Now's the time to start practicing for those fall hunts.

By Craig Boddington

There are a few exceptionally gifted riflemen who perform extremely well in the field without ever practicing. I am not one of them. Or at least I don’t think I am, and I don’t care to find out (either way). So I shoot whenever I can. I’m fairly certain that any shooting, of any kind, helps with all other shooting. But, to some extent, that’s a matter of experience.

I am not as good a rifle shot today as I was in my twenties (which ended nearly thirty years ago!). I’m not in as good condition, I’m not as steady, and my eyes aren’t as keen. On the other hand, there aren’t many unfamiliar field-shooting situations left in the world. I know, from many years of experience, what to expect and how to react in terms of getting steady and getting off the shot. Long experience, both in the field and on the range, have given me a fairly wide repertoire of shooting positions that work in various situations. Everybody misses now and again, but I generally know instinctively what to do. Muscle memory kicks in, and I usually get the job done.

However, not everybody has had the time or good fortune to acquire an extensive background in field shooting. In today’s world, hunting experience is hard-won over a matter of many years. Second, even experienced hunters like me may think we have it down pat, but we may have acquired some bad shooting habits--maybe we had them all along, and maybe we just slipped into them. Third, different types of field shooting require different skills. Let’s address each of these issues.

With forty years of hunting experience, I usually know what do do in order to get steady and get a shot off, no matter what I am hunting, but that doesn't mean I don't need to practice. I shoot as often as possible in preparation for a moment like this.

Experience

There is no way to perfectly replicate hunting conditions other than to go hunting, but even with many seasons in the field, as you expand your horizons there may still be strange situations that cannot be addressed with familiar solutions. Even so, practice remains the key.

The benchrest is ubiquitous on American rifle ranges, and I fear that, all too often, American hunters sit down at the bench, test loads, shoot groups, check their zero, and consider that they have “practiced.” Nope. The bench is essential for checking loads and zero, but it has almost nothing to do with field shooting. The “almost” is breath control, sight picture, and trigger squeeze, and these basic concepts are universal and inherent in all rifle shooting. But there are no formal benchrests in game country. So the first rule in serious practice is to get away from the bench.

I haven’t shot a smallbore match since I left college, but I still practice all the positions we used: Prone, sitting, kneeling, offhand (in descending order of steadiness). These are the basic shooting positions, and most field shooting is some permutation of one or another. They should all be familiar, and then you should know how to augment all of them with tripods, bipods, and shooting sticks,. You should also know how to make a makeshift field benchrest by using a pack over a rock or log, and how to get steady against a vertical object such as a tree or a fencepost. All of these skills can be learned on any range, and it doesn’t have to be painful or expensive. The lowly .22 rimfire remains the best teacher. All of these skills can be practiced and rehearsed with a .22 or, for that matter, with an air gun in your basement or garage. These days it is very difficult to acquire extensive field experience without decades in the field, but it isn’t so difficult to replicate field-shooting situations and expand your “comfort zone”—your ability not only to get steady, but to know how to get steady under a wide variety of situations.

There is no substitute for professional coaching. In just one day at the SAAM course, my wife's confidence and ability to hit long-range targets increased exponentially.

Bad Habits

Realistically, self-analysis doesn’t work too well, because we don’t know what we don’t know, and we can’t see what we can’t see. Coaching does help. An experienced buddy can offer useful pointers (if you’re willing to listen), and in this great nation of ours there are a lot of wonderful shooting schools with fantastic coaches. Please note that old dogs can learn new tricks. The last couple of years I’ve been really fortunate to have done several sessions at the SAAM Shooting School on Tim Fallon’s FTW Ranch (www.ftwoutfitters.com ) in the Texas Hill Country. This is just one of several great shooting schools available today, but it’s the one I’m most familiar with.

