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What gun for… ?

January 31, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

I get this question probably more than any other. What caliber should I choose for wild boar? What about elk? Moose? Texas whitetailed deer? Mule deer? What if I find myself out on a bear hunt and I come across a moose, which I also have a license for and is conveniently in season, what gun should I take?

Folks, first of all, there is no one magic caliber or rifle. Second of all, there are far too many other variables. What is the terrain? Are you going to be hunting in dense brush where your maximum range might top out at 75 yards, or are you seeking out game on wide open rolling plains where a 300 yard shot is considered normal?

At the end of the day, you should choose a rifle that you can comfortable shoot accurately, that won’t cause you to flinch from excessive recoil, and that has enough energy to reliably drop your quarry. Ammunition availability and cost is another consideration as well, since having a rifle you can’t find affordable ammunition for renders it pretty much useless.

Still, there are some calibers favored by sportsmen. A .30-06, .308, .270, or even a 6.5×55 can be used on any game animal found in North America. In fact, outside of Africa (and maybe Australian Water buffalo), these calibers are useful on any medium or large game found throughout the entire world. Get a rifle that you can shoot comfortably in one of these calibers and top it off with a good quality 3-9x scope and you’ll be well equipped for most any hunt.

Hunting, Rifles

Hunting, Rifle

Maximum Point Blank Range: What distance should you zero your rifle for?

January 10, 2011 2 Comments Written by DanielS

Comparison by Winchester Ballistics of various weight .308 and .223 bullet trajectories fired out of a rifle zeroed at 25 yards. Click to Embiggen.

It’s a common question: what distance should you zero your rifle for? Many hunters I know simply zero their rifles at whatever distance is available at their local range. But is this the ideal distance to have your scope set at? The answer varies depending on the caliber your rifle is chambered in and what game you are pursuing.

Let’s talk for a bit about what Maximum Point Blank Range (MPBR) is. In a nutshell, the MPBR is the maximum range at which you can aim your rifle directly at any target within that distance and be reasonably assured that your round will hit. What that distance is depends on the size of your target, the round you are firing, and the configuration of your rifle.

On medium sized North American game animals, the size of the vital area is generally 10 inches in diameter. That gives you 5 inches of bullet rise above the sight height and another 5 inches of drop below the sight height.

To figure the best distance to have your scope dialed on at, you’ll need to know your rifle and chosen ammunition well, and you’ll need to be able to do a little bit of math. But to help you out, there are online ballistic calculators available from Winchester and a very comprehensive calculator over at JBM Ballistics. In general, you’ll need to know the ammunition you are using including the bullet weight as well as the muzzle velocity it achieves in your firearm. If possible, it helps to know the bullet length and the ballistic coefficient. Both Winchester and JBM ballistics have fairly comprehensive libraries with all of this information included with particular Winchester cartridges or bullets in the case of JBM Ballistics. The final piece of information you’ll need is the height of the center line of your scope over the rifle bore. In most modern firearms this ranges from about an inch up to around 2.5 inches.

If you’re using a .308 caliber rifle, depending on your load, you’ll have a maximum point blank range of just over 300 yards. A 150 grain .308 caliber Barnes XLC boattail bullet will top out with 4.8 inches of rise at 150 yards and be dead on at 300 yards. This gives you “minute of deer” accuracy out to nearly 350 yards, meaning that with the crosshairs of your scope centered on the vital area of a deer, you will be assured of a solid hit at any distance out to 350 yards.

For most modern rifles, I usually recommend zeroing at a distance between 100 and 300 yards. The higher the ballistic coefficient of the bullet and the faster it is traveling when it leaves the muzzle, the longer the distance you can expect to be able to have your rifle zeroed for. Obviously, if you have a .22 caliber squirrel gun, the size of your target is much smaller and consequently your MPBR will be much shorter, usually only 50 or 100 yards. Small fast varmint rounds may have a high muzzle velocity, but due to their light weight and low ballistic coefficient, they lose speed fast. Most varmint rifles will do well to be zeroed at distances between 200 and 300 yards. For larger calibers capable of making shots out past 600 yards, especially some of the larger .30 caliber belted magnums, you can reasonably zero your scope and rifle for 400 yards and beyond.

