Popular Science Monthly 



533 



so accustomed is he to the dash of the 

 bird on his call, and the more experi- 

 enced the shooter, the more likely is this 

 to cause him to miss. 



To score the bird "dead" on the score 

 sheet, the shooter must break off a 

 perceptible piece. A puff of dust will 

 not do. Many and many are the peeved 

 shooters who see the fatal plume of dust 

 rise from the bird, but do not get it 

 scored to them. That means that a 

 single pellet of shot has passed through 

 the top oi the bird, but due to the in- 

 accuracy of the shooter's pointing, the 

 pellet hit but the outside of the shot 

 circle, and he has virtually and legally 

 mi.sscd the bird. 



As the shooter cannot stand nearer 

 than sixteen yards to the trap, and in 

 handicap events, may be put back to 

 twenty-three yards, it follows that the 

 bird because of its high speed, gets 

 another sixteen yards or so from the 

 trap before it is hit. Probably the 

 average shooter hits his birds at about 

 thirty-five yards from the muzzle of his 

 gun. Here there is a circle of about 

 thirty inches of shot, which, placed on 

 the bird, will surely break it. So the 

 problem of the trapshooter is to judge 

 the speed and angle of the bird so that 

 he can place a two and a half foot 

 circle of little pellets in the path of the 

 saucer. He may have to pull the trigger 

 when the muzzle is three feet ahead of 

 a quartering bird if he is 

 a slow shot and a slow 

 swinger to hit that 

 saucer. 



Because of the danger 

 of the small saucer get- 

 ting through the hissing 

 cloud of pellets without 

 being hit, full choke 

 guns, which hold their 

 charges together and 

 shoot dense clouds, art- 

 necessary for the traj)- 

 shooter, and even then 

 there are times when tin- 

 slow shot, firing when 

 the bird has gotten so 

 far away that the cloud 

 of pellets has spread 

 widely and thinned out, 

 misses merely becau.sehis 

 "pattern had a hole in it." 



Trapshooting is a game in which the 

 gun and the clay bird are the tools as 

 the l)all and bat are in baseball. It is 

 not preparation for any other shooting 

 any more than baseball is preparation 

 for anything else. I'rom the little houses 

 covering the pits in which are set the 

 trappers and traps and birds, there 

 speed more than thirty-five million of 

 the little saucers each year. Forty-five 

 hundred clubs fallow the game of the 

 trap. Four hundred thousand men shoot 

 once or more each year at the clay birds. 



While the beginner marvels at the 

 immensity of the space surrounding the 

 little birds, and the shortness of the 

 time available in which to locate the 

 flying saucer and judge its angle of 

 flight, put the gun on the right spot and 

 pull the trigger, yet the skill acquired 

 by the shooter following the game is 

 wonderful. Breaking ninety of the 

 clay birds out of one hundred in a big 

 tournament would not put one within 

 the first ten per cent of the men entered 

 in the shoot unless the conditions were 

 unusually bad. There are hundreds 

 of instances where a hundred of the 

 birds have been broken without a miss, 

 while a professional shot has the record 

 of more than fi\'e hundred straight hits. 

 The record for 1915 was three hundred 

 and seventy-two in competition, without 

 a miss, four hundred and ninety-nine out 

 of five hundred bv the same man. 



The puller reclining in his little house. He watches each 

 clay bird as it leaves the machine and he knows that 

 his slightest hesitation will "balk" the best shooter 



