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Typical driven pheasant I shoot, nothing below 20 yards tends to get shot at unless its a pricked bird. Your bred and butter birds are coming at 30 yards high and you might get a few get up a bit more each drive coming over at 45 yards 50 being about as good as you get. The shoot I went on where I found the birds high your bread and butter birds were 40 yards with the real high flyers getting up to 60 yards when the wind was favorable or they were driven off high ground. You man in the film is selectively choosing birds that look to be getting on 70 - 80 possibly more. What we might normal call a high bird 40 - 50 yards, is very different to the birds this man is shooting at.

Tim posted

Tim, that does happen, but not just on "high bird" drives. On any shooting day there will be a team of pickers up each with multiple dogs who will be active well behind the line looking for winged birds and runners, and someone will be out the following day too. The keepers wouldn't usually make it a special job, just take close care as they are doing the normal rounds.

The numbers found on the day following, relative to the overall bag isn't in my experience a function of the quality of the shooting team, so much as the efficiency of the pickers up on the day of the shoot.

I used to organise the pickers up on several shoots, some of them the "high bird" variety and I'd take a wise old dog with me on the day following to look for the cripples precisely with the objective of seeing how well or poorly we'd done the day before. My impression was that if we'd done our job properly there were no more pricked birds from a "normal" day than on a high bird one.

It's quite rare to find a dead bird on these occasions; if you do it's usually under a tree where it's perched for a while and then expired.

Also interesting is the examination of those old cock birds that are shot by use of a .22 after the season proper closes. I dressed out twenty such off a really high bird Welsh shoot about ten days ago and found just one shotgun pellet; there might have been a couple more but all these birds were fine big fellows in prime nick. So the residual stock having been shot at for five months don't show a high incidence of non - fatal wounding.

Personally I find the high bird mania a bit distasteful (and big numbers too) but I suspect this is an old fashioned and uncommercial view.



Three old dogs, two with wisdom!

Eug

Very thoughtful and informative post, eugene. Interesting that your actual experience picking up after driven shoots does not bear out the much repeated mantra about "long shooting" wounding birds excessively. Having never shot driven pheasant I cannot speak directly concerning them. However, having done more than a little long and high shooting with shotguns I can say that I have noticed that those who have never taken the time and put forth the effort to learn how to do so are most often the quickest to disparage it. I certainly do not put you in that group, eugene. But, there are plenty here for whom that "shoe" should be a comfortable fit.

SRH

I have an issue with shooting magazines promoting high pheasant shooting articles and intimating that anyone can do it.
We then get commercial shoots selling days to teams of guns with either none or very little experience of ever shooting at a pheasant at a greater range than 30 yards.
It isn't easy , so please, practice on high driven clays before venturing out onto a truly high pheasant day.Good instruction can be bought for the price of three dead pheasants, but is very rarely purchased before setting foot in the Field.
I increasingly find that many Guns, expectations,and ego's, far outstrips their ability.

Well said, salopian.

SRH

A HE 12 (actually an 11 gauge, or overbored 12 if you like- Super Fox on a lighter frame? Say what- I owned one once, some 20 years ago- 32" F&F, DT, Ej. weighed about as much as a loaded M-1 Garand- Now I use a 1929 era 12 Specialty grade Smith- 32" Imp. Mod & F, DT, Ej, std R size frame factory ventilated rib- std. field stock dims (for me) to a solid red pad- No trap shooting dims- for tower birds at our area hunt club- at 8 lbs. even, waaay easier to handle-

That's why I liked the Venters and Batha articles in SSM. They made it clear that high bird shooting is a specialty game, requiring a special gun with tighter chokes and shooting heavier loads than on a typical driven bird day (as described above by various people who've shot driven birds). In my own case, I've seen the occasional drive on a "typical" driven shoot--pretty much as described above, with "bread and butter" birds in the 20-30 yard range, taller ones around 40--where there are very few below 40 yards. And not very many birds are killed on those drives. I remember one drive last year where that was the case. And another from a couple years ago, when I was next in line to the best shot in the group. Instead of coming at us on that drive, most of the birds were coming from our right, and I was on the far left end of the line. My companion was missing a few, hitting a few--and they were taller by the time they were over me than over him. After missing about 7 or 8 in a row, I realized they were beyond my capability, after which all I did was watch the guy next to me, and admire his skill. But he also shoots 50-60 driven days a season, which does help.

