DO CLAYS MAKE YOU A BETTER GAME SHOT?
It's early in the season and an invitation to shoot rolls into the inbox and stings the average game shot into confronting the fact that they haven't picked up a gun in something approaching a year. In the age of covid that might even be two years for some of us, but can a disappointing session missing pitch discs do more harm than good?
Many guns begin their seasonal migration to their local clay ground just as the pinkfeet geese begin to split the sky overhead in the early autumn sunshine. The clay ground for some is a place of trepidation as many game shots are nervous of their lack of match fitness showing for all to see. They are prepared to grapple with it though because the imagined (and it is imagined) scorn of complete strangers pales into insignificance when compared to the ridicule from their friends after the first few drives on the big day. So, with a cartridge bag over their shoulder and pre-prepared excuses on their lips, they make their furtive, solo approach to the tower, the home of the driven pair.
That's if their clay ground has a driven pair to shoot at. In an increasingly safety conscious world driven clays are becoming less and less common on many clay grounds. Potential injury from falling fragments means that some risk assessments simply do not allow for a driven bird to be thrown. The fall out zone required by the target setter to allow for missed birds to settle safely may also just take up too much space for the ground to view catering to the game shooters wishing to hone their skills as a profitable option. Instead they are replaced by a variety of crossers: long loopers, battues and chodels, many of which require sight pictures that are unfamiliar to those who do not shoot the Sportrap regularly. Baffled by gulf between the reality of modern sporting clays and what they can expect to find on the peg, the humbled game shot retreats back to the car park muttering "I never could shoot clays anyway".
Is such a bad practice session, played out weekly all over the country, worse than no practice at all? Are modern sporting clay grounds really the best place to hone one's skills?
A round of sporting is a different examination when someone is counting your misses to that which you find on a peg when counting anything other than what you have left to pick up is considered poor form (and only then so that all the game can enter the food chain). Clay shooting is not necessarily the relaxing experience they might find out in the field and the frustration can end up being a self-defeating downward spiral of decreasing performance.
An important point to appreciate is that many experienced shots do not shoot clays and game the same way and they all miss some birds just like everybody else.
At its most basic there are three methods to shoot a moving target with a shotgun. Pull Away, Swing Through, and Maintained Lead. Chris Baker from Suffolk is a AA class clay shot who has also won the British Side by Side Championships five times, and the European Championship four times. That haul of wins demonstrates that this is not a question of over and under versus side by side (interestingly, many exceptional over and under shots can't shoot side by sides) and not necessarily a question of mastering any one method. He is one of the best around at shooting both and even he has to remind himself that there is an adjustment to be made after a long summer shooting competitive clays.
"It took me a long time to get a handle on the fact that when I transition into the game season and I have a bad drive early season that I am almost always in front of the bird." he says.
I don't use swing through on game, I lock onto the head and I match the speed of the gun to the bird. It is a fast gun swing but the bead doesn't appear to leave the head of the bird. I'm killing it with gun speed not lead."
Only when we start shooting higher birds do I lock onto the front and then open up a gap but its really no more than a three or five feet. Whereas I could go to Grimsthorpe Shooting Ground and shoot a battue and I might see 15ft of lead."
This points to two conundrums from the different codes. Firstly: everybody sees lead differently. Secondly, and perhaps counterintuitively, the clay target that is almost always slowing down once it leaves the trap needs more perceived lead for many experienced shots than the game bird which is maintaining its flight speed and often increasing it.
Lead is personal. Very personal. We all want to be tested by sporting birds and when we reach the limit of our ability and our success rate falls away, forward allowance or lead is one of the most discussed topics between stands and drives. For most people it may be mistake to begin to think about opening up gaps and giving birds the proverbial 'five bar gate'. Whilst high level clay shots may have the experience to be able to focus on the clay as well as its relationship with the muzzle of the gun, for many game shots anything other than a peripheral awareness of the relative position of the barrel can lead their focus away from the head of the bird and onto the muzzles. This invariably results in stopping the gun - a 'poke' - and a miss behind.
Matt Smith, a respected game shooting instructor and sporting agent at the Royal Berkshire Shooting School (RBSS) confirms that all too often the gulf is getting wider between your average clay ground, and a specialist game shooting ground designed to prepare you for the peg. At RBSS all visitors are accompanied by an instructor. This one-to-one guidance allows them, as long as the client is experienced enough, to dispense safely with the traditional cage in which you stand and vary the speed, line and angle of the clay when preparing a client for their next day in the field.
"After a while shooting very rangey chondels and loopers at many sporting grounds you can become very focussed on seeing the gap and not the bird itself" he says. "This is partly because the bird you're shooting at is relatively consistent in its presentation. Every bird that comes out of a piece of cover is going to be different so we must rely on instinct". This is a different skill. "We must be more focussed on the bird and where it is going, not the gap."
There are two ways to shoot longer range game birds he points out. You can shoot it with a quick gun and no gap or, as some specialist high bird shots prefer, a slower gun but a bigger perceived gap. But for most normal range game shooting because of the variations in the equation there is no time to consciously plan as one might with longer clays or very high pheasants. The demands of these shots are very different.
The steady rise in popularity of the simulated game day is bridging the increasing divide between sporting grounds and off-season practice for game shots looking to improve. However care must be taken to ensure that bad habits that will not help you in the field are not ingrained into your technique. A poor gun mount can quickly result in injury on a sim’ game day. We must not over look the fact that new clay shots are often taught shooting the gun pre-mounted or 'gun up'. They may be better refining the 'gun down' mount, a vital part of the their technique in the privacy of their own home first. Mounting your gun looking into a mirror is the first step and is good practice at no cost. If circumstances are private enough to permit it without upsetting the neighbours, and with an empty gun (or using snap caps), then standing in your garden and tracking the flight path of pigeons as they fly over can be extremely beneficial, again at no cost. I spent hours practicing this way as a teenager and I'm now in the fortunate position to be able to do it again at the vast numbers of jackdaws that overfly my house in the evenings.
For me clay shooting is primarily an exercise in controlled levels of focus. We are looking to repeat a series of actions on 4 or 5 pairs of targets and we need consistency so that we can either adjust from a miss or repeat a successful shot. Whereas when I'm shooting game I am looking for fluidity that can open the door to a flow experience that allows natural timing and adjustment to be made at a subconscious level. We must correctly asses whether a shot is safe but also a bird's speed, line (whether it is ours or better for our neighbour), angle of flight, as well as its species and sex - important later in the season. You only have a few seconds in which to make the correct call.
Many game shots rely purely on gun speed to kill the majority of their game, allowing their internal supercomputer to do the near impossible calculation for them. Depending on how you shoot, with confidence comes timing but above all the gun must keep moving and the shot must be finished with the natural fluidity inherent in many good sporting performances that require any level of hand eye coordination.