Is height over-rated?

Ever since the dawn of driven shooting ‘sporting’ guns have placed great value in the height of the pheasants presented to them. This makes perfect sense, since a high pheasant is a challenging pheasant, and shooting is, if nothing else, about testing our skills. Shooting low birds is frowned upon not only because it is unsafe and produces unusable meat, but because it is deemed too easy. It is perhaps a quirk of the British psyche that we have a tendency to gravitate towards the most perverse way of achieving a goal; see also fly fishing, golf, and cricket, and a host of other baffling-to-foreigners British inventions.

Why is high bird shooting so sought-after?

As the capabilities of gamekeepers, shotguns, their operators and shotgun cartridges have improved over time, the cult of the high bird has grown to match them. First there were shoots, then there were ‘high bird shoots’, and now we have ‘extreme high bird shoots’. All well and good. But it would be a mistake to think that height is the only challenge in shooting, or that higher is necessarily the zenith of shooting in anything but the literal sense.

Shoots like Brigands have developed a reputation for showing birds at remarkable hights

But first, let me be clear, I’m not denying that the further away something is the harder it is to hit. It is probably also true to say that a bird that is 60 yards up is harder to hit than a crossing one sixty yards away, thanks to a number of factors. For one, there is less frame of reference in which to judge lead. Height also brings things like wind direction and speed into the picture. So high bird shooting is hard, I’m not denying it. What’s more I can take as much pleasure in pulling down a cloud-scraping bird as the next man. But does that mean that as guns we should be striving always to shoot taller and taller birds? I would argue that the relentless pursuit of extra altitude is probably misguided. 

Is high-bird shooting for everyone?

There are a number of reasons for this. First, it has to be said that most guns - myself very much included - are simply out of their depth (somehow that feels like entirely the wrong phrase) when presented with birds of the kind shown at some of the shoots that are famous for their high bird shooting.

On many shoots in the land, a 40 yard pheasant will most likely be one of the tallest of the day. As guns we have a duty to kill what we shoot cleanly and with confidence, and speaking for myself, a very average shot, I simply would not have the confidence to pull the trigger at anything much beyond 40 yards, for fear of wounding the bird. Call me crazy, but despite wanting a challenge, I don’t especially want to be shooting at 10:1, either, and that is probably a fairly generous estimate of what my ratio might be. 

Top Tips for high bird shooting

Listen to the High Pheasant Episode of the GunsOnPegs Podcast for Gerwyn Jones's top tips for high bird shooting.

Of course, there are high-bird specialists - the Gerwyn Joneses, Dave Carries and their ilk, who are capable of killing consistently and cleanly at this range, but they are few and far between, and typically have put in plenty of practice, know their capabilities and those of their gun/cartridge/choke setup. If you’re going to try to join their ranks, or even just give high bird shooting a try (and I wouldn't deny anyone that pleasure) it is important that you do so equipped with that same knowledge.

Looking beyond height

However, beyond altitude, there are a number of factors that can make a bird a challenging shot: speed, direction of travel, agility to name just three. Consider a ‘traditional’ partridge drive, with tightly packed coveys of birds pushed over high hedges or shelter belts, with guns positioned quite close to the hedge. 

The challenge here is two-fold - first the lack of reaction time, and second the behaviour of that tightly packed covey - the famed “starburst”, a defense mechanism designed to dazzle and confuse predators, in this instance, the waiting guns. There’s nothing that will make you feel quite as incompetant as you try to pick a bird, your eyes darting, then eventually miss miles behind. They’re fast, zooming about all over the show, and they take a steady nerve to shoot well.

The author takes on a classically driven partridge at Steventon Estate in Hampshire

Let’s also consider snap shooting driven pheasants on a woodland path or wooded valley. When I was a lad my father had a half-gun on a syndicate where much of the shooting was of this kind. You would hear the screech of a startled cock-bird, the snapping of twigs and crashing of undergrowth as the bird fought its way to tree-top height, a cry of “over” and before you knew it the bird was bearing down upon your position. 

Pheasants typically want to fly in straight lines, but in ancient woodland, that’s impossible, so one had to make a bit of an enducated guess as to where the bird would eventually appear. Your shooting ‘window’ was usually the width of the path, and again, you needed lightning fast reactions and quick feet to have a hope of connecting. If high-bird shooting is the fieldsports equivalent of Jofra Archer bowling 90mph bombs, woodland snapshooting is Shane Warne bamboozling you in the flight.

In my experience with both of these styles of shooting, because you’re not operating at the very limit of your equipment’s capabilities, it becomes more of a zero-sum game - hit or miss. This reduces the risk of merely wounding a bird, while still presenting a challenge. What's more, you don't need specialist equipment, so the barriers to entry are... erm, lower.

I’ll be honest, I’ve not done a great deal of ‘high bird shooting’, but I’ve been under a few crackers in my time  - some I missed, some I brought down. But I can derive at least as much pleasure and satisfaction from a reaction shot amid the trees or a well-taken partridge as I can a tall pheasant. Perhaps it is because this kind of shooting relies a little more on instinct than high bird shooting? Who can say? What I can say is that these types of shooting can often get overlooked and underappreciated in favour of stratospheric pheasants, and that’s a real shame.