“Show me how a guy deals with cripples and I’ll tell you what kind of a hunter he is – or maybe even what kind of man he is.” I heard those words at dinner on the night before the first duck hunt of my life. They were spoken by the neighbor who had invited me. It was late November of 1948. I was fourteen years old at the time and had no idea what he was talking about. I’ve got a pretty fair idea now.

We all know that hunters shoot down a lot of birds that never end up on the strap. Some studies suggest that 20 percent of all ducks downed are not retrieved, a cripple loss that represents the average over the course of a season. The true number varies dramatically depending upon the conditions, and it can be higher than 20 percent in certain circumstances.

Field hunters generally lose fewer birds than those who hunt over water. Flooded rice fields are less conducive to cripple loss than heavily overgrown natural marsh or flooded timberlands. A good dog reduces the loss considerably, regardless of the environment – a great dog can eliminate it almost entirely. Many other factors come into play, but the bottom line is that hunters should do what is necessary to reduce crippling mortality to the maximum extent possible as a point of sportsmanship and a matter of honor.

Why should this be the case – and why is it important? If we respect the game to the degree that we should, then we have an obligation to end the suffering of the individuals we have wounded. As stewards of the resource we have an obligation to avoid waste. These concepts are primary cornerstones of the hunting ethic. Indeed: “Show me how a guy deals with cripples and I’ll tell you what kind of a hunter he is – or maybe even what kind of man he is.” More wisdom there than meets the eye. Let’s take it apart and examine some of the facets.

As in most activities where one seeks to minimize an undesirable consequence, avoidance is the first line of defense. Applied to the facts of this situation, avoidance means reduce the number of birds brought down with a lot of life and mobility. Reduce the number of birds brought down that land in places where retrieves will be difficult. Translation: Practice shooting in the off-season. In the blind, pass up low percentage (i.e., high and wide) shots. Don’t crack one off just to see what might happen, when the most likely result is a few spent pellets in the gut of a bird that staggers off to die an agonizing death. Understand the limitations of the ammunition you are using and respect those limitations. Don’t shoot at birds that can only fall in an inaccessible place if you happen to hit them.

These subjects all deserve discussion and touch only one part of the crippling issue. It is an issue that cuts across many important areas, indeed most aspects of waterfowling. Thus, it will be the focal point for several articles after this one because I don’t want to shortchange any of this. So we begin.

With respect to shooting practice: If you hit a bird, that is within killing range in the head, neck or front end of the cavity with three or more pellets of proper size, that bird will normally die when hit and present no recovery problem. Even if the bird retains life when it lands, it will be too afflicted to escape. Thus, the first avoidance technique is shooting skill, related to the hunting experience.

The latter point needs emphasis. European style sporting clays (known as FITASC after the European acronym), for example, features a lot of fifty, sixty and seventy yard targets. A good FITASC course can be a fascinating challenge and a lot of fun, but it does not cultivate the skill required to minimize crippling in the duck marsh. Indeed, it can do the reverse by giving the shooter an unrealistic concept of effective range. It takes far more pellet energy to anchor a duck than to break a target. A shooter who falls in love with those seventy yard breaks on the FITASC course may gain a false confidence that leads to profligate mistakes in the blind.

The skeet field also has its limitations. Regulations of the game require skeet targets to fly a fixed path at a fixed height and speed. Thus, the high house target at station four always presents the same shooting challenge. Learning to break it teaches proper lead for that target – which may or may not be relevant to shots you will see in the blind. Skeet can be useful in training the novice on basic shotgun principles, but a lot of skeet shooting – particularly competitive skeet shooting -- tends to turn the gunner into a skeet shooter, not a wing shooter. There’s a big difference. I have known many top-flight skeet shooters who were indifferent wing shots, and it wasn’t just because the birds showed up before the shooter called “pull.”

A good, versatile sporting clays course presents the type of challenges that will tune the shooter up for the blind, particularly a layout where the operator changes target presentations at regular intervals. But in saying that, I am not suggesting that you go out and just shoot the course. (If you’ve got the time, fine. Never forget that a laughin’ and scratchin’ meander through all the stands with a jocular band of buddies may be fine recreation, but it