One of the reasons many of us hunt with an airgun is the increase challenge and the technical refinement it requires to our hunting approach. We need to get in closer and deliver the shot with pinpoint accuracy to be consistently successful. In todays post I want to share some of my thoughts on what makes an accurate hunting gun.

Practice makes perfect is an adage that applies to most things and it is as true, if not more so, when it comes to shooting an air rifle. and lucky for us, because these guns are relatively quiet with limited energy, we can practice a lot; in the basement, backyard, virtually anywhere a target and a bit of space are available. My Remington 700 Mountain variation 30-06 is one of my favorite hunting firarms, but I probably shoot less than fifty rounds per year out of it. On the other hand I have several air rifles that I put hundreds or thousands of pellets through in the same time period, and unlike my 30-06 in which most of the shots are off the bench, the air rifles are practiced with from just about any conceivable position I will be called to shoot from when in the field.

So with this said, lets get started with a brief discussion of what leads to accuracy in a hunting gun!

Gun Related  Ergonomics and Fit is a key factor that is often not given enough consideration, is the shooter able to get a comfortable and consistent hold on the gun, and moreover can they achieve this in all the positions to be encountered in the field? Is the gun a comfortable fit when shooting offhand as well as off sticks, does the cheekpiece provide a good site alignment and are you using the correct scope and mounts for the particular rifle? The ability to achieve a consistent hold is key to obtaining the optimum accuracy in general, but is particularly important when shooting hold sensitive spring piston rifles. I do quite well with many sporter style stocks, and just about every thumbhole stock I’ve used, though it may be necessary to place a spacer at the buttpad to extend pull. The hunter has to experiment a bit to find what works best for them, but when working up a gun review, every now and then I’ll shoulder a gun and it just feels right……. like it was made to fit me.

No matter how intrinsically accurate a rifle is, the shooter will not be able to realize the full potential without an excellent trigger. The trigger must be light and crisp, break cleanly and consistently to provide optimal Trigger Control. The trigger blade should engage the the pad of the finger, and the trigger pull, which is the distance between the butt and the trigger blade which allows the pad of the trigger finger to fall naturally on the trigger when the gun is shoulder

The type of scope married to the rifle: how its mounted, where it’s zeroed, and how its used are also important factors in accuracy. The mounting of the scope should be done using a mount and rings of the appropriate height to allow the shooter to obtain a good line of sight with the cheek glued to the cheekpiece. Care must be taken when mounting the scope to properly adjust the cant. Also, zero the gun appropriately for the caliber and power level being used: for most of my hunting PCPs in standard calibers I zero at 50 yards, then work out the POI for ranges from 25 to 75 yards, but will talk more about this later.

The last point is to make sure whatever gun you are using you practice with it, shooting from the same positions that will be used in the field, and find a consistent hold. As mentioned this is particularly important when shooting a spinger, as slight changes in how the forstock is balanced can cause a dramatic shift in the where your pellets hits.

Pellet Related  The style of pellet used also has an impact on accuracy, but regardless of style you need to make sure that you start out with a quality manufactured pellet; with respect to weight, lack of seams or defects, free of dirt or oils and a consistent skirt and head dimensions. Its always worth a look, because even a pellet you’ve used for years can have a bad lot turn up on occasion. Also make sure the pellets are packaged in a container that protects the contents from damage, it doesn’t take much external pressure on a tin to crimp the skirts, which will wreak havoc on accuracy!

The shape of the pellet head impacts accuracy, the degree to which it is a factor in part defined by the distances being shoot from. Flat headed pellet designs can be very accurate at closer range, but with an inherently poor BC, they are not so in the mid to long range. I have not had any gun that shoots pointed (field tip) pellets more accurately than flat head (close range) or round nosed (dome) pellets at most distances. Round nose pellets are the most accurate mid to long range pellet out of almost any of my rifles, and are the style I use in most cases.

