We were up bright and early opening morning of pheasant season, but not to hunt pheasants.
We were off instead to the gun show at the state fair grounds to find Joyce a better shotgun. She still had her first one, a little youth model 20 gauge single shot that had served her well, but I have long kidded her about her “toy shotgun,” and besides it was high time for her to step up a notch or two.
The gun show proved disappointing, and we found nothing, so we canvassed the town and found her a really nice Charles Daly youth model 20 gauge pump; just what the doctor ordered. She calls it her diamond, because in this day and age it will never decrease in value.
I’m not much of an upland bird hunter and Joyce has never hunted pheasants or quail, so in an attempt to expand our horizons and add to our experiences and adventures we have a couple bird hunts scheduled for the near future.
This necessitates her learning how to wing shoot; a category where my skills are so paltry I’d probably do better teaching my own daughter how to put on makeup. Nevertheless, come Saturday afternoon, off we went. We found a field of milo stalks on some property where we hunt deer, and the lesson began.
First, we spent a short time on the pump gun itself, loading, sighting, working the safety and shooting at stationary paper targets to get her familiar with the gun. We both agreed a set of luminous front and rear sights would be a help, so that’s being addressed as I write. I stressed to her the need to shoulder the gun the same each time and to be absolutely certain she lines up the sights each time and sees only the sights, not the top of the barrel (as that would mean she wasn’t sighting the gun fully horizontally toward her target.)
Next, we discussed how wing shooting differs from shooting at a standing deer or turkey; how it requires her to follow the flying bird, anticipating where to shoot so the bird and the pellets from the shell collide, so to speak.
By the way, this is a skill that can be TAUGHT in a classroom on a chalk board, but can only be LEARNED by experience. We’d been given a case of Blue Rock clay birds and an old thrower, and it was time to put my instruction to the test. There were some technical issues as the first couple clays wobbled and dribbled out of the thrower, and we never did get it working satisfactorily, so I began hand throwing them Frisbee style. It’s always a fear of mine when teaching someone something like this (and especially my wife), they will never be successful, and I won’t know what to do to help them. And so it went for awhile; I’d fling a clay bird, she would shoot, and the clay would crash to the ground untouched.
