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Airguns are for hunting: here is one way the hunter can stay in shape during the off season, while reliving some boyhood memories
Guns Magazine, August, 2002 by Holt Bodinson
We were a tribe of Daisy BB gun shooters. Sprinkled through our happy little band were Red Ryder lever actions, Model 25 Daisy pumps, a Red Ryder with a full length telescopic sight, and a lone Benjamin pump-up pellet gun. BBs came in little paper tubes or flat cellophane packs that we bought with hard earned cents at the local hardware store.
And we shot. We shot thousands upon thousands of BBs each year. We hunted sparrows, pigeons, starlings, blackbirds, rats, mice, frogs, grasshoppers, flies and cow chips. We could toss in the air a pebble or a penny and whack it more times than not. The trajectory of a BB was so engraved in our brains that we never really aimed. Our BB guns became extensions of our psyches and ourselves.
During our youth, the BB gun was indeed a rite-of-passage a rite-of-passage perfectly captured on film in "A Christmas Story". If you haven't seen this nostalgic film, by all means rent it at your local video store tonight.
After my Red Ryder days, one Christmas there came the Crosman pump-up .22 pellet pistol. Here was a power and accuracy I could never have even dreamed of. It anchored cottontails with authority in snow-covered blackberry patches and harvested the innumerable sparrows I fed to pet raccoons.
One air rifle we all lusted after, but could never afford, was the Sheridan .20 caliber pellet rifle. It possessed a quality, power and range that fascinated us. Sheridans we saw were owned by adults in our community who used them with precision on the local squirrel population. There was also an English sporting gentleman in town who regaled us with stories of using a BSA underlever air rifle to pot pigeons at 65 yards -- an unbelievable distance based on our own limited experience with Daisys.
Not Just For Youngsters
We didn't realize then that the hunting air gun has been around for a long time. By all accounts, the air rifle itself evolved sometime in the 16th century. By 1800, the air rifle had become so powerful and practical that Lewis and Clark carried a .54 caliber butt reservoir pneumatic on their cross continental trek. Mentioned several times in their journals, Lewis and Clark used it to kill deer and amaze Indians.
At about the same time, Austrians were issuing magazine fed, .51 caliber, butt reservoir air rifles to their Jaeger and Tyrolean troops. Apparently, these were capable of firing 20 shots in one minute at velocities up to 1,000 fps. And they proved deadly accurate out to 100 meters.
It's curious to think about powerful, big bore air rifles employed during the height of the muzzleloading, black powder era. But consider for a moment their practical advantages. They gave off no smoke and required no cleaning. They were dependable and not affected by rain. And in the case of the Austrian design, they were repeaters in an era of single shots. Of course, when you consider the obvious precision that went into the manufacture of the valves, locks, air reservoirs, and pump systems in the early 1800s, these were costly custom arms indeed.
But air rifles are costly no more. Today we have a selection of affordable air rifles and air shotguns designed for a variety of purposes. You can still buy a Daisy Red Ryder for less than $40. Or you can spend over a $1,000 for a top-of-the-line pre-charged pneumatic repeater in calibers as large as 9mm, even bigger. And between these extremes exists a tremendous selection of perfectly suitable air rifles for the hunt.
Given the growth of suburbia and the continued abundance of small game and pest populations in and around the fringes of our communities, it makes good sense to own and hunt with a powerful air rifle, if local ordinances and state game laws permit. Not only are airguns effective on small game species, but they're inexpensive to shoot. And because on your home territory you can shoot them a lot, during the off season they're the finest arms that exist for honing shooting and stalking skills.
Based on my own experience afield with a variety of air rifles, here are a few observations about hunting with an airgun.
The Game
Small game and airguns were made for each other. But check your state's game laws. For instance, in my home state of Arizona it's legal to hunt rabbits, tree squirrels, and unprotected small mammals and birds with a "pneumatic weapon." That's it, but that's enough. While it's entirely possible to humanely take a mammal species larger than a rabbit or a bird the size of a wild turkey with a big bore pre-charged air rifle, most of us will be shooting a .177, .20, or .22 caliber pellet rifle and limiting our hunting to the smaller species of mammals and birds at reasonable distances -- which is the very essence of ethical hunting.
The Gun
The most remarkable qualities of an air rifle are its consistency, and, within its usable range, its accuracy. Shot-to-shot variations in velocity are almost negligible, which is one reason why quality air rifles fired at 10 meters can place 10 shots in one ragged hole. But even the least expensive airguns are remarkable in this regard. For example, my Daisy Red Ryder BB gun's extreme spread for five shots is only 4 fps -- the same extreme spread produced by the much more expensive .20 caliber Sheridan.
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