Not many people have access to a 300 yard range, but with the help of a a ballistic table, you can calculate exactly how high or low the round should impact at any distance. The .308 load we mentioned earlier has 4.8 inches of rise at 150 yards, but what if you only have access to 25 and 100 yard ranges? You can get the rifle on paper by zeroing it at 25 yards, and then fine tune it until your group is centered at 3.9 inches high at 100. A bullet fired from a rifle starts out anywhere from 1″ to as much as 2.5″ below the sight height. For a rifle zeroed at 25 yards this means that the bullet must climb fairly steeply, and of course it will continue to climb for another hundred yards or so before reaching the apex and beginning to descend. For this particular load, the initial 25 yard zero should get you roughly on target at 300 yards. By confirming that your rounds are hitting 3.9 inches high at 100 yards you’ll get the rifle much closer to being precisely on target at 300.

I don’t know of any hunters running bench rest guns capable of putting a 5 shot group inside the diameter of a quarter at 600 yards. If you’re running a traditional .30-30 in the thick South Texas brush, a 100 yard zero is probably just fine. But for most other situations, it only makes sense to zero your scope and rifle combination for the Maximum Point Blank Range, which depends on your quarry and the caliber of your rifle.

Hunting, Rifles

End of A Successful Deer Season

January 7, 2011 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

There was quite a bit of activity all season on the game camera. Most of it was when I wasn’t there. This one photo always cracks me up.

Regular deer season has come to an end here in Texas. I went out on 4 hunts and managed to bring home two deer: one 10 point buck and one 90 pound doe.

The first hunt was the 1st Annual Hog Hunt (can it be annual if it’s the first one?) with Bryan and some of the crew from ITS Tactical. Although it started as a hog hunt, it became a deer hunt when the landowner graciously allowed us to harvest a doe or buck should we have the opportunity since it was opening weekend for deer season. It was a good thing too, because nobody harvested anything except for Rocky who tagged a young 6 point buck. In fact, only one hog was spotted at all by myself, but it was moving fast about 150-200 yards away and I didn’t have time to line up a shot before it disappeared into the thick brush.

Most of the guys who went out on that trip had little or no hunting experience, although everybody was experienced with firearms and most had prior military experience. Despite the lack of hunting experience, it turns out that many of the skills learned in the military are also useful when pursuing hog and deer.

Since Rocky, who bagged the small buck, had no experience field dressing, skinning, or quartering a deer I offered my expertise and instructed while he worked on the deer with a friend. In return I got to take home the skin, which has now been tanned (a process I will discuss in a later post).

The next week I spent out hunting Caddo National Grasslands, public hunting land which is very difficult to hunt since it is besieged by over a hundred hunters on opening week. Public lands in Texas are walk-in hunting only, and Caddo National Grasslands is a broad stretch of land, with the area I hunt covering more than 10,000 acres. This means that I often have to hike for a couple of miles into deep heavy cover to get to where the deer are. Unfortunately, I came up empty. But, that’s why they call it hunting and not shooting.

A few weeks later I took my wife, Dreamer Dez, out hunting for her first time ever. She didn’t know if she’d have it in her to “shoot Bambi” but she does enjoy the outdoors and has no problem helping me process the deer that I bring home, so we went out to a friend’s ranch in Central Texas for Doe Day weekend. Doe Days are designated dates set by the Texas Parks and Wildlife in areas with very large doe populations. This was definitely the case where we were hunting. A census done the year before counted more than 75 does on less than 700 acres. That’s quite the population!

Dreamer Dez scans the underbrush for any signs of movement.

To her credit, Dez shot at a little 50 pound piglet with my 6.5×55 Swedish Mauser but missed low, sending up a fountain of dirt and scaring off the herd. Myself, I managed to harvest a good sized doe that would put a dent into refilling the deep freeze with venison.

Later the next month I would head back out in search of a monster buck we’d seen while hunting antlerless during Doe Days. This buck was a monster: he looked like he had a damn tumbleweed on his head. There was no way to estimate the number of points on this massive atypical deer. I spent the better part of the weekend stalking this buck. Deer of that age are like ghosts. Spooky. Silent. Cautious, even during the rut.

