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 livia) along the cliffs. The stock dove (Columba Ænas) 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 quickness 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 evidence 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 shoot straight quick enough; that of shooting driven game is to wait long enough and shoot straight. For the first, there is an individual limit for each of us, which no amount of practice seems to improve. There is, for the second, no limit to the cultivation of patience.

But this only applies to the single shot of each kind. The difficulty of driving is not in the shot, but in the shots. There is no limit to the number of possible chances, and for this reason one cannot exercise patience and let the game get very near, lest other chances should be lost. The real difficulty, then, in shooting driven game well is to shoot the far-off birds as soon as the gun will kill them, in order to change guns quickly and be ready again.

In pigeon shooting the double rise is the most difficult. Few kill half their birds at 25 yards rise, and still folk will talk of the difficulty of driven game as compared with flushed game. The author does not believe there is any pigeon shooter who can, even occasionally, kill a dozen blue rocks in double rises at 30 yards. He knows there are plenty of people who can frequently kill a dozen grouse, pheasants, and partridges driven overhead. And yet a rising blue rock is not “in it” with the spring of an October grouse, partridge, or snipe for quickness. A ten-year-old boy has been coached at the shooting school to kill driven game well, but nobody ever saw or will see a ten-year-old walk after October grouse and kill them well. An old man of eighty has made quite as good work as the rising generation at driven game, but not at shooting over dogs.

Still, pigeon shooting from traps is only now regarded as a test of skill by a very small and decreasing minority, and the reason is that the coming game has been invested with a difficulty that does not properly belong to it, and one that will grow less each year as the prejudice against going to school to learn skill with the gun decreases. At present it is not the townsman who finds driven game difficult, but the countryman who has learnt his shooting on game, but only a little of it, and who is “above” going to school again.

The rules for pigeon shooting can always be had from the Secretary of the Gun Club, Notting Hill; they are slightly changed occasionally, and therefore it is not wise to repeat them here. There are five traps, each of which is supplied with a pigeon, and either of these birds is released for the man at the mark to shoot at when he calls “Pull.” The operation of the traps is done by hand, but a hand that does not know which trap is to be opened.

Ordinary game weapons are of no use in these competitive pigeon matches. Guns are used of above 7 lbs., that will absorb the recoil of large charges of powder and shot, the latter of which is limited to 1¼ oz. The usual plan is to use small-sized shot, so that there shall be many of them in this weight of load, and to use enough powder to cause the light pellet to strike with as much energy as pellets a size larger from a game gun and charge of powder. Pigeon weapons used always to be chambered for 3 inch cartridges, but whether this will continue, now that concentrated powders have come in and are much used for pigeons, is doubtful.

Some very wonderful scores have been made in America by professional pigeon shots. Probably nothing is more deceptive than the scoring of long runs at pigeons, which may be the best blue rocks or very blundering slow-rising fowl. In America they have not had a very good class of pigeons, and their records are consequently not fairly comparable with those made in England at best blue rocks. The American birds are of the English race, but not of the blue rock variety. The latter are a domesticated breed of the wild rock pigeons of the coast caves, where its pursuit is vastly more difficult than shooting its cousins from a trap.

The records of kills of even best blue rocks do not tell us very much of the form of the men who made them. Some apparently very wonderful shooting was done half a century ago, at 40 yards rise. Later, guns were reduced in bore, and in weight and load; boundaries were shortened, and 12 bore charges of nitro powders were improved, so that conditions have varied from time to time so much that nobody can say with any certainty who were the best pigeon shots or at what period they lived. Probably Horatio Ross got out of a gun as great a proportion of its accuracy and power as any man who ever lived, and although the numbers of gunners who can shoot driven game well has greatly increased, the number who can shoot pigeons even moderately well has very much declined in England. Our countrymen now lose the Grand Prix de Monte Carlo with nearly as great certainty as formerly they won it. This does not appear to be because the competition is more severe than it was, for the author knows some winners of the Grand Prix whom he could not call first-rate shots. One of the writer’s first pigeon shooting matches was at a private house party at Vaynol Park. His experience there serves to illustrate the differences between good blue rocks and what are usually called “owls”; this term means any bird either bigger or with more white in it than a blue rock has, also it serves to show that an occasional “owl” is a good test of ready marksmanship. The writer had won a single stake, and only required one more bird out of the double rise stake to win that too. It was getting dusk, and the birds had been very smart. When the traps fell, two white ones came out and circled round to right and left as slowly as they could. Of course the shooter thought it an obviously soft thing to get them both; but “certainties” in shooting have a way of following the example of racing precedents. He missed both quite easily, and had to pay instead of to receive—except in “chaff.”

It might be thought that something should be said on the ethics of pigeon shooting, since the exigencies of polo have abolished it at Hurlingham, and the screeching brigade have rendered this as a moral victory in the press.

