doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Videos - Warter Priory, Yorkshire High Birds

One guy mentioned our American heavy side by sides we have here such as the Model 21. Would any of you Brits want to trade a Model 21 for a Purdey or Boss?
Just let me know.

Mike, I noticed that too. However, thinking about it I find myself picking out the higher, better flying birds when I'm shooting driven birds that are coming over in numbers.

The reason is that I am given the choice and prefer to test myself against the more sporting birds, provided they are in range for me and my gun. Most guns I know also select the birds they shoot at. The lower birds are considered less sporting and we clearly don't wish to ruin their eating by 'blasting' them, if you follow my meaning!

In Dave Carrie's case I guess he is being selective in the same way, just that his skill base is considerably greater than mine!

On the question of cartridge to kill ratios, I too have found on a normal driven bird shoot (bags of around 100 birds) 1:3 is usual. On one shoot we keep annual records and the average over the last ten years is just under that ratio.

Tim

So all the hoop-la over large kill numbers are for nothing since low birds are not normally taken. If the guys wanted to "kill" birds they would be shooting the low flying birds.
I find the "Driven" shooting an excellent challenge. I for one have not mastered that shot and I suppose it is because most of our shots are going away.
I wish we had more clay target ranges that threw the driven style targets.

I'm not surprised by the extensive use of Over/Unders for high Pheasant for two reasons. One is the torque that is a function of the SxS barrel arrangement. The gun tends to "twist" when fired. That would undoubtedly be exaggerated with the use of very heavy loads. Firing a few hundred of those over a day would certainly be tiresome, even with a heavier SxS. The O/U does away with this torque.
The second reason is wear and tear on the gun. English guns are marvels of the art with wonderful balance. But that comes at a price - durability. There is a reason why those wonderfully balanced and slim SxS barrels literally wear out with heavy shooting. Note all the "re-barreled" English shotguns on the market. How many "re-barreled" Parkers or Model 21s do you see. Add the heavy loads that they use for high Pheasant and the wear would be accelerated.

Mike, I don't think we should confuse the high bird discussion with one about large bags. That's two different topics, though that's not to say they don't happen at the same place on the same day.

Just to divert to the large bag issue, though. We probably first need to define what we mean by large bag. That is tricky though. For the shooting I am used to a 200 bird day would be as large as I like to go. Some shoots have the ground to lay on 300-500 bird days (those are large bags to my mind and compared to my experience) and to do so successfully, presenting challenging birds to capable guns. On the other hand, I know of one or two commercial shoots, laying on up to 6 days a week shooting, bags of 150-250 birds, where the birds don't fly especially well, where the guns, on the whole, don't know better and where the numbers killed are what counts toward a good day (and let me hasten to add I would not have anything to do with those shoots).

Related to this and harking back to the two videos I originally posted at the start of this thread, there were two guns on the partridge shoot who had little or no experience of shooting. Now I like to encourage folk to try shooting and take it up if they enjoy it, but I do have a problem with them learning at a high bird driven shoot. I felt 'uncomfortable' watching that. Surely better to get time in on the clays, then progress to some walking up over dogs around the margins informally, then a few smaller driven days, before testing oneself on a high bird day.

Sorry, I'm banging on; I'll go back into my corner now!

Tim

In fear of stating the obvious shooting a shotgun does not wear the barrels out. The main culprits for barrel demise is firstly poor maintenance not every owner cleans his gun after each days use. Secondly some of the more mature guns where used with black powder and the material used in the primers was as aggressive as black powder residue. Then there is the old enemy RUST!!!! Caused by the first three!!! But the largest cause of barrel wear is the gunsmith with his attempts to remove the rust and pitting by let�s just say reaming out the bore and in doing so making it larger.
Now here in Brit land as I am sure you know there are finite limits on bore size you just can�t ream out the bore to remove all traces of pitting go too far the gun is valueless and will require a re-proof with all the risk that entails to restore its value, but NOT on your side of the pond export it from here and its value returns and this happened a lot in the past. You can do more or less whatever it takes to end up with a mirror finish bore. And may be that puts in perspective why there are a lot of guns with oversized out of Brit proof bores on your side of the water that will command a high price but over here are just bad news to the owner. So let�s level the playing field if your �Parkers� had to live over here with the same rules of proof a Maritime climate over the same time scale you would see a lot with new sets of barrels.
Though with correct and regular owner maintenance plus a trip now and again to a reputable gun smith, a lot of these finely balanced marvels of true English gun making are still in continuous use after some one hundred and fifty years and still comply with the Brit proof laws.
So in the end you folks are extremely lucky that soundness of a gun is what is correct in your opinion you do not have the government deciding it for you!!!!!!!

