doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Traits of a pigeon gun?

To add a bit more thread drift, helice venues are growing and it is a great game w/present loads limited to 28 grams and no shot larger than #7.5's here, but FITASC says 2.7mm or .106" maximum which would be #7.

You can find a partial listing of US venues here:

https://www.ushelice.com/

On another note, the World Cup is being held in Rome this year. The US will be well represented and I believe there will be 12 persons representing us who will be headed that way in the next few days. An interesting aside is that if you think you are good enough or even if you don't and have not qualified for a spot on the US team, you may show up at a World Cup & shoot anyway. Same apples for any of the open USHA shoots held here; some are qualification matches from which team members are selected and some are just races, but they are all always good fun.

Also, there have been huge improvements in both machines & targets over the past several years and there are machines now that can and do load automatically from magazine of targets allowing larger shoots to go smoothly & w/o the tedium of having to manually reload them after each shooter. Where single target traps are in use, they usually limit the number of shooters so the races can be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

A 16g L.C. Smith No. 2 with no safety. It is possible it was ordered as such for traditional southern quail plantation shooting, rather than Live Birds. I don't know the chokes.

Here's another. Homer Clark's Ithaca NID 5E with which he won the 1948 Live Bird World Championship



Hemingway's W. & C. Scott & Son; at Club de Cazadores del Cerro, Rancho Boyeros, Cuba. He also used a Model 12 at the rings

I should have qualified my earlier post with the caveat that pigeon guns can be anything the gunner wants them to be. I was not there when this happened, but when the big flyer shoot of the year was held at Malloy's, years ago, it is told that a hunter from, I believe, PA, was urged to go to it and enter because he was such a good shot on game birds. He was a working man, a logger if I recall correctly, and had a mortgage on his home (not the financial condition of most serious flyer shooters). He arrived on the day before the shoot began so as to get acclimated to the "game" he had never competed in. There was a lot of side betting going on as he shot his first flyers of his life. His wife had pleaded with him to not throw away the house payment on shooting pigeons.

After the first day it is said that he called his wife and told her not to be concerned about the house payment ............... in fact, "Don't be concerned about the house at all. I've won enough money to pay off the mortgage already". He went on to win the whole shoot with ................. a Rem. 1100.

If this much circulated story is inaccurate I would appreciate anyone with firsthand information correcting it.

Anyone who really wants to learn the history of pigeon shooting, and pigeon guns, should buy Cyril's book. It is not cheap, but it is priceless.

SRH

For those who "No Hablan Espanol"-- Club of the hunters on the hill. I have read that Hemingway won more $ on live birds with his Model 12 that with any of the other 12 bores he owned and shot: An Early Browning Superposed, the W. & C. Scott he bought used in Italy following WW2- and a very high grade Beretta sidelock, even a pair of Merkels with extra barrel sets. RWTF

Maybe he shot more matches with the 12?

The 22 men who went twenty-five straight at the 1901 Grand American Handicap at Live Birds, arrow pointing at Ansley H. Fox with his Winchester Model 1897 --

I went to Malloy�s a couple times in the �old days� Stan. I saw a man from PA win the shoot, but it was with a Model 21....and he knew how to operate it. Maybe not the same guy? Jon Kruger was there too. Malloy�s was quite a place. Of course, protesters were there too, but outside the entrance. Food was fabulous and the poker games were unreal. Calcutta�s were huge money.

Could you have meant a Model 12, buzz? If so, that could have been the same guy. As I said, I heard it secondhand (or third hand ).

Jon won it one time, probably with a K gun, not sure. That is a great story, and everything about it is typically Jon Kruger. He left there with his winnings and went directly to Argentina. He took a paper bag full of cash on the airplane there and back, an obscene amount. When his sponsor, who is a close friend of mine, asked him why he did such a thing (carrying that much out of the country) he replied "What the h--- was I supposed to do, leave it in a locker at the airport?". Typical Jon.

One great pigeon shooter I would have like to have known was Billy Perdue. One of the members here was a close friend of Billy's and traveled with him to many pigeon shoots, both here and abroad. Billy shot S x Ss .......... and won a lot with them.

SRH

Here is the list of shooters, guns and loads that goes with Dave's image; from https://digital.la84.org/digital/collection/p17103coll2/id/42076
Note most of the loads were 1 1/4 oz. with 3 1/2 Dr.Eq. - in 8# guns.



E.C. Griffith is far right, and won both the 1901 GAH at Live Birds and the GAH at Targets



The gun Griffith used at the GAHs in 1901 was a Parker DH 30" straight grip choked IM/IM and ordered in 1898. His 2nd Parker was an AAH SN 104021 shipped December 13, 1901 with 32" Whitworth barrels, pistol grip stock, with special instructions, "no safety, no butt, put gold shield on side of stock 'Presented to E. C. Griffith, Pascoag, RI By Parker Bros'". The gun was returned in 1902 to be re-stocked with a straight grip and to install Silver pad.