The beginning of the end for lead.
We now finally have the clarity from the government that we will in fact have to retire our faithful and effective lead ammunition. Legislation will be introduced next summer to begin the 3-year transition period, with a hard ban coming into force in 2029. This season we have just entered may be the last hurrah for full use of lead. The general consensus is that guns will get ‘stuck in’ this year and make the most of the use of their favourite lead loads.
With this in mind, we have the Thimbleby cartridge stores stacked to the rafters. We’ve the best bombs on offer from Gamebore, Hull and Eley. In reference to our previous article “The Big Bomb Conundrum”, this season is an opportunity to trial those lighter weight and effective loads we referenced. These include Gamebore Grouse Extreme, Hull Imperial Game and Eley Zenith.
Another factor that is often misunderstood when game shooting is choke selection. As covered previously, distance is very often overestimated in the field which in-turn incorrectly incentives the use of excessively tight choke. When selecting say a ¾ or full choke, the pattern does necessarily become more effective. The tighter constriction concentrates a number of pellets to the centre, the overall size i.e. spread is unaltered. The narrower aperture that is created at the barrel end damages more pellets in the shot column when forced through. This creates more fliers that stray from the patterns and produce less consistent out edges of the pattern. Those who can consistently place the bird directly into the core of the pattern will take advantage of tight chokes, however if we were to analyse what more often occurs, birds are killed at the periphery of the ‘cloud’ of shot we launch. In practice the majority of guns we get far better results with a pattern that has an even distribution of pellets throughout. This is generally produced by skeet, ¼ , ⅜, and ½ choke. The combination of light loads of small pellets with mild choke has produced a vast quantity of clean pheasant kills over the past century. For most of us, we are shooting these birds at the same distance as the past – the contour of the land has not changed in this time!
The pattern board does not give a totally accurate picture of the 300 or so angry bees that leave the barrel at over the speed of sound. It shows us a 2 dimensional view of the 3 dimensional column of shot – a shot string can be as long as 15 feet at distance. With this in mind, it does give an understanding of dispersion of shot. Say if we took a very mild 28gm 6 game load and shot a 40 yard board with ¼ choke, the results would generally be very satisfactory. It takes roughly 3-4 pellets to kill a pheasant stone dead in the air, and the plume of feathers can sometimes be deceiving and give an impression that more than 50 hit it! This is proven when breasting or plucking a bird and it’s commonplace to only see a handful of strikes in the body. With this in mind with the board we have just shot, it will certainly prove to be an ample killing pattern.
As a priority, we need the pheasant to be killed ethically, however the purpose of this sacrifice is no other than for consumption. The carcass of the bird must be edible and excess pellet strikes cause trauma in the breast meat, rendering most of it unusable. At most normal ranges, excessively large pellets through overly tight choke will cause more wounding of birds when ‘clipped’ by the edge of the pattern or spoiling of the meat when the shot is centred – two effects we seldom desire.
Game meat is a massively under-used and unique resource we have access to in our country. Many may consider it to be cruel, however could anyone argue that the life of a chicken, intensively bred for the supermarket shelf is preferable to that of a pheasant reared and released into the countryside with a natural environment to roam, feed supplemented, its predators controlled and no certainty that our shot column will come anywhere close to their flight path – as we all know this is far too common an occurrence!
We may be resistant to the implementation of non-toxic shot as we don’t like change! The bottom line is that birds shot without lead will be able to find their way into the commercial foodchain with less resistance. The higher proportion of the population eating the delicious, healthy game meat we produce, the safer the future of our sport.