Caliber  I don’t believe it’s true to say any one caliber is inherently more accurate than another. I used to hear statements to the effect that .177 was the most accurate and that .25 had accuracy issues, which I think if ever it was true, no longer is the case. It may seem that .177 is more accurate because it is flatter shooting, but when the trajectory of your gun is understood, this is less of an issue with the larger calibers. The contribution o caliber to accuracy is a complex issue that is a function of gun, pellet, and other variables. But let me say that I have several powerful guns in .22 and .25 caliber, that are minute of prairie dog at 75-100 yards, which is everything I desire in a hunting airgun. While I am fine using a .177 for small game hunting and find the accuracy very good in many rifles, I find that the smaller, lighter .177 pellets (which may be substantially more accurate at closer ranges) loose any advantage as the range is lengthened.

External Factors  As mentioned early in this post, Trajectory of the pellets flight is a factor that every airgunner needs to come to grips with. Regardless of the caliber, the longer a pellet is in flight the more it will drop from the horizontal line of travel. That means a .77 pellets moving at 600 fps ill have a similar trajectory as a .25 pellet moving at the same 600 fps velocity. Its not exactly the same, because the pellets BC and external influences (altitude, wind, etc) will come into play, yet they will be close. So to get the best accuracy from a gun/pellet combination, the shooter needs to know the guns trajectory (or will it will impact the target) at specific distances along its flight path, and will need to know the distance.

Range finding is a critical piece to the accuracy equation; at the simplest you know what the exact distance is when target shooting on a marked range, to the other end of the spectrum when hunting unfamiliar ground for unfamiliar quarry. Every shooter I’ve known considers themselves to be quite accurate at estimating range; but few if any have actually been as good as they think they are. I inclue myself in that statement, and while its fairly easy to tell the difference between a 20-30 yards shoot in the woods where I often hunt squirrel, differentiating a prairie dog at 60 or 75 yards when out of the open plains is much more difficult for me. In these cases I use a range finder along with a trajectory table to improve my field accuracy.

So that’s it for this week. Sorry I’m late posting, but last week we finished packing our household and shipping it to out to our new place up North in Minneapolis. And the day the moving truck left I kissed my wife and daughter goodbye and climbed on a plane for Tokyo, where I sit in a small hotel room (and I do mean small) writing this weeks blog entry. We’re almost to the point where I am situated and we’ll be back  on my Friday posting cycle, and ask that you stay with me until then! hope everybody is getting plenty of trigger time, I can’t wait to get home and back in the field myself!

I’ve been hunting with a great PCP for about a year now, which has become one of my favorites based on the merits of an outstanding design. It is the FX Verminator Extreme, and mine is a .25 caliber……when not shooting arrows! The reasons I like this rifle so much are: it is exceedingly accurate (thanks to the smooth twist barrel), it is powerful and has adjustable power, it has a modular design, offers a high shot count, cycles smoothly, has a robust and reliable multi-shot magazine, with the moderator installed it is quiet ……. and did I mention it is ACCURATE!

The modular design coupled with the adjustable power has let me use the same gun to hunt pest birds around the barn to prairie dogs at 100 yards without making tradeoffs at either end of the range. When dialed down and dressed in the shroud extension this gun is a 12 fpe urban hunting machine that is quiet and dead accurate. When dialed up, I can routinely drop a pellet on a pdogs head at 100 yards, which will flip them backwards off the mound. And though no success yet, I will arrow a coyote this year if it’s the last thing I do. I misjudged a suburban dog a week ago, sending the bolt flying inches over it’s back from 35 yards away…….. Oh well, it gives me a purpose and will make the trophy that much better when I succeed!

The point is, the Verminator adapts to just about any situation/application, and does a fine job all around. I also like the fact that it has a takedown design, which in urban hunting situations allows me to slip it in a daypack and carry it onsite without calling attention to myself. I’ve also packed the rifle into my kayak and on my bike for a couple of outings, where the compact takedown design and large air volume are notable assets.

One day I spotted a stream of starlings flying in and out of a hole in the side of a metal outbuilding at an industrial complex. I’d been out looking for groundhogs and was carrying the Verminator. I hadn’t seen a whistle pig all day, so the starlings raised my interest, but I wouldn’t have risked damaging the building and loosing my shooting privilages. But with this gun… no problem….. I dialed down the power and went at it. I missed a couple of shots hitting the building, yet the errant pellets did no harm.

