doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Ground swatting.

I’ve shot a few pen raised birds and I decided I didn’t like it. IMO the concept of fair chase is lost when birds have to nudged to fly. No more for me. Spiking the ball after killing game is crude. The hunting shows are about selling equipment, nothing more. When I was younger my lab and I would flush wild bobwhite in cut over timber. Sometimes we’d connect and sometimes not but it was always fun and we worked for it. Those days around here are gone.

I’m typically just not that hungry. If the bird gets away, I’m not angry at him, he just won that day. I miss more than I used to, but, you try shooting off the opposite shoulder and tell me how it goes. I am thrilled to be out there still doing it, with my goofy Setter, the last kid from the neighborhood I grew up in still hitting it. I usually ease off for the day, once I have a brace.

Nobody eats it but me. I can only use so much bird, but, I’ll take all the bird hunting I can get.

Best,
Ted

You have to give the quarry a sporting chance.. shooting a bird on the water doesn’t seem so.

I agree that game birds should be taken on the wing today, not sitting or swimming. But, what I have a really big problem with are those "sportsmen" of today who belittle our grandparents for shooting into a covey of quail on the ground, or shooting a grouse off a limb, when they were hunting for food, not sport. The action should be judged by the the era in which if occurred. Our morales, when it comes to game shooting, were not necessarily the predominant ones of 90-100 years ago. People who cannot see the difference are closed minded.

People who can’t see the difference have likely never been hungry.

Best,
Ted

Brent said it best...

"But I do not think ground swatting is nearly as bad as the 500-1000 big game "hunting" videos, though the motivation seems much the same. It is mostly about killing, not hunting. 90 yd turkeys, 70 yds "archery" whitetails, 500 yd rifle mule deer, 1000 yd antelope, swatting ducks and geese standing in a field - all pretty much the same. Every day, it is a new and ugly world. I imagine my predecessors thought much the same back in their later years."

Oskar, your description of teal hunting has me laughing. Been there and expect to be there again, next week.

Ground swatting aside, there is hunting and there is grocery shopping. Knocking a fox squirrel off a tree limb with a 12 bore is not a dime's worth of difference from squatting a duck on the water. Both sound like grocery shopping to me. I am more interested in hunting.

None of this conversation can change the fact that nineteenth and early twentieth century market hunting and pigeon shooting has deprived us from a reasonable population of game birds and waterfowl today, regardless of habitat changes. Even today, the endless populations of pigeons and doves in South America are a bit diminished in some areas, causes yet to be determined. Yes, I hunt and shoot box birds, but I have researched early practices of these sports, and there is a difference.

Ground swatting . . . I started out shooting squirrels with a single shot .410. That's a good way for the "mentor" to keep an eye on a novice hunter. I also ground swatted pheasants if we could spy a rooster sticking his head up in a road ditch as we slowly drove by. Dad didn't bother getting out of the car. Just rolled the window down and BOOM. But he learned to hunt during the depression, and it was more a case of meat on the table than anything else.

Later on, having been educated by outdoor writers, I discovered the challenge of shooting flying.

Iowa law allows a hunter to enter private land without permission to retrieve game, but the gun must be left behind. I did that once with a wing-busted rooster pheasant that came down in a field of corn stubble. I think the video would have looked like Rocky trying to catch the chicken in the alley as he prepared for his next fight. I finally succeeded in grabbing the cripple.

As an instructor in the Hunter Education Program, we discussed fair chase. There would almost always be a question about why we shoot turkeys on the ground and pheasants and other gamebirds in the air? My explanation was that turkey hunting is more like big game hunting. The challenge is to call the turkey into range so that you have a good chance to make a killing shot. Standing on a gravel road and shooting a pheasant that you've spotted in the ditch isn't much of a challenge at all. So we make the pheasant fly (or our dog does) and the challenge is shooting it in the air. Imagine someone driving by while you're executing a pheasant in a road ditch. They're not going to see much challenge involved, and they may end up with a negative opinion of all hunters as a result. And that's something we want to avoid.
Re shooting preserves: I've found that most of them can do a pretty good job with pheasants and chukar. Released quail are another story, especially if the cover is wet. They may just flutter (or not even that). Because I run pointing dogs, one thing I avoid doing on preserves, even when we're after pheasants or chukar, is that I don't want to pin the bird between me and the dog. The result can be the bird flushing into the dog's face and the dog catching it. Or even worse, a pheasant flushing right into a young dog may result in a bird shy dog. Hopefully only temporarily.

Eye dominance or shoulder issue?