I have participated in "Tower Shoots" as invited for about 20 years. And am an avid pass shooter of snow geese.
I used 1.25oz Activ shells at first. 3 3/4 dr eq I think. On the highest birds. US #6 shot maximum.
After about 75 cartridges, the level of fatigue is just too much for me. The lifting, swinging, shooting, all just exhausts me. It's a pounding for sure.
I used a heavy weight Ithaca Flues 12 (32") w/ Sunburst pad, and like I said, after 75 max cartridges, I was spent. It wasn't any fun after about 50 cartridges truthfully.

At least when I'm on the flight line at Great Bend, and am shooting Snow's, I can use a gas assisted auto loader. I might shoot 50-60, 3" 1 3/8 oz cartridges in a morning, and still feel OK. But a full day of high birds with 32g loads in a standing breech gun would put me off the endeavor.

I don't like heavily shot up birds, so I don't mind dispatching returns. And if you are gunning tall birds, you're going to have some cripples. Not as many as you'd think though. The landings from 50 yards up are very accommodating.

I absolutely love these videos. Keeps me excited for when I head out for Snow's in a couple weeks.

Re the comment about American doubles, Jack O'Connor talks about shooting driven birds with a Model 21 in his "Shotgun Book", and being fairly successful. But that's long enough ago that we're not talking extremely high birds--which are a relatively recent phenomenon, given the century and a half or so history of driven shooting.

The shoots I've done have all been in the 200-300 bird range, mixed pheasant and partridge (most of the time favoring the former). If I'm on a peg where I'm not seeing much action, I may take a "low" bird or two that I would pass on if more birds were coming my way. "Low" by the way, must always mean "safe". The blue sky rule: Bird has to be surrounded by sky to make sure you're not going to pepper a beater. But, as noted earlier, you don't want to take too many low birds--even if they are safe and meet the low end of the "sporting" criteria--because you run up the cost of the shoot, which is based on birds bagged (or birds that should be bagged, if whomever runs the shoot feels that the guns are missing a lot of birds that are within their capabilities).

Agree with trw about inexperienced shots at high bird shoots. They're likely to be so frustrated that they won't try it again. And they'll end up paying for the privilege of missing almost everything they shoot at, and essentially subsidizing the bag taken by the skilled high bird shots.

On the subject of barrel wear, somewhere I recall reading of a noted gun scribe visiting the Birmingham Proof House.

He was shown one of the barrels used for proof testing. It was old and well used. Apparently, it still measured as intended; in other words it was not worn internally despite having many thousands of rounds through it. It may even have never been cleaned, but now I really am testing my brain cells!

Anyway, the point made was that is not the rounds fired through a barrel that wear it, it is the cleaning. This really rather surprised me. It didn't go into details but I assumed that using a phosphor bronze brush for cleaning is, in effect, an abrasive action and thus likely, over the years, to wear away at the inner surface. Now I'm the messenger here so don't shoot me (pun intended!) and, as I have indicated, this is stretching my memory - a lot!

I have to say that ever since I only ever clean my barrels with a phosphor bronze brush once, lightly, at the end of the season. All the rest of the time I use a nylon brush to get rid of the deposits, before then using a woolly. I also always clean my guns at the end of each days use.

Sorry, I' wittering on - again!

Tim

Hardened and machine nickel alloy gun barrel steel bearing "worn" on the barrel ID by a non-ferrous bronze brush- Strange indeed-??