A few weeks later I was in Kansas on a prairie dog shoot, and once again carried the Verminator. On this trip the power was kept on high and when shooting off sticks, felt like I couldn’t miss. Some bottle stocked guns don’t feel quite right on the shoulder, and can be difficult to get a consistant mount with. The Verminator has good ergonomics, and provides a good sight alignment.

But the unique characteristic of this gun is that the Verminator Extreme kit comes with an arrow barrel and four carbon fiber bolts which fits over the barrel like a sleave, and achieves velocities in the 275 fps range. It is a simple and tool free procedure to swap between barrels.

Other News

You may have noticed that I’ve been late posting on the blog the last couple weeks, I am in the process of selling one house, buying another, and getting my family relocated. It’s played havoc with my hunting schedule this year, but when spring rolls around I’ll be relocated and set up just a few short hours from unlimited prairie dog, small game, and predator hunting with my airguns, not to mention big game and birds with my firearms and bow!

A few years ago I was in Dallas on business, when a couple of friends invited me to break away for an evening pest control shoot on a small truck farm located on the outskirts of the city. We shot several raccoons, possums, and skunks that night and had a good time, but what stands out in my memory is that I was using a borrowed FX Gladiator, and it was the first FX gun that I’d ever used. I felt like I couldn’t miss, knocking over the varmints left and right, and I loved the trigger.

Jump ahead a few years and I was in Arizona for a rabbit hunt, and had the opportunity to hunt with the new Gladiator Mk2 for a few days. I had selected a .22 as this is my all favored caliber for small game in a powerful pcp hunting rifle …… although .25 is making a bid to usurp thst position. In the years between these two trips I’d used a number of FX guns, and invariably find them to be impressive performers in the field. Accurate, powerful, ergonomic, reliable, high shot count and intelligently designed with all the bells and whistles. But aside from the intrinsic accuracy, what I found useful in this hunting application was the high shot count that allowed me to put in the miles without lugging a buddy bottle in my pack or having to return to the truck.

The stock tucked right in and offered an excellent sight alignment.

A cottontail sitting in a clump of grass, was given away by the glare of a black eye.

This new iteration has an improved breech block, power adjuster, fully shrouded smooth twist barrel, improved stock and more. As mentioned, one of the great attributes of the Gladiator rifles is the large air supply that delivers  a high shot count on a single fill. The gun has adjustable power settings; on high power the rifle will deliver over 100 shots from a single 3000 psi fill, which gives me a full day of prairie dog shooting on a single fill. The power selector has three settings; one dot on the wheel is low (13 fpe) power, medium is two dots (21 fpe), and three is high power (32 fpe). I used high power to shoot rabbits out to 100 yards, and while I didn’t need it on this outing, the suppression system reduces the report to levels that can be used inside a barn or industrial building when moving from small game hunting to pest control.

Another thing I like about the new Gladiator Mk2 is that it uses the Royale style side-lever cocking system. The entire cycling of the gun and indexing of the magazine is extremely smooth and reliable. While shooting rabbits I was able to quickly cycle the gun without dismounting the rifle for a follow up if needed, which I have to admit came in handy a couple of times. The new ambidextrous stock design is ergonomic, not always easy to achieve in a bottle buttstock configuration, and the length of pull is also adjustable which along with the two-stage match trigger allows the full potential of the guns accuracy to be realized.

The gun is a well balanced offhand shooter.

Hiking back with another bunny in the bag. I had a great time hunting this gun in the beautiful Northern Arizona desert!

In the field I found the Gladiator was a great handling rifle that I could shoot well from any position; I used it sitting, prone, standing, offhand or off sticks. The stock provided a good sight alignment with a solid and consistent hold. Kip and I were hiking the desert hills searching the brush in the washes and arroyos for cottontails. My best shot of the trip was a 78 yards offhand head shot on a rabbit we spotted feeding at the bottom of the wash. I had nothing to brace on and if I sat or kneeled the rabbit was hidden behind the vegetation.  The gun fit me well and provided the stability required, and I knew I could nail this shot. I just about filled my limit in an afternoon hunt, and really enjoyed using this rifle.

