My new (old) little .177 bullpup.

Maybe try the heaviest pellet you can. I use 18 grn JSB at around 11 fpe for pigeons. But it does depend on where you hit them, as there's not much resistance inside the bird unless you hit bone or wings.

Been an interesting day of testing…

Rummaged through my old .177 pellets and chose the following 4 to test:
JSB Hades 10.34gr
Gamo TS-10 10.49gr
H&N rabbiter which I weighed a long time ago at 15.56gr
And the Piledriver at 21gr.

The piledrivers are very long and need to be pushed gently into the AA magazine.
I was also worried about them being too heavy to exit the barrel at this low velocity 🫣, but they did.
Decided not to test the gamo TS-10 as it is just a domed version of the hades.



Shot a pellet from each through an apple and put a piece of wood behind to catch incase the pellet made it through the apple. Shot the wad cutter as a control pellet.
The 15.56gr rabbiter was way off poa, so far that it eliminated its self and got no further testing.
The wadcutter, hades and piledriver all penetrated the apple and embedded into the wood.
The pileriver landed next to the hades, and squashed it! what are the chances….?
The take away from this for me was that although all 3 pellets were shot from the same rifle, same power level, the heavy piledriver (which would have been traveling much slower) went deeper into the wood.
So it seems the heavier pellet carry’s more momentum (thats just physics), but it didnt transfer that energy into the target, possibly because of the shape of the projectile?



I then got out Maurice, our fearless volunteer pigeon. I tried to set him up in a position similar to the shot I would be presented with, I.e. steep uphill. I put a piece of paper behind Maurice to tell if any pellets exited the bird.



I fired 5 wad cutters into the crop/breast area, hoping to reach vitals, but not exit.
The good news is…. None of the wad cutters exited!!!
I then shot a wadcutter into the back of the bird, again trying to reach the vitals, followed by a pile driver in the back. Nothing exited.
Lastly I fired 3 piledrivers into the crop/breast area, again hoping to reach vitals. All 3 of the piledrivers exited the bird, through the paper and into the pellet trap!!!
Again, the piledrivers weigh two and a half times more than the wadcutters, but should be traveling much slower, so they should have about the same FPE. But they penetrate like hell!
Imagine if those piledrivers had a huge hollow point and could mushroom and dump all their energy into the target! Deadly!


My fingers are showing the directions the shots were taken in.

So that answered the question of will a 4,5FPE 8.18gr wad cutter exit a pigeon at 8 or 10m.
No, they don’t. Yay!

The next question I have is did they penetrate far enough to reach vitals?
To answer that I had to do a pigeon disection. This was my first time dissecting a pigeon, and boy did I learn a lot!!!
If u intend shooting any pigeons I would highly recomend you dissect one, their anatomy is nothing like what you think it is!!!
So what did I learn?
Well, a pigeons crop extends way further down the chest than what I thought it did!
I thought I was taking crop/breast shots, no, they were mostly crop shots.
When the crop is full it is big, and holds a lot of seeds and corn. This just means more stuff for your pellet to get through before u reach vitals 🤔. Maybe something to think about when shooting pigeons feeding during the day, verses shooting them at night when they r roosting and their crops are empty.
I also learnt the breast meat is thick and red, (and looks delishious!) and is more stuff to get through to reach the vitals, although from a different angle to the crop.
I also learnt that the heart is fairly large and is protected behind a huge shield called the sternum, and the breast mussels. It is also positioned way further down the body than I would have ever imagined! It’s closer to the drumsticks than it is to the neck. Infact, a shot through the back would be much easier to reach the heart and lungs than from the front or from below (typical uphill shot at a pigeon).
I also learnt that what I though was a “in the back shot”, trying to take the easy route to the vitals, was actually way to far down the back, they were actually more like kidney shots!

So where did the wad cutters end up?
One I couldn’t find, 1 I recovered deep in the crop, around the wishbone. One deep in the breast mussel, one went through the crop into the neck, One just into the lung, and the last one was in the heart. I think the one in the heart was the shot from the back. The piledriver sent into the back (lower back) I found at the base of the neck.


Pellets recovered from the pigeon.

So more questions…
This is a very particular situation, steep uphill shot that I do not want to exit.
Will the wadcutters exit? I don’t think so.
Will they kill the pigeons dead on the spot? I don’t think so.
Will they kill the pigeons and solve the problem? I believe so.
Would a slightly heavier pellet, like the 10,34gr hades penetrate deeper into vitals but still not exit? Maybe.
I think we’re making progress and have a possible solution, but I also feel more testing is needed to find the best pellet and set up for this specific situation.
Pete.

I attended to the pigeons on Monday night, after the pub had closed and everyone had gone home.
Went past this afternoon and there were no pigeons to be seen.
Seems we might have succeeded 👍🏻.
But I’d still like to keep testing to work out what the perfect pellet, speed and penetration combination is for any further tricky pigeon problems.

Did you use your night vision? Still vote for pollymags at short distance or havn't used them the gamo redfires.

flock wrote: Did you use your night vision? Still vote for pollymags at short distance or havn't used them the gamo redfires.

Yes, used the Pulasr Thermion 👍🏻.

Ja it is an amazing piece of kit.
Unfortunately it is not mine, but I’m lucky enough to be able to get to use it 👍🏻
For pest control it is a game changer. For hunting, it feels like cheating!
So I only use it for pest control 👍🏻

What I mean is the thermal scope is amazing for finding game (pests/rabbits) in the darkness of night.
It makes it possible to quickly and easily shoot 20 or 30 rabbits in a few hours, in total darkness.
For me that’s culling/pest control, and the thermal scope is an amazing tool for that job.

Hunting, for me, is very different. For me hunting revolves around the principles of “fair chase”, meaning the animal should have every chance and opportunity to use its well developed senses of hearing, sight and smell, it’s ability to be stealthy, to use its natural camouflage etc, to outwit the hunter. The animal deserves the opportunity to be able to escape unhindered if it detects me (no cages or fences), I also don’t hunt from a vehicle or with in 200m of a vehicle. I believe in walk and stalk. Getting close, on foot. Stalking is sadly a dying art these days.

For me, to be a hunter you need to see the animal before it sees you. You need to approach the animal with out being detected (that’s called stalking for the millennials), and get as close as you possibly can before you make your lethal shot to take that animals life.

When you have done a perfect stalk, when you have been staring at that animal for ages, when you can see it’s eyes, but it hasn’t seen you, when you have been focused and fixated on it while planning your approach, feeling and reading the wind and keeping it in your favour, when you have felt your pulse racing and noticed your hands trembling as you close in… then you are hunting!

Not bashing anyone or how they may choose to hunt, but in my humble opinion shooting an animal from 600m away is not hunting, it’s target practice.
You don’t need to get out into the bush to do that, you can do it at any shooting range. If someone thinks killing an animal from half a kilometer away is hunting, then they have missed the whole point of going on a hunt.

Weather I’m hunting a stag or a warthog or a rabbit, and weather I’m using a rifle or a bow, it dosent matter, the principles of fair chase still need to apply if I want to call it a hunt.

For me a thermal scope is an amazing tool, it is the pinnacle of our species technological marvels and inventions… but it dosent feature in the principles of Fair Chase. It dosent just tip the balance in the hunters favour, it completely skewes the odds.
Fricken amazing pest control tool though 😉