While stalking one morning I spotted a small 8-point trailing after a doe about 300 yards across a property line. I lay down prone and waited patiently as they made their way down a clearing towards the fence where I would have a shot. As I watched them make their way towards me, suddenly the massive buck came crashing out of the trees and into the side of the smaller 8-point. The smaller buck quickly wheeled around to face his challenger, but both of them soon crashed into thick heavy timber nearby. I never saw either one of them again.

In fact, I didn’t see another legal buck until the very last morning. Having seen the two bucks in full rut the day before, I decided to break out the doe bleat call I’d purchased before that trip. It was an impulse buy. I don’t usually use calls, but figured what the heck. After a brief walk through the predawn frost I entered the clearing where my blind was set up and startled two does who were feeding along the treeline. They both sneezed and bounded off and I made it to my blind where I got set up and waited for thins to quiet down.

After about 30 minutes I sounded 3 short doe bleats and sat back to wait. Incredibly, not 10 minutes later, a large (well, large for Central Texas) buck came trotting into the clearing. He was in full rut, head up and ears alert, looking around for the doe he thought he’d heard. I counted 8 points on his head, 3 on each side with brow tines. His main beam stretched just beyond his ears, making him a legal buck in Texas.

The shot was good and dropped him in his tracks. I waited a while and text messaged my buddies in nearby blinds to let them know what had transpired. When I got up and approached the deer I noticed that the brow tines were actually split, with two points long enough to make him a 10 point buck. His pedicles were wide in diameter, marking him as being about 3-4 years old.

That was the last buck I would take this year. I’ll still be out in the woods though. There’s a peace that can’t be found anywhere else but far out in the wilderness, where cell phone signals can’t reach and the roar of traffic on nearby highways cannot be heard. There are squirrels and rabbits to hunt in the off season, and there’s room in the freezer for another feral hog or two that I find while out scouting and hiking.

The woods and meadows that remain in our increasingly urbanized world call to me, and I long to be out in them. Among the leaves.

Hunting

A Central Texas Hog Hunt

December 11, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Long time no blog… yeah, I know. It’s hunting season, and I’ve been out stalking deer and hogs for the last 6 weeks. Some days I came back empty handed, but more often than not I came back with a hog or a deer. Which is great, until you consider all of the work that goes into skinning and tanning the hide, processing the meat, etc. For the most part, I’ve finished processing all of the game, though there are a few hides that aren’t quite done being tanned yet.

Three weeks ago Ambulance Driver, Alan from SnarkyBytes.com and Matt G and I, along with some other friends, set off to hunt some wild boar in the hardwood bottoms of Central Texas. Friday night we got settled into our little cabin in the woods and found we had some time to make sure the couple of new hunters we had with us had their rifles zeroed.

5 minutes later AD was using a bit of DuraBond to close up a small cut on his UK friend Limey Buddy, who had gotten scope-bit when firing an 8mm Mauser. Not easily deterred, we decided the rifles were hitting “minute of hog” split up to head to our respective blinds and stands.

I chose to set up in a 20 foot tower stand on top of a hill overlooking a feeder set close to the creek bottom. Most of the area I could see was sparsely populated with cedars and tall grasses, which would make it difficult to spot any hogs coming up from the creek towards the feeder. I wasn’t even sure that they would hit the feeder, as the game cameras had shown them only intermittently and with the rainy spring and summer we’d had this year, the acorn crop was more than abundant. If I was a hog, I wouldn’t leave the abundant acorns and safety of the thick brushy creek bottom.

The large sow came to rest beneath a large stand of cedars.

But I’m not a hog. After about 45 minutes of sitting in my stand watching a herd of cattle mosey about below me, I noticed their ears perk up and they began to move off. Not long after that I heard the tell-tale grunts and squeals of wild hogs coming up from the creek.