Other Topics

I just wanted to quickly comment on my schedule for updating the blog: My intention has been to update on a weekly basis every Friday. However I am in the middle of a move, my family is relocating to the Minneapolis area, so for the next month or so I’d like to ask readers to bear with me. I’ll be getting the new post up over the weekend until our move is completed and my schedule normalizes, then we’ll get back on the Friday release.

All my life I’d been raised to believe that hunting at night was wrong, I mean it was illegal in my home state and nobody I knew would shoot a deer or other big game at night. But then I found myself living in Europe and reading the British magazines where lamping, as opposed as the stigmatized jacklighting, was an accepted method of take for rabbit hunters. When I returned to the States I started hitting the predators more aggressively, and many of the jurisdictions I was hunting in allowed the use of lights at night. Especially as I spent more time in Texas where you can hunt bobcat, coyote, fox, raccoon, hogs, and rabbits after dark, I found myself loading up my gear and taking off for the field after dinner.

Some states will let you hunt at night, but without the use of artificial lights. Often when I’m out calling in winter, the reflection of moonlight off the snow covered fields lets you see pretty clearly in the ambient lighting. A good scope with optimal light transmission characteristics will let you see clearly with surprisingly little light, and this is one of the times I like a scope with an illuminated reticule.

But the most effective approach to hunting at night is with lights; these can be scope mounted, handheld, conventional white light or colored filters can be used, and a lot of LED lights are now available. I’ve used scope mounted lights from Leapers, Gamo/BSA, and many others as well as the new generations of laser locators to good effect. The king of the night hunting gear is the infrared sighting system, which lets you see without any light being tracked back to you. But nightvision and infrared optics are very expensive, and can’t be used in daylight hours requiring that you have a specialized night time gun.

A collection of nighttime accessories; an iluminated low power scope, a couple of the Laser Genetics lights, a scope mounted light combined with laser, amd another scope mounted LED lamp.

Terry Tate lining up on a possum with a scope mounted light on his Benjamin Marauder.

Besides this possum, we shot four others, about a dozen raccoons, and a couple beavers that had been wrecking havoc on his property…. nighttime pest control is very productive.

When hunting predators in Texas we’ll sit on a platform mounted in a truck bed, with an e-called screaming out challenges or prey calls while a handheld spot light is swept in 360 degree sweeps with the light haloing the ground, which doesn’t spook the animals. This method works best with a two man team, letting the trigger man focus on the shot. When hunting on my own, I use a scope mounted light, putting my gun on a tripod and sweeping the barrel in an arc. It’s really excited to see a yote or raccoon charging in on you, or a bob cat winding his way in and hanging up to wait and see.

It is the combination of a light and a call thats particularly effective at night, one one hunt last winter I had a mixture of over twenty bobcat, fox, coyote, raccoon, and ringtail cats charge in to range, it was an incredible night. Predaors and varmint are on the prowl at night, so its a good time for the hunter to be out as we…

Another night we went out on a buddys farm in East Texas and we took off on his polaris one night scanning the trees with handheld spotlights and we took down a load of possum, raccoons and great big beaver that were tearing up Terry’s stack pond.

The thing you have to think about when picking out a light is how bright, how focused the beam, the battery life, how it will be mounted and directed, I have several set ups that I rotate through My Favorite lights are small and moderately light snap on the scope and don’t require a separate battery pack.

I like rifles in .22 or .25 calibers in mid to high velocity configuration for smaller game like rabbits or raccoons, but pull out the 30’s when the bigger predators come out to play.

One of my friends out in West Texas has an extreme lamping set up … he needs a truck to haul it!

On my best night on this rig we called in over twenty coyote, several bobcats, a few fox, and had a raccoon or two walk up.

When your out at night you do need to watch out for the other citizens of the dark, scorpions, rattlesnakes, skunks can all put a bad end to your evening, and work hard not to do a face plant as you work through the brush. It’s a lot of fun, if you have the chance, give it a go!

