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Deadly Distraction.


Longstrider
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I had a lovely evening on one of my shoots Friday evening. Plenty of jackdaws wheeling in and out of the trees as they came and went from nearby silage cutting and all of them distracted enough by what was going on over there to miss me standing in the shadows beneath the trees .. unlucky indeed for about 30 of them :)

When things went quiet there I had a wander through some very rough ground where I sometimes stalk with the rifle. There's a magpie down there that has chack-a-chacked at me on countless occasions and then always seems to manage to evade my efforts to silence it.  It usually sits atop a tree and shouts at me when I have a rifle in my hand and cannot take the shot, or it's nowhere to be seen when I have a shotgun with me.

I managed to call in a carrion crow I had heard calling some 500 yds away. Bang went the gun and down came the crow, all good stuff, but then I moved about 100 yds and stood by a fence and hedge line that has some very big trees in it. Along came another crow with the same result, but this crow fell through the branches of a huge aspen and landed right-side up in the grass beneath it. Almost immediately I could hear that ruddy magpie shouting at it, presumably for invading the magpies territory (not that it had a lot of choice in the matter). I walked calmly along the fence line beneath the trees for about 25 yds and that magpie was sitting on the lowest branch of one of them, chacking at the crow not 20 feet from me. It was completely oblivious to all danger. Not the sound of my shots or my presence seemed to register with it despite me being so close.

Up went the gun and down came what was left of the magpie. 32g of #5 at around 18 feet through 3/4 choke doesn't leave a lot of magpie !

Anyone else noticed how one thing can distract quarry to the point where you can get that close to something usually so wary ?

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