Preliminary testing is promising, but I have yet to test "out in the field" so to speak.

A 25.4gr .25cal pellet at 221fps (2.8FPE) should knock the snot out of any sparrow. The only problem is, you guessed it, at 221fps its shooting fricken rainbows. You could probably throw the pellet further then its shooting!

Shooting at close range (through a scope) is tricky enough as it is, at 5 yards your pellet has only just started to start climbing up towards your line of sight at normal velocitys, but at 221fps, it reaches the zenith of its arc at about 10 yards , and by 15yards its dropping like a brick!

I spent the afternoon with the .25cal, setting up profile on a digital scope I'm testing, setting up this profile specifically for sparrow-ing (if that is a thing...???)

Anyway, many pellets later I now have a profile set up on this digital scope where the ballistic calculator is giving me the perfect hold over from 5 yards, zeroed at 10yards, and perfect hold over at 15yards.

So any sparrow I meet from 5 to 15 yards has go big trouble coming his way.

I hang old clothes in my pellet trap, the cloth quietens down the ping of the pellet as it hits the angled steel plate. The cloth is a pair of old pants and is folded over 3 times, so 6 layers of cloth.

And believe it or not at 2.8FPE, 9 time out of 10 the cloth stops the pellet before it hit the back plate!

Some pellets make it through and get smooshed, flat angles on the heads or damaged skirts, but most look like they are perfectly reusable.

So I went through them, gave them a visual inspection and pulled out the ones that look normal.

I racked my brain trying to think of what I could use as a pellet sizer and came up with the cylinder from in the magazine. New pellets are usually snug in the "chambers" so I figured if these used ones fit through the chamber, they should be fine.

Well I dropped 59 pellets through the chamber. I'm not expecting them to be hunting accurate, but I'll keep them in their own separate tin just for plinking