When you write, it can often come across that every time you go out it’s a success ……. but it kind of depends how you define success. If it is game in the bag, you have your misses like everyone else. As a hunter, I consider myself ahead of the curve everytime I get to spend a day in the field. But when I have my writters hat on and testing new equipment while up against a deadline, success is often measured against getting the material you needed to write your article and meet the deadline.

I’ve mentioned that my family and I are in the process of moving from Indiana to Minnesota, and while waiting to sell my house I’ve been flying back and forth every week, which has been cutting into my hunting season this year. I keep telling myself that once relocated I’ll have access to tons of hunting opportunities in the Dakotas as well as Minnesota, but it’s put a premium on my hunting time. What compounds the problem for me is that I have several new guns, pellets, scopes, calls, and other gear to test. So I try to make the most out of every chance to get out; where I used to hunt three to four time per week I’m now lucky to get out on a morning or afternoon hunt during the week. Against this backdrop, a failure to bag my game has ramifications on my writting assignment. So rather than base this article on an earlier hunt, I thought that in the name of balanced reporting I’d share a recent hunt where I struck out……. no matter how good you are (or think you are), no matter how much time you spend in the field. or how honed your techniques are, this will happen from time to time.

I was flying back on a Friday night with my plane arriving at 10:00 pm, and knew that I’d get home at 11:00, spend an hour getting my gear together, and catch a few hours sleep before a 5:30 wake up call. That would be the signal to throw on my camo, pack my guns and gear, for the drive up to one of my squirrel hunting spots. My plan was to drive a couple hours north, to a local public hunting area that is comprised of several thousand acres of woods and lakefront that I hunt quite frequenly. I grabbed two guns that I’ve been shooting, one of the new .30’s and a .25 rifle in which I was trying out some newly release pellets. My plan was to head out with the .25 to bag a few squirrels, then hike back to my vehicle and swap out guns, grab my Fox Pro E-caller and work the margins where the harvested cornfields ran up against the woods and try to call up a coyote. I got on site before the sun came up and set up in a stand of hardwoods where I always see bushytails. It was a cold morning and there was snow on the ground. I wore my warm snow patterned camo overalls and coat, and was feeling that this was going to be a good morning. Sitting with my back against a tree, which let me overlook a gently sloping hill with a lot of deadfall, I waited. After 15 minutes I sensed motion to my right, and slowly turning spotted a couple does walking off to the side. After they’d wandered by I herd some noise and saw a flash of movement, and after a few minutes spotted a red squirrel about 40 yards away moving down a tree, then digging up nuts and feeding. I tracked him through the scope, but as I don’t hunt these little guys, satified myself with watching. After a few minutes, another squirrel ran down the trunk of a tree 30 yards to my left …… another red! I sat this stand for a half hour and saw nothing more, so decided to move on.

Hiking 15 minutes on, I spotted a fox squirrel moving through the trees in my direction, closing in from about 100 yards away. I sat down and prepared to shoot when he popped up in range. I never saw him again. But 10 minutes later a nice little four point buck came walking right past me. It figured, now that I was squirrel hunting I couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a deer! Funny how that works. I waited another few minutes and caught the outline of a squirrels head peering over the fork of an oak branch about 40 yards away. I brought the gun to shoulder and found my target …… another bloody red squirrel! I spent the next two hours in what should have been great conditions, in a place I knew head squirrels, and there was nothing to be found. I decided to give up on squirrels and give some predator calling a try before giving up altogether.

I drove a couple miles down the road to an area where I’d heard coyotes when I was out a few weeks earlier, parked, grabbed my gear, then hike about a half mile to a harvested corn field surrounded on three sides by woods. I worked into a spot that gave me a wind advantage and tucked into a snow dusted bush along the border. With the call positioned about 20 yards in front of me, I started with a soft rodent squeal before changing to a cottontail distress and increasing the volume. 10 minutes in I saw a yote pop out of the woodline about 200 yards away from me. He started charging in to the call on a dead run, then at about 100 yards he started circling into the wind. I don’t know if he saw me bringing my gun around (I was moving at a painfully slow speed) or winded me, but he turned tail and bolted back to where he’d come from. And that was all she wrote, a couple more sets but no more action followed.