I don’t know where I came up with this particular bad habit, but while I was shooting a long-range course (and having some near misses), coach Doug Prichard started watching my trigger finger. Rather than following through with the trigger squeeze I was “bouncing” my finger off the trigger. With good position and all the rest, I was getting away with this out to 400 yards or so, but at serious long range it was killing me. Through good coaching, I recovered a proper trigger squeeze, but without good coaching I would never have known the problem.

This was a very arcane bad habit, but they are seemingly without limit. Perhaps the worst is flinching, which is very difficult to cure. Most of us have little things we do that we could do better: Hand position, position of rifle butt on shoulder, shooting positions, breathing, position of finger on trigger--you name it. Honestly, until I met the instructors at SAAM, I thought I had it down pretty well. But their very good coaching has made me better. I am now a believer in instruction, no matter the skill level. It doesn’t have to be formal, but it must be serious, delivered by someone who knows what he or she is doing.

Unfamiliar Situations

One of the most common “bad habits” I’ve seen is the inability to adapt to unfamiliar situations. Again, this is a matter of experience, but if you don’t know what you don’t know, how do you know how to adapt? Shooting skills are universal, but it seems to me that different kinds of hunting require slightly different skill sets. Some of these are transferable. For instance, a whitetail hunter accustomed to shooting from a stand should be pretty good at shooting a leopard from a blind.

Other skill sets are universal. Open-country hunting, whether for caribou, pronghorn, or any mountain animal anywhere in the world, is pretty similar. Once you’re in range, whatever that means to you, you must figure out how to get steady and how to make the shot. A sound background in prone and sitting—sweetened by bipods, sticks, and packs—will probably be helpful.

Different types of hunting require different skill sets. For African hunting, it's essential to know how to get steady over shooting sticks. This should be learned long before you get there, and practiced regularly.

With African plains game, it’s pretty rare to be able to go prone or even sit. Too much brush, too many thorns. Which is why the three-legged African “shooting sticks” are almost universal over there. They get you above the brush, and they work, but you must learn how to use them. Dangerous game is different yet again. Sometimes you can use sticks, or even a natural rest, but often you are too close and the situation is too fast, so you must stand on your hind legs and shoot. Regrettably, this is a skill that too many of us never learned, and even more of us have forgotten.

With creativity and an open mind, all the skills required for field shooting can be replicated on your own range. Or you can get some help. Just a couple of weeks ago I was at SAAM for two days with the Blaser folks. I don’t know if you’d call it a “refresher” or a “crash course;” that would depend on your experience level. For me it was an excellent refresher. My wife, Donna, was with me, and for her it was more of a crash course. We spent one day at the dangerous game and plains game ranges, concentrating on offhand shooting and sticks. The second day was spent on long-range targets, where the focus was on shooting prone with shooting aids such as bipods and packs.

Even with a half-century of rifle shooting under my belt I can’t describe how valuable this training is. There is no substitute for competent, objective coaching, and I came away feeling I was very well “tuned up.” For Donna it was a different experience. I’ve coached her as well as I can. She shoots well. Most women do. They listen because they don’t have that horrible macho gene that prevents them from listening. Donna has shot a lot of stuff but she has less than a decade of rifle shooting under her belt. She’s very good off sticks, but she has very little experience with offhand shooting, and even less shooting at longer ranges.

At some point husbands are not the best coaches for their wives (and vice versa). A totally objective coach that you can’t get frustrated with (and vice versa) is invaluable. Her learning curve was amazing, far beyond what I have, or could have, accomplished with her. In just two days of formal training her ability to center a lifesize buffalo target, offhand on the run, increased to near certainty; her ability and confidence in ringing a nine-inch plate at 500 yards went from zero to astronomic.

The message: Today’s hunts are expensive, so extensive field experience is astronomically expensive. Even if you have decades of experience, you may not have the right skill sets for a long-dreamed-of hunting adventure, and you may have some bad habits you aren’t aware of. All the training you need can be done on your own, but there’s nothing wrong with asking for help. There’s plenty of it out there.