken the shot that I realised that someone, a hundred or so yards away from me to my left, was walking their dog in the next field. I was mortified and ashamed that I'd been so foolish as to take a shot when there was anyone remotely nearby, even if only - and this was the greatest risk that they faced, I'd say - because the sound of the shot might have alarmed them. I learned something about good practise in shooting last night and it's something I take seriously - I hope that I'll never become complacent as far as safety is concerned.

But even if I were to become an obsessional loon about safety, I couldn't eradicate the element of risk - to others, to myself - entirely. There's a school of thought that says that, in situations where it's judged to be the case that it's not possible to completely remove the possibility of risk, then that activity should be banned forthwith. I'm not a member of that school. Ultimately, I'd say, the only state in which humans can pose no risk whatsoever to each other is the health-and-safety nirvana of being safely dead and buried. Where there's life, there's risk - which is to say, the risk of life itself!

So I'm going to carry on examining the ways in which I need to adapt my practise in order to keep becoming a better, safer shot - but I'm still going to go out after rabbits because, as well as being a blight upon crops, rabbits are, and I can testify to this, very good eating!
__________________________________________________________

Tags: air rifles, ethics, health and safety, politics, hunting, rabbits

Zeroing the HW80k: Experiences with Groups

Concerned that I might be shooting off the mark, I went out yesterday and did a bit of re-zeroing. The first shot I put into the target (the uppermost one) was perfectly on the intersection of the horizontal and vertical lines - God, I thought, that's astounding! The rest of the group, however, was more dispersed - that's groups for you.

After going up and looking at the overall position of the pellets, I decided that the average of their positions was falling somewhat low. I went back 30 yards to the shooting spot, uncapped the top scope adjustment cap and tried to figure out how many clicks meant a movement of about half an inch up at thirty yards. After failing to remember anything that might help me to work it out, I made a guess instead: five clicks 'Up', then. I shot off another group of six (the lower picture above). There were no astonishing and misleading bulls-eyes this time, but, instead, the group had indeed moved up so that the group of shots more accurately surrounded the bulls-eye than it did before.

I spent a little time after this trying to see if there was a lot of difference between the zero point of the RWS Superdomes that I've been using over the last month or so and the rest of the tin of H&N Field Target Trophy's that I'd used before this. I also threw a group in with Air Arms Diabolo Fields to see what that could tell me. And what did I learn? I learned that trying to do this sort of thing in a hurry and draw conclusions from hastily thrown off groups is a bad idea. It'd take, I decided - at least with my shooting, anyway - a procession of groups with each of the different pellets before anything could be properly learned - and I didn't have the time to do that yesterday. So I learned that if I do want to learn stuff then I have to allocate proper amounts of time for learning - and not hope to get rich (with knowledge) quick.

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.