Pellet Power & Performance 5 - Kill shots on a pigeon

[Music] Shooting wood pigeons or ferals with an air rifle is sensational sport but accuracy is key to ensure the bird drops on the spot. Roy likes head shots, but the target's small. So where else is effective? Let's get techie. Does a wing divert a heart shot? Will a crop full of acorns re-route a front-on neck shot? Well, to find out a little more Roy gone all Damien Hurst on us, not cross sectioning a shark, but a pigeon he shot earlier. We are then going to fire pellets at a dead bird at different angles to replicate a typical 30 yard shot. We have dissected a pigeon here, we have cut it in half. So we are showing all the organs and we are just going to go through the bird's anatomy and see exactly where we have got to put our shot placement in order to have a proficient, clean kill which isn't always easy on wood pigeons especially with an air rifle, because they are quite a large bird. You have got an awful lot of feather in here, you have got the wings which can also add a little bit of deflection if you are hitting the bone on the wing or if you are hitting the compact feathers here. And also the wings can take out quite a lot of the penetration out of the pellet as well. With most animals if you want to make a clean and most effective kill, shooting into the main body of the animal, you want to affect the heart. So that is your main target if you are shooting into the chest. Unlike a mammal we haven't got any lungs surrounding the heart the lungs on a bird are actually set back and run as air sacks down the back bone, down the spine of the bird. As you are going down the bird then we are getting into the liver and down into the gut region. And again if you hit the bird there it is going to fly off and die slowly later on which isn't what you want. Obviously we want to try and find a shot that is going to drop the bird on the spot. To illustrate just how tricky it is to hit the heart Roy's going to push tent pegs stolen from his local Scout group through the bird in voodoo-doll-like fashion to show where he'd normally shoot a bird with an airgun. First it's the chest shot. Looking at it like that his heart is going to be somewhere around his mid line. Now a side on shot through the wing. You can see how hard it is for me to push the skewer through. That is exactly the same problem the pellet is going to have when you are punching through and shooting through the wing like that. Now a shot at a roosting bird above you. I am going to try and take a section mid line where we will push through like so. Although I have come very close to the heart and those shots will have probably disrupted the heart we have still missed where exactly we are aiming at. So that just shows how difficult it is and how precise you have got to be with your aiming point. Leaving our kebabbed woodie- we retire to the paddock to get some shooting under our wing - or should that be through our wing. For our experiment Roy is using the Webley Raider sub 12 ft pounder in .22 calibre. The first shot that we are going to do is we are going to shoot it from the side. So we are going to go through the wing and hopefully into the heart aiming for the main chest cavity. Unfortunately because I have suspended the pigeon by its neck it has made it look a little bit of a giraffe pigeon. We will go around about there Our slo mo side-on shot shows that the pellet punctures the bottom of the heart. There's plenty of power for pass through the wing and punch through the vitals. Here he is with his pegs again.... Looking at the pigeon without his giraffe neck. So as he was sitting in a tree, or sitting in a field feeding that is pretty much the position he would be in. So when you are looking at it like that for a reference point that is pretty much in line with where his heart is. So I will spin him round in that position and we are there. Not all pigeons are going to sit pretty like this. Here's a feral pigeon feeding side-on and quartering. Roy uses the spine as a reference for the position of the heart. Next is a shot that will truly test the capabilities of the sub-12-ft-pounder - will it break the keel? What I want to try and do is put the pellet directly on this keel bone here. So you have got quite a depth of bone there for the pellet to punch through. So I just want to see what sort of effect we have on that. Now if you did hit the keel bone I think the amount of damage, the bony damage that it would cause and the impact it would cause would probably disable the pigeon, but I am just interested to see whether we get the penetration into the vital organs as well. Again we try and cover this from all angles - and the result is a surprising one - Roy's perfect shot proves the keel is no match for the Acupell and Webley combo. So if we are looking at the pigeon here, the shot has hit smack on the keel bone there and looking at it we have got the wound channel tracking down and that has taken out all of the bone in the keel at its widest part and it has taken the bottom part of the heart completely off. So for a keel shot that is absolutely spot on. You can actually see here look it has completely broken the keel bone in half. So that pigeon certainly wouldn't have been going anywhere. Lastly it's our whole wood pigeon. Roy doesn't think that the pellet will pass through the bird but that's a good thing - the pellet needs to be expending all its energy inside the animal. I just want to see how much penetration we get and whether or not we get a complete pass through. I very much doubt that we will get a complete pass through because it has got to go through both wings and all of the muscle either side and all the vitals and bones. So we will see how we do. The pellet behaves as expected and, if this were a living bird, we hope it would have dropped on the spot because woodies taste great. The whole purpose of the experiment for me was just to see exactly where the shot positioning would be best. If you can get away with taking front on chest shots through the keel, we have proved yes you can with that one, but time and time again with any shooting it is making sure you know your quarry, you understand the anatomy and you know exactly where you are putting your shot placement. That it is going to go through and take out the vitals. So whatever your quarry it makes sense to know the bits that result in as quick a kill as possible bot for the best animal welfare reasons and to make sure it ends up grilled and in your tossed salad.