So there you go, those of us that write about hunting may give the impression that we never come back empty handed, but that’s not the case. Especially for those of us that hunt public land as well as private property, you take the strikeouts along with the home runs. After a couple days off for the holidays, I’ll get back out for some hunting before I go back to work. If all goes well, I’ll have a success story for you in my next post ….. but you never know! That’s why they call it hunting!

When my friends and I hunt predators or deer, we’ll usually be decked head to toe in terrain matching camouflage clothing, replete with face masks, gloves, and additional cover on our guns or bows. But often when I meet up with the same guys for a fall squirrel hunt, they’ll show in jeans and their favorite hoodie. We’ve often discussed the importance of camo for small game air gun hunting, and in this weeks blog entry I’d like to give my thoughts and see what others are thinking.

For some quarry, such as jackrabbits in the desert, I don’t find camo as important as keeping the noise down and making good use of color. Still, it does makes sense to wear neutral colors so you don’t stand out like a traffic cone!

 Let me first start with my answer to the question of whether camo is important or not…. in general I think it is very important …. in most cases. Obviously when hunting turkey in California or Virginia nobody argues that it makes sense to camo up, I mean that’s what you do with a shotgun or bow, and the ranges are about the same. But I also think on quarry like squirrels,woodchuck, or prairie dogs it can lead to dramatically improved results. These animals are prey to just about every meat eater in their territory, and keen vision is the primary sense that keeps them off the menu. The sense of hearing is an issue with tree squirrels and rabbits, smelling not so much, but they’ll see an unbroken outline or moving hands from a long ways off! Part of a successful camo strategy is not only to break up your outline, but also control movement.

When I moved to the Midwest and started hunting tree squirrels, my typical clothing would be jeans and a natural covered top….. I didn’t worry so much about breaking up my outline, yet still had the common sense not to dress in day glow colors that anything with eyes could pick up from a mile off. That first season I shot a few squirrels, but didn’t have the stellar success rates I heard some guys were getting using the same still hunting and ambush techniques I was applying. Then one day I was looking a photo my son had shot on one of our outings and I noticed my outline was exceedingly noticeable against the tree behind me, and my face staring up into a tree and my hands on the rifle looked like flares in the early morning daylight. This got me to thinking and I decided the following season I’d approach squirrel hunting more like I was out after coyote.

My success hunting squirrels sky rocketed when I got serious about camo … for both me and the gun.

Next year I started in fall with camo, I gloved and masked myself, and was much more disciplined in my approach. Everyone of my first few hunts ranked amongst my best ever. So I switched back for a few hunts to jeans, etc without gloves or mask, and my numbers dropped. Back to camo and my success rate started climbing again…. this was enough empirical data for me!

Now the way I hunt jackrabbits in the desert is a bit different, with lots of glassing and hiking it’s more like stalking plains game in South Africa. I’ll glass the sparse hillsides looking for the glow of amber light diffusing through a rabbits ears as it lays in its scrape. Using brush and arroyos to close the distance, I’ll slowly move into a shooting position. In this situation I don’t believe full camo offers the same advantage.

But if you are out calling crows, my experience is that unless you have have very good camo in conjunction with a blind or hide, your chances of getting a crow into shooting range are about nil…. It’s a game changer! No doubt I’ve had the opportunistic shot on a crow that pops up from time to time, and I’ve sniped them in suburban or industrial areas where they don’t expect to be shot while wearing street cloths, but for serious crow hunting you are not going to be consistently successful without camo clothing, even if sitting in a blind.

Muted greens for spring and early fall….

and whites for the winter hunts, match your camo to the surroundings. Sounds obvious, but many hunters use the same patterns year round.

When picking camo look for a pattern that blends with your surroundings, cover everything, especially the hands and face which are where most body motion occurs, and limit extraneous movement. I think that if you approach squirrel, groundhogs, or crows with the same care you’d put into predators, deer, or turkey, you’ll see the results in larger bags.