Scottish hunter devises formula to improve shooting of birds
10:55 PM CDT on Saturday, August 30, 2008
At 30 minutes before official sunrise Monday, dove fields throughout most of Texas will reverberate with the staccato bark of shotguns. Veteran wing shots agree that mourning doves are among the most difficult targets that an average hunter will encounter.
For every dove that falls on opening day, at least four shots will be fired, and that's assuming an abundance of birds. The fewer birds are available in a given field, the more shots are required to bag each bird.
That's due to the frustration factor that results in hunters taking increasingly marginal shots rather than waiting for birds to approach within range. In a slow dove field on opening weekend last year, I watched a single dove fly across a shooting line and counted 17 shots directed at the bird. None connected. The bird simply disappeared in the distance, much the wiser in the ways of avoiding dove hunters.
As many as 10 hunters shot at that bird. They missed for a variety of reasons. A few were not even in shotgun range. Others did not have their guns properly mounted. Most of those who fired at the bird flying past their position in a 90-degree angle shot behind the dove.
They don't fully understand the concept of forward allowance, usually referred to as "lead." Pete Blakeley is a Dallas-area author and shooting instructor who is constantly seeking ways to explain the physics of shotguns to his many students.
The native Scotsman hasn't shed his charming brogue, despite 10 years of listening to Texas twang. Blakeley's cell phone ring tone still sounds like bagpipes, but his shooting lessons more closely resemble the high school geometry or trigonometry lessons so many of us slept through.
"To better understand how my method works, let's do some calculations," Blakeley said. "At 30 yards, it takes .097 of a second for a shot load moving at 1,200 feet per second to reach the target. If the target is crossing at a right angle and moving 30 mph, the laws of physics say we must lead the target 4.62 feet in order for the shot and the target to arrive at the same place at the same time."
Through thousands of shots personally fired and even more shots fired by students with Blakeley peering over their shoulders, he's figured out a system that he calls the unit lead system. He's written a book and produced a DVD that explains in detail how it works.
While the book and DVD (available at www.peteblakeley.com) are aimed directly at clay target sports, like sporting clays, the same principles apply to hunting.
The unit that Blakeley advocates is .75 of an inch, about the diameter of a penny or the width of an adult man's index finger. For narrow angle shots, either incoming or quartering away, a one unit lead is all you need. As the angle increases, so does the lead requirement. Blakeley leads a 50-yard crossing shot by six units.
Hitting moving targets with a shotgun is an inexact science at best. Luckily, shotguns have a built-in margin of error. As soon as the shotgun pellets emerge from the barrel, they start to spread out. That's why the same lead on a narrow-angle target will break a target at 20 yards or 50 yards.
Blakeley's DVD may be more useful as a teaching tool than his book. That's because he uses a special camera and slow-motion photography to show exactly what he sees when he breaks the target. The DVD would be particularly useful to anyone interested in improving their sporting clays scores.
When Blakeley gives individual shooting lessons, he uses a pointer alongside the gun barrel to illustrate how much lead the shooter must see in order to break a specific target. Unfortunately, dove hunters can't all have Pete Blakeley standing behind them in a hunting field. It's enough to know that the title of Blakeley's book and accompanying DVD is You're Behind It!
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