The author has bred pigeons in Lincolnshire dovecotes for this sport, and is not a bit ashamed of the fact. Moreover, as Edward VII. was at that time shooting them, the company is good enough.

This bird generally has to be shot from a boat, and usually on a sea not as steady as it might be. The pigeons live in the cliff caves, and disturbance causes them to dash out with a speed and a twist that is highly productive of sport that is not very fatal to the birds.

It is clear that there are limits to the appreciation of difficulty in shooting, otherwise these cave rock pigeons would attract all those shooters who can never get pheasants high enough or fast enough for them. But they do not. There is certainly a chance of mingling the pleasures of sport with the pains of sea-sickness, and so an excuse of a kind for leaving the wild rock pigeon severely alone.

The Wood Pigeon

In summer these birds are widely distributed through nearly every wood in the country, and the majority of the large flocks we see in the winter come from abroad. Summer gives shooting to anyone who has patience to wait for a very occasional shot, but in winter great sport is to be had wherever the big flocks are found. These flocks often number many thousands of individuals, and do not visit the same spots every year. The attraction is always food: acorns, clover-fields, and turnip-fields are most attractive. If left alone, the pigeons would soon clear a big field of every blade of clover or of every turnip leaf. In ordinary weather they are very wild indeed, and must be attracted to the hidden shooter with decoys of kinds. But in hard frost, when there is some frost fog in the air, through which the birds look as big as barndoor fowls with their puffed-out feathers, they are almost careless of man or gun. At least, they are so occasionally, and in such circumstances the author has shot lots of them from the roadside hedge without any concealment, but by merely walking along and shooting those which rose nearest to the fence. Another way of shooting them is to wait for them to come in to roost. The latter gives a few very sporting shots, but neither plan is likely to give great sport, and the best is undoubtedly to be had only by the double means of the use of decoys and a constant and simultaneous disturbance of the pigeons in all the coverts of a neighbourhood by a number of guns.

In this way the birds are kept upon the move all the time, they are attracted to your hide by your decoys or dummy pigeons, and many times over 100 and sometimes over 200 pigeons have in this way been killed in one day by a single gun. The shooting is all the harder because of the necessity of shooting from a shelter, except in snow-time, when occasionally a white nightshirt is a good substitute for any hide, and the gunner may stand out in the open unobserved by the birds. Very tall bamboo rods are useful to fix up dummy or stuffed wood pigeons, head to the wind, on the tallest branches of the trees near by the sportsman’s hide. Others can be placed upon the ground to give additional confidence to the coming birds. Even better results can be obtained by the use of one or two live decoys on the ground amongst the dummy or stuffed birds.

A live decoy is best used on the principle of the “play bird” of the bird-catching fraternity. He is made to rise from the ground occasionally, so that he flaps his wings and settles again. This is done by the pulling of a string which is fastened to the pigeon and works over a lever. Anything in the shape of a couple of sticks placed some yards apart, with the string fastened to the farther from the shooter and running loosely over the top of the nearer, will answer the purpose of hoisting up the pigeon 4 feet or a yard. In tying it to the running string between the two sticks, it is necessary so to arrange as not to impede the wing movement and not to turn over the bird in flipping it upwards. It is not the rise that must be looked to for attracting wild ones, but the natural way the bird settles after it has been flipped into the air. This will be seen much farther away than the dummies on the ground, or even those in the trees, but it is not so much because of the distance whence it is seen as because of the confidence it begets that it is the best form of decoy. In this sport the quicker one shoots the better, because there are always more birds coming, and if you wait they may get near enough to hear the shot, or even to see the smoke, after either of which those particular birds are lost for the day. The best position for a hide is in the fence of a covert, near to not very tall trees on which dummies can be placed, and where the adjoining field affords food—for choice, a turnip or a clover field.

The shooting at settling pigeons as they steady themselves is child’s play, but the ambitious gunner need not wait for this, and will have plenty of opportunities of being dissatisfied with his own skill. If there should be big hawks about, as described by Lord Walsingham of one of his famous shoots, the gunner is likely to realise that even wood pigeons can emulate the twisting of the snipe and the speed of a down-wind grouse, and do it all at one time.

It may be asked whether wooden dummies are likely to take in the live birds. There is no doubt about that, if they are set head to wind, as the real thing always sets himself. Moreover, it has occurred that a peregrine has so much mistaken the nature of these imitations as on one occasion to dash at one of them, hurl it yards away, and suffer himself to become a gunner’s substitute for the tardy quarry, and so to gaze out of a glass case ever after as a warning to rash and greedy humanity.

The author believes that Mr. Mason of Eynsham Hall, who now has Drumour in Perthshire, holds the record for a day’s wood pigeon shooting. He is not very certain of the score, but believes it was 253 birds, if memory is reliable.

With all the records of trap shooting before him, the author cannot make up his mind to occupy space with them; for, as already said, they are not comparable amongst themselves.