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.
Last edited by L. Brown; 08/30/24 06:08 AM.