The young boars came up first, followed by little year-old piglets. None of them were old enough or large enough for me to want, but then a large alpha-sow appeared. She kept to the safety of the cedars and tall grass, making a clear shot difficult. I kept the crosshairs of the scope atop my Howa 1500 trained on her last position as she rooted and foraged out of sight among the tall grasses, and eventually she emerged into a clearing where they had previously rooted up a good sized wallow.

Bingo.

Reacting to the shot, she wheeled towards me and ran straight at the tower before veering off to the right and diving into a thick stand of cedar choked oak trees. I texted my companions to let them know what had happened and settled in to wait until sunset when we would meet up to track and recover her.

Sunset came quickly, and I clambered out of the tower as MattG and some of the rest of the crew showed up to help track. A bright red blood trail quickly became evident, and we soon found her piled up near a stand of cedars not 100 yards away. She was huge, much larger up close than she appeared from the safety of my stand.

While I was glad to have harvested such a large hog, one considered a destructive invasive species in this part of the world, I knew just how much work it would take to transform this beautiful beast into pork loin and sausage for my freezer. We hauled her out and loaded her into a truck for the drive back to the cabin. Once there, she weighed in at a hair over 250 pounds live weight. I began the arduous task of cleaning and skinning her. AD volunteered the use of his Alaska Knife set – which I have to say I was insanely jealous of. It was a beautiful knife set bundled in a well crafted scabbard and included a caping knife as well as a large skinner and cleaver. AD even pitched in and helped with the skinning, a process which is much more difficult on feral hogs than on most other North American game animals.

The process of skinning and quartering took a while, but soon enough I had the quarters on ice in the cooler and it was time to relax. Turning my attention to the rest of our motley crew, I found that while I had been busy processing my kill they had broken out the beer and grilled up some very nice sized steaks. I wasn’t terribly hungry, having eaten a large lunch earlier, but this was one of the more enjoyable parts of any hunting trip: getting the chance to sit around and socialize with good friends.

The next morning dawned cold and overcast. I chose a stand set up just inside the treeline of a creek bottom about a mile away from where I’d been successful the night before. Having been the only one to harvest anything so far, I took along Limey Buddy, one of the less experienced hunters, with me in the hopes that he would be able to harvest his first hog.

Sure enough, not long after the sky began to turn grey and the the first hints of sunlight danced with the treetops, a bachelor group of young boars came up the creek, foraging among the fallen leaves. I pointed them out and began to line up my own shot on one on the right. Limey Buddy fired before I was quite ready, and the entire herd scattered at the sound. I couldn’t quite tell whether the shot had hit or not, but we sat back anyway to give things time to quiet down some. Not 5 minutes later two more boars appeared out of the thick brush across the creek and my partner fired again. This time the shot looked good, and again the wild hogs dashed off into the undergrowth.

AD demonstrates pairing food with scotch whiskey while out hunting.

I texted a summary of the past few minutes events and we relaxed in the ground blind while things quieted down again. After about 30 minutes I ventured from our hiding spot to see if I could spot any blood trail. The footprints and disturbed leaves were easy to spot, and I followed the trail for about 30-40 yards but didn’t see even a speck of blood. The other hog he shot at appeared to be a clean miss as well: obvious footprints and disturbed earth and leaves, but no blood whatsoever. Not wanting to leave our quarry possibly killed or injured and unrecovered, we combed the woods and creek bottom for more than 2 hours but didn’t see anything to indicate that either one had been hit.

We returned to camp to find that nobody else had been successful either. A few deer had been seen, but none were legal to shoot at the time. After a filling breakfast I headed down south a few miles to a deer property I had access to in order to scout out some scrapes and rub lines for a deer hunt the next week.

That afternoon we reconvened to determine who would be setting up in which stand. Knowing that the hogs would be keeping to the creeks and river bottoms after the activities and shooting that morning and the night before, I chose a remote blind set up about 50 yards from a little draw that lead into a larger creek system. I sat there all afternoon, and while I could hear the hogs no more than 20 yards away, they never came up out of the thick brush and I never had a shot. Towards sunset however, I heard a shot from one of the nearby stands.

