--Chad Love

It's been a long, strange and litigious trip, but it looks like Phil Bourjaily can finally go dove hunting in Iowa with whatever ammo he wants to use, thanks to an executive order from Iowa governor Terry Branstad

From this story in the Sioux City Journal:
Gov. Terry Branstad fired a shot at his executive-branch agencies by issuing an order Friday rescinding a ban on lead ammunition by dove hunters. Branstad said he would not let them trump actions of elected officials by using “administrative fiat” to set rules that go beyond a law’s intended effect. “We need to make sure that we stop this practice of agencies going beyond what’s been delegated to them and their responsibility,” Branstad said.

by Phil Bourjaily

I have written a lot of how-to turkey stories over the years, but I generally ignore my own advice. Instead my personal approach to hunting boils down to: sleep late, get lucky. This morning I actually woke up at 4:30 a.m., thought about getting out of bed, then decided against it. It’s not that I don’t like getting up in the early morning, it’s that I hate feeling wiped out later in the day when I do.

So I left the house at the crack of 6:30 a.m. As an afterthought, on my way out the door, I grabbed a new mouth call from the box where I store the calls sent to me by manufacturers to try. I had noticed yesterday the ones in my vest were starting to fall apart and thought I should add a new one.

by Phil Bourjaily

Braced for a jolt of recoil the first time I pulled the trigger of a .458 Winchester Magnum rifle, I thought: That wasn’t as bad as a turkey gun.

A .458—an elephant gun—generates up to 65 foot-pounds of recoil that you feel as a shove. Meanwhile, a 12-gauge loaded with a high-velocity 31⁄2-inch magnum lead turkey load cracks you with up to 75 foot-pounds of recoil. Turkey guns are light to make them easy to carry long distances, and turkey loads contain lots of shot driven at high speed to ensure penetration of skull and vertebrae. The result is massive recoil. It offends my sense of proportion that guns for a 21-pound bird kick harder than rifles designed for the most dangerous game in the world, so I avoid the heaviest turkey loads on principle.

That said, in the excitement of shooting a turkey, no one feels the gun go off. Should we just accept brutal recoil as part of the price of a masochistic sport, along with sleep deprivation, mosquitoes, and chiggers?

by Phil Bourjaily

Last weekend I took a National Sporting Clays Association class for my Level I instructor certification. It was a wonderful experience, I learned a ton, and I’ll be writing a column about it in the magazine in the future.

However, since this blog space is supposed to contain “rantings and ravings” let me take the only complaint I have about the class and run with it. We did not learn to teach students how to shoot from a low-gun, unmounted start. Sporting Clays--once called “Hunter’s Clays”--used to be about hunting practice, just as skeet (another game that has abandoned the low-gun start) was. American sporting clays rules now allow a premounted gun as in trap and skeet. Unless you shoot international skeet or FITASC which do require a low-gun, there is no need to learn how to mount a shotgun.