Blocking on pheasant drives in the US doesn't compare very well to driven shooting. Certainly not really high bird driven shooting. Our pheasant country is relatively flat. In the UK, you don't get really tall birds unless they're coming off the tops of hills (and often over the tops of trees) and the guns are down in a valley. We tend to overestimate the range of pheasants coming at us with some elevation, because that's not the way we usually see pheasants. A rooster that's 25 yards up will clear the top of a 60 foot tree with quite a bit to spare--and that's a fairly tall tree. Birds 30-35 yards up can look REALLY high, because we Yanks seldom see them presented that way. We're used to judging horizontal distance on pheasants, not vertical.

There are a couple problems with classic American 12's. One is that, unless you modify them, they're stocked too low for this kind of shooting. The other is that, especially on very tall birds coming at you, ANY sxs will blot out the bird. (The broader profile of a sxs is one reason an OU is preferred by most of the high bird specialists.) The tendency is to stop your swing when the barrels hide the bird, so you miss behind. It's not that the Brits don't have longer barreled, tighter choked, heavier sxs. Many were built for waterfowl or pigeon shooting, and aren't that different from our classic sxs (although they're much more likely to be stocked higher than ours). And sxs certainly work well enough on "typical" driven birds, although more and more Brits are shooting OU's simply because they come to driven shooting after having started on clays, and an OU is the gun with which they're familiar.

The first time I shot driven birds, one of our "guns" was Roger Mitchell, then managing director of H&H, and pretty well-experienced at driven game. I asked him what was considered a good average on driven birds. He told me that on proper, sporting birds, 1 for 3 was a respectable average. I thought that seemed pretty low. Having done it several times now, I'm pretty much in agreement. I usually shoot 3 driven days when I go, and I have had rare days where I've been over 50%, and begin to think that perhaps Lord Ripon's shade is nodding approvingly. That will be followed by a day when I have more challenging birds, or just plain aren't on my game, and I don't make the 1 in 3 standard. When all is said and done, if I can shoot around 40% total for the trip, I'm satisfied. I keep hoping I'll make 50% one of these years, but if I did, I might be asking myself whether I took too many of the easier (but still "sporting") chances and not enough of the harder ones.

To give an idea of chokes for "typical" driven birds: an American friend, who's done a lot more driven shooting than I have, has a pair of McKay-Brown OU's. He sought out David's advice on choking: .010 in both barrels. I seem to recall that at least some of Ripon's guns had no choke. I want at least some, but an honest IC pushing an ounce or 1 1/16 of Brit 6's (270/oz) should put 140+ pellets in a 30" circle at 40 yards. And with that being a "tall" bird on a typical shoot, fairly open chokes seem to make a lot of sense.

The weakest team on a driven day that I picked up on averaged one bird in the bag for each eighteen shots.

Given that figure you'd expect to see a larger than average proportion of pricked birds, but I didn't notice anything much different. Until someone comes up with some valid figures, a lot of the comments on wounded / kill ratio are just guesswork.

There is another "fad" amongst some Guns for using 28 bores on drives where high birds are present. That does lead to an increase in wounding. I picked 23 birds from behind one such team, and 15 were runners .... I stayed behind after the drive was over and really searched all the cover for about 45 minutes with three Labs before I judged I'd got all I was going to.

That was one of the occasions that pissed me off with the direction that driven shooting is taking.

Eug

I have been watching his videos for the past year and they are fantastic. This past issue of Fieldsport Magazine has an article on High Bird shooting and tells the guns and cartridges they use.
There is also other articles in there, one by Chris Batha and one by Simon Ward talking about cartridges and other stuff about high bird shooting.

The article I mentioned listed some of the guns and cartridges they shot at this one particular shoot. All shot over and unders. A couple shot 20 bores, a Perazzi and a Watson Brothers with 33" barrels.
Some makers now specialize in High Bird guns. I know McCay Brown makes one and even has his own brand of HB cartridges,
There is a chap that has a web site, HIGH PHEASANT EXTREME, that sells his own brand of Perazzi's for such shoots. He also has his own cartridges. He touts his Perazzi's because they have the reverse slope rib that makes you be able to see more of the bird. He recommends 32 - 34" barrel guns.
I have been watching these videos for over a year now, I try to watch the guys when they shoot and see how much recoil they are getting from the shells they are shooting. Dave Carrie in the video really has his shooting down and if you watch he passes on the low birds and only shoots the high and far birds.