doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Starling shooting

This guy said he was shooting his father's 30's vintage Model 12, 20 gauge. He said he would shoot in to the flock and kill two to three at a time.

Check out Shooting Sportsman Magazine Mar/April 2000. There is an article on page 16 By Michael McIntosh shooting starlings over hand made decoys by Bill Headrick. I just came across this article the other day and had to pass this along after reading this thread.

In my more salad days I utilized "flock shooting" into humongous droves of redwing blackbirds and have downed 8 or more at a shot. Huge migrations of them would move into late season sunflowers that I would be about to harvest. We would shoot boxes of shells at them trying to run them off.

I vaguely recall an article by MM where he was in his wife’s kitchen trying to prepare a blackbird or starling pie, and described how he got a bit too far into the bottle during the festivities.

Not in a hurry to build a pie out of songbirds, even if they are a pestilence.

Best,
Ted

McIntosh was a trip. I remember when he was a forum contributor here.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie
https://www.food.com/recipe/four-and-twenty-black-birds-baked-in-a-pie-309028

If my memory and the article I read many years ago are accurate, the black birds of the English poem were more like our American Robin, but dark in color.

The blackbirds were actually young rooks just out of the nest. Back when I was in Scotland we used to go out shooting the young rooks on the local estate. We used .22s rather than the classic rook rifle.

See here: https://www.thefield.co.uk/shooting/rook-shooting-rook-32075

I have mentioned this before, but have read that during WW2 Starlings shot (or netted?) in Norfolk were shipped to the London poultry markets.

After the dressed birds were put into baskets the final stage was to stamp the cover as, variously , “Snipe”, “Plover” or “Quail”.

As I recall, Mr MacIntosh’s story ended up involving a pine Siskin and the police. lol


The big flocks of starlings that swoop around in unison are called murmurations.

While sitting on a stock pond hunting ducks in Kansas, the shooting was slow. A murmuration swooped down onto the pond, and I shot into it.

By the end of the afternoon, my dog had retrieved 36 starlings and grackles (can’t recall which exactly), but at least a very dull afternoon was livened up by my dog, making endless exhausting retrieves for those birds.

The cow dogs loved then.