“Finally,” I thought, “Someone other than myself managed to see something and got a successful shot. Upon returning to the cabin however we discovered that Jeff had shot at a hog and missed. He blamed “crosswind”. It turns out that the hog he shot at was about 100 yards away. Something didn’t quite add up… the winds were only blowing 15-20 and gusting to 30. That meant that if he had a full value crosswind the shot would only be 3″ off at 100 yards. AD and I, not being talented mathematicians, still managed to put 2 and 2 together to determine that a small EF5 tornado had touched down between Jeff and the hog just at the moment he fired the shot, and the 250 mph winds had blown his round more than two feet and caused him to miss the hog completely.

Everyone was pretty dejected about not having harvested anything. I even felt a bit guilty that I had been the only one to have been successful so far. For a minute or so at least. Alan stoked up the fire while AD carved off a backstrap from the hog I’d bagged the night before and we dined in style on twice-baked potatoes and wild hog backstrap. Jeff had left a half a bottle of scotch and soon enough that came out and, as they do when scotch is involved, hijinks ensued.

Predawn the next morning I set out on my own for the same ground blind that Limey Buddy and I had seen hogs the morning before. No sooner had I settled into the camouflaged blind did I hear something moving in the underbrush to my right about 20 yards away. It was dark, too dark to really make out what was rustling around out there beneath the canopy of trees. But it kept coming towards me, and soon I could make out the tell-tale stripes of a skunk making a beeline towards my hiding spot. I cursed underneath my breath. He was just outside my blind now, nosing underneath the edge of the floorless tent-like structure. The last thing I wanted was to get sprayed by the startled skunk when he came up inside and discovered that he was not alone inside the ground blind.

I cleared my throat and hissed “Shoo!” hoping that would be enough to dissuade the determined Mustelid. The skunk’s activity stopped and after a brief pause I heard him head back into the underbrush. After breathing a sigh of relief I settled back into my chair and scanned the river bottom for any sign of hog activity.

Nothing moved for some while. Nothing I was looking for at any rate. Squirrels played in the branches of trees nearby and an armadillo rooted around in the fallen leaves about 10 yards behind me, but I didn’t see any sign of hog. I had just decided to give it another 30 minutes before giving up and heading in when I heard hooves moving through the flatwood riparian terrain on the other side of a dry creekbed. The wind was not in my favor. Almost as soon as he came crashing through the undergrowth, the medium sized black boar skidded to a stop and huffed in my direction. Both ears were up and he glared right at my position, standing stock still. He was strongly quartered towards me and I could hear him growl as I slowly squeezed the trigger.

I fired and he turned and ran back along the same path he had come. 25 minutes later, after a brief search, we located him. He was back in some very thick cedars uphill from where he’d encountered me and it took a bit to haul him out, but we got him loaded up into the 4×4 after about 45 minutes effort.

Ambulance Driver explains the sentiment that was shared among my fellow hunters upon my return to our cabin in the woods:

Sunday morning saw us getting desperate, since our hunt ended at noon. Once again, we heard one of us shoot, and we arrived back at camp to discover it had been Daniel. Again. Being ~~blessed with blind shithouse luck~~ the excellent hunter that he is, he managed to score on another hog, a 150-pound boar.

I felt pretty bad now, I had gotten two hogs and at this point everyone else would be going home empty handed. Or so I thought. Not to be outdone, MattG, Alan, and another of AD’s buddies loaded up in a pickup truck and drove down to a swampy area, determined to get at least one hog before we had to leave at noon that day. I heard some shots about 30 minutes later, but they sounded too far away to be our guys. AD felt differently: they’d all taken AR-15s with them, not the bolt guns we’d been using earlier.

“That’s an AR15,” he said. “That was pretty fast for a bolt throw. They’re on the hogs.”

And sure enough, he was right. They’d scared up a group of hogs and shot two on the run. Alan was sure that he had hit his, but they were unable to find a blood trail. T on the other hand managed get a small 80 lb. female hog, the perfect size for the smoker.

It was, by all accounts, a great weekend out hunting with old friends and new. Not everyone got to take a hog, but nobody went home empty handed. We all took home the memories of another great weekend spent among friends and among the leaves.

