Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 92.djvu/161

 Popular Science Monthly

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��the wise gunner puts the muzzle a foot or two to the left or right of the bird, as he may be angling from the straight

����When the bird is ascending the hunter shoots well over him to make sure of a hit

��line. No swing is possible, because the distance from the straight line is slight.

The soaring bird is another deceiver of the simple huntsman. No old duck shot needs to be told how much one has to hold over the duck which leaps from the reeds and darts almost vertically for the blue voids. I remember shooting about one box of shells at a covey of quail, broken up and lying just over the crest of a rocky ridge. The birds simply dropped down the ridge like stones, and most of the box of shells went while I was thinking that I had to hold lower and lower below the dropping bird to make the shot charge intersect his flight. When I saw two or three feet of daylight 'twixt the muzzle of the gun and the bird above, then the bird usually quit flying and went tumbling down the slope.

All of this holding v/here the bird isn't and all this swing prove necessary merely because of the relatively slow flight of shot, which has about the • velocity of sound for a short distance, and then less as the range grows longer. If we could give shot the sustained velocity of our Government rifle, hitting with the shot- gun would be a matter merely of holding correctly on the bird — and so "like shooting fish."

As I have said, applying the mathe- matics of the case to the actual shooting is difficult, because of the unknown factors in the problem; but it is possible to get an approximation of the right distance ahead necessary for the various ranges, and so avoid the inclination to shoot behind the bird, which is the most common fault of the shotgun man.

��A load of No. 7 shot flies like this over the various ranges:

��angc

�Time of FllyUl

�Average vcloflly

�Velocity at ond ot

range

�Lead neoossary lor bird flying 60 ft. pcrBcc.

�20

�.0611 sec.

�1050

�860

�3 ft. 8 in.

�25

�.079 "

�1000

�800

�4 " 9 "

�30

�.0985 "

�1)50

�740

�6 " 11 "

�35

�.1194 "

�900

�700

�7 " 2 "

�40

�.14 "

�875

�650

�8 " G "

��The speed of birds is usually over- estimated. British experiments with ac- curate time-measuring apparatus years ago showed that pheasants fly little more than thirty miles per hour in the open, while the buzzing partridge, like our own quail, flies less than this. The duck, down-wind, is the fastest thing our gun- ners have to shoot at, but it is doubtful

���'T^-^^^^'^^^

��The hunter does not aim at the spot where the rabbit is but at where he is jumping

��over 60 miles an hour yarns of the returned

��if they get up despite all the huntsman.

The same general rules which are given for shooting birds on the wing also apply to rabbit hunting. The rabbit usually gives the hunter only the slightest glimpse of him in passing an open stretch of ground, so that some rapid calculations must be made in order to hit him at the next clearing.

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