The Outdoors

By Scott Rall, Outdoors Columnist

With a break from the rains, I was willing to venture outside a bunch this past week. My rain gauge in Nobles County had 15.2 inches of rain over the past few weeks. The grass is tall and the mosquitos are as big as fighter jets and there are certainly a lot of them.

With all of my food plots tended to and much of the to-do list completed, I opted for an afternoon of clay bird shooting. A friend of mine was emptying out an old barn and he had a number of clay pigeon throwers he was looking for a home for. I said “Yes!” in a loud response. I added them to the half dozen I already had.

I find it totally hilarious when the hunting season starts and some of my hunting partners miss the first five roosters they shoot at. I then ask them when was the last time they shot their gun? Often the answer is the last day of the hunting season last year.

Shooting is a perishable sport. I compare it to playing pool. Pool is a game of minute angles and what I call a finite touch. The more pool you play the better you play. If you exit that game for a time you need to redevelop your touch all over again. Now, it certainly does not take as long to get your touch back the second time, but engaging in the act all year long helps you retain your touch.

I shoot pretty much all summer long and I can pretty much hold my own against most other shooters when I have a shotgun in my hand. Maybe a little better than most, but not the best shot by any means. There are really two separate schools when it comes to breaking clay birds. The first is trap. When you shoot trap all of the birds are thrown from the same machine and all are in some shape or form shots going away from you.

The shooter moves to five stations in a semi-circle all behind one throwing machine. Some shots are straight aways and others will be a gentle shift to the left or right. A round of trap is 25 targets. I don’t shoot trap because when I am out hunting roosters, they do not all fly away in the same general direction.

I shoot a different discipline call sporting clays. A round of sporting clays is 50 birds. You move around to 8-12 different stations. Some will be straight left to right shots. Some will be coming from a distance straight towards the shooter. A wide variety of different types of shots will be presented. Some birds will come from under your feet. Some will buzz just over your head. Almost all sporting clays are shot as doubles.

This means two birds are thrown at the exact same time. Others will be a report pair. This is one bird thrown followed by the second bird being thrown when the sound of the first shot is heard. Sporting clays requires the shooter to be capable of making many different kinds of shots. Many different angles and ranges are part of this program. I find sporting clays to be much more challenging than trap. Both require intense concentration if you want to get really good at either one. I know guys that could easily beat me at trap that I would totally take to school on a sporting clay range.

My home base for sporting clays is Rossows’ Horse Barn and Hunt Club in Lakefield. I have been shooting there for over 30 years. My first round there was seven birds out of a possible 50. I have improved much since that first time. Shooting at different sporting clay ranges always presents you to different target angles than you have ever seen before. I can shoot in the mid-40’s on my home range and my scores are always a little less on a range I have never shot at before.

You can travel the world and shoot at 150 different trap ranges and they will be all exactly the same. Every shooter will have one or two types of targets that are harder for them to hit than others. I am no different. What I do then is go to my sporting clay range when traffic is light and shoot all my 50 rounds at only one or two stations until I can figure out just what I need to do to kill the birds at that station. Most shooters never do this and as a result, when you can only shoot 4-6 times at those particular birds, never figuring out why you keep missing them, they will continue to miss those same birds round after round after round, year after year.

Recreational shooting is one of the safest pastimes you can participate in.  Golfing has more injuries than recreational shooting. This is a documented fact. Kids also do great at this sport and they don’t need to be a peak athlete to do it. What other pastimes can you share with your kids and still be able to do it with them into your 80s? It sure won’t be football or baseball, I can tell you that.

Find a course and take a kid with you. Many people of all ages will shoot clay birds that never actually go hunting. Others start on the clay range and then, in turn, take up hunting and ultimately turn into the next generation of wildlife and habitat conservationists. Lord knows we need more of those.

Grab the mosquito spray and a few boxes of shells and turn some clay birds into dust. I call it trigger therapy, and I can never get enough.

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If you have any questions, reach out to me at scottarall@gmail.com.