Hunting

Light Blogging Alert

November 14, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

It’s hunting season. That means posting will be light (as you may have already noticed). Will have more posts around the time deer season ends or I tag out, whichever comes first.

Uncategorized

Packing Light For A Long Stalk

October 9, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

You’ll have to hike in quite a distance and follow up with a very stealthy stalk to get a shot at one of these guys.

When I hunt, I am usually forced to hunt public lands. I don’t have the money for an expensive deer lease with a couple hundred acres and feeders, so public lands it is. Of course, hunting public lands is not without its own unique problems. I’m not the only hunter out there, and the presence of the dozens of other hunters, all looking to score their own big buck tends to cause the deer to make themselves scarce. Studies have shown that just the presence of one hunter on 40 acres hunting a couple of hours a day causes deer to react to the pressure and drastically change their habits.

Contrary to what many people will tell you, pressured deer don’t head for the hills, go completely nocturnal, or take off for the next county over. But they do change their habits and that usually means having to hike a mile or so into the thickest brush on the property. Having to hike for miles just to get to the game means that I have to travel light.

It’s taken years to perfect my ultralight setup, but I’m going to share a portion of my gear list here. First, traveling over long distances means that I need to stay hydrated. Even in the coldest Texas weather can dehydrate you, often faster than many people realize. Cold air is usually very dry, and that dry air can suck the moisture right out of you just from your normal respiration. Since I need to stay hydrated, the foundation of my setup is a 70 Oz Camelbak Rogue Hydration Pack. It holds enough water for me to cover as much as 10 miles (a distinct possibility depending on the game animal and the property I’m on) and still have enough water for the hike back out hauling a 150 pound buck.

Which brings me to game transport. This is probably the biggest pain in hunting public lands. Most of the properties only allow walk in access and, in some cases, equestrian access. I haven’t owned a horse in 16 years, so I’m not able to bring Trigger my trusty steed onto the property to help me pack out my quarry. Many types of game carts are on the market, but none of them are both lightweight and able to handle rugged terrain. They’re heavy and never seem to be able to handle transporting my harvest through thick brush and weeds. Instead of valuing the ability to cart out my deer, I find myself dreading the extra 10 or 15 pounds I have to haul into the woods with me.

It’s a bit harder to haul out of the woods, but my preferred method of game transport is the Dead Sled. It’s very lightweight and adds right around a pound to my gear. The drawback is that you have to drag a couple of hundred pounds back out with you. Still, I found that after a successful hunt the adrenaline and excitement gives me at least a little bit of an energy boost to help make hauling that dead weight back out a little bit easier.

All of the gear described here, with the exception of the dead sled, fits neatly into this hydration carrier.

Of course, before hauling out my harvest, there’s the matter of field dressing it. Proper field dressing after the kill is not just a weight saving measure: it also helps the carcass to cool off faster and minimizes the exposure of the meat to various juices from the internal organs. So, add in a good quality skinning/gutting knife, some nitrile gloves, a game bag, and a Gerber 46036 folding saw to my pack list. I prefer the increased sharpness of a small single bevel sushi knife, and I’ve crafted a custom leather holster to keep the blade safe. Sharpness is the key to a good skinning knife, and the single bevel on a Japanese blade means that it is twice as sharp as a Western knife. The Gerber saw isn’t necessary per se, but since I don’t want to damage the fragile blade of the skinner/gutter I prefer to use the saw to cut through the sternum. Plus, we are in the wilderness after all and having a saw could come in handy in a survival situation.

In addition to this I carry along a few accessories: first aid and survival kit including an MRE, GPS, compass, map, and camera. The camera, first aid and survival kit are fairly self explanatory, and I recommend that every hunter bring some sort of first aid and survival system. If you’ve got a GPS, I always recommend bringing it as a navigational aid as well as a compass for backup.

Most of this gear fits in the pocket and pouches of the CamelBak, except for the Dead Sled which is extremelt lightweight and easy to wear slung across one shoulder. The first aid and survival kit are also too bulky to fit in the CamelBak and have their own MOLLE pouches that are then hung off of the hydration carrier.

