PIGEON SHOOTING 



THERE are three kinds of pigeon shooting in this country : 

 that from traps; that against the farmer's great enemy 

 the wood pigeon (Columba palumbus) ; and that of the wild blue 

 rock pigeon {Columba lima) along the cliffs. The stock dove 

 (Columba cenas) is found amongst the wood pigeons in small 

 proportion to their numbers. 



A few years ago the " trap shooting," as it was called, was 

 very fashionable, and probably it will be so again, when the 

 shooting schools have sufficiently shown that they can teach 

 anybody to hit targets sent overhead, and cannot do much for 

 any form of shooting that depends for its accuracy and quick- 

 ness upon balance and good walking powers. Not that pigeon 

 shooting is much of a school for this class of shooting either, 

 but it is shooting at birds going away from the gun and rising 

 at a fair range. At 30 yards rise the majority of those who 

 shoot pigeons fail to kill many more than half their birds with 

 two barrels. It is a very poor shot indeed who misses as great 

 a proportion of shots at driven pheasants. Yet with this evi- 

 dence constantly before the eyes of everybody who reads his 

 sporting papers, it is very frequently asserted that driven game 

 is much more difficult to kill than birds rising in front of the 

 shooter. Besides this, the pigeon springs from the ground 

 slowly compared with a partridge or a grouse or a snipe, and 

 it does not cause the sportsman to walk after it. The author 

 has on many occasions seen pigeons dropped within 3 yards 

 of the trap constantly by a man in good form, but he never saw 

 a full-feathered grouse, partridge, or snipe knocked over as near 

 as that to its rise. The difficulty of shooting rising game is to 



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