It’s April and by now spring has sprung. My tomatoes are in the ground and growing. Nature has brought forth her bounty of beauty in the outdoors. All the leaves are coming out in rich colors of green and the grass is growing, adding to an ever expanding list of “honey-doos” around the house. March is what I call the “take a break” month to get caught up around the house and build up enough points with the boss so I can sneak away for a few turkey hunts.
If you are like me, you have been chasing bass and crappie and enjoying some great fillets deep fried to a golden brown during late February and March. Hopefully you have been practicing with your turkey gun and getting your gear ready.
Last month we talked about shot placement on the bird with a turkey choke and how much your front bead on your shotgun covers up at different ranges. It is critical that you practice with your gun prior to going out to hunt, and the more times the better. I know it’s boring, but it is a responsibility each one of us must take on.
You can look at practice in two ways. First, patterning your load to make sure the choke and load combination you have chosen will do the job at the ranges you are comfortable with. I realize that this takes time and the gun always kicks more when you are shooting at a target, but it still must be done. You would not go deer hunting without sighting in your rifle would you?
Second, placing the shot where it needs to be to harvest the bird. I know you are shooting a shotgun, but you are shooting it like a rifle. Unless you have a scope mounted on your shotgun, it’s going take some practice getting a feel for the correct sight picture. Using light target loads eliminates a lot of the recoil and expense when doing this.
Perhaps the biggest difference in shooting a shotgun like a rifle is squeezing the trigger. When you normally shoot a shotgun, you swing the gun and slap the trigger. If you slap the trigger when shooting at a stationary object like a turkey, the likelihood of centering the payload where you are aiming goes way down. This leads to every hunter’s nightmare of wounding the bird and possibly losing the bird. We are fortunate to have an abundance of turkeys to hunt, and we as hunters must take the responsibility to increase our proficiency with our gun prior to going into the hunting fields.
Learning to squeeze the trigger is the first step in being able to place the shot cloud where it needs to be. Shotgun triggers are not like rifle triggers, and you must practice with them to become proficient with them. They are typically harder to pull and you have to pull them farther to shoot the gun, so the likelihood of pulling the shot is great.
You can practice this at home using a snap cap. A snap cap is a dummy shell that you can load into the chamber of your gun and then pull the trigger without worrying about breaking the firing pin by pulling the trigger on an empty chamber. They can be purchased for a 12-gauge or 20-gauge at most sporting goods stores. Do not have any live ammunition on your person or remotely close to you when performing this drill.
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