This type of setup can be customized to suit your needs with different hydration carriers and pouch configurations, but I’d encourage you to keep the overall weight in mind when putting together your gear. Whether you’re pursuing back country elk, big horn sheep, deer, or pronghorn, having a light load makes it that much easier to hike in and get to where the game are.

Gear, Hunting

Game Camera Pics

September 28, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Checked the game camera last weekend out at a friend’s lease. The fall season is shaping up pretty good. This big solitary boar was seem frequently at the feeder. That’s one of the largest hogs I’ve seen in this area… Probably weighs close to 200 pounds if I had to guess.

There aren’t many wild hogs in this area, but partly because there aren’t many they’re not hunted much and this allows the ones that are here more opportunities to grow to sizes like this. To get an idea of just how big this pig is, compare him to the yearling deer snapped by the same game cam.

Hunting, Scouting

The Tactical Bird Gun

September 19, 2010 1 Comment Written by DanielS

Tacti-Cool Bird Gun Model 870 Mk 1. Is it ugly? Damn straight. Does it work? I’ll let the birds speak for themselves. It’s not a limit of dove, and it really is an ugly gun, but it’s not bad for what I had on hand.

Go ahead, I’ll wait for the laughter to die down before I continue.

Now, before you get going, sending me emails and leaving comment asking me “What the hell were you thinking doing that to that poor bird gun?” let me say, this shotty did not begin life as a bird gun but instead was pressed into service. I first purchased this 870 shotgun back when I was working executive protection and needed a small tactical shotgun. It came with a pistol grip and an 18″ cylinder bore barrel. I added the side saddle, folding stock and vertical foregrip to make it more useful in my job. I haven’t worked security for a number of years and, despite having bird hunted with friends’ guns for some time, as my firearm collection grew somehow a proper bird gun of my own never made its way into my safe.

Fast forward to this weekend. Friday a friend of mine called asking if I wanted to join him early the next morning on a Dove hunt in North Texas. Sure I did, but I didn’t have a bird gun, and on such short notice I couldn’t get my hands on one easily in time to get out to the dove fields before sunrise. I could however get my hands on a ribbed 26″ Remington 870 barrel with an improved cylinder choke, so I called my buddy with the barrel and asked him if he wanted to come on a dove hunt with us. He’d never hunted before, but agreed it could be fun so off we went.

It wasn’t pretty, but with the bird barrel installed on my Remington 870 I felt confident I could drop a few birds. Getting proper cheek weld was going to be a problem: the bead on the rib was a bit higher than on my old barrel, but after a few misses I quickly figured it out.

By the afternoon, I was dropping doves regularly. While I didn’t shoot a limit like my friend with his semiautomatic 11-87, I was pretty happy with the results. It wasn’t the best tool, but with a quick barrel swap I turned the wrong tool into an adequate tool. And dove is a tasty reward.

Hunting, Shotguns

Busy Couple of Weeks

September 10, 2010 Leave a Comment Written by DanielS

Doggies need hearing protection too! Image courtesy of AEPilotJim.

I’ve been going pretty much non-stop since September 1st (the beginning of Dove season). Since then I’ve driven over 2,000 miles to three different hunting areas, and then driven up to Oklahoma for the Labor Day blog shoot with Jennifer, EvylRobot, Warrior Geek, AEPilotJim, and others (which was a blast BTW – you should go if you can next time).

Then this weekend is the Gun Blogger Rendezvous in Reno NV, which I simply am not going to make due to severe time constraints. I’m shooting a 3-Gun match this weekend and then rushing back home for my wife and I’s birthday party, so tonight was spent cramming magazines and making sure the competition guns and rig were all ready to go. I’ll be shooting the Mossberg M590A1 instead of my normal Remington 870. Probably won’t be much difference in my times, as long as I remember the tang mounted safety as opposed to the crossbolt.

This is all in addition to my normal blogging/writing duties at the day job and attempts to keep up with the other clients and my own work at home. Hopefully next week will slow down a bit, but I doubt it. I’ve got more hunting trips scheduled, articles to write and deadlines to meet. The life of a gun and outdoor writer may be fun, but it can be incredibly hectic this time of year!

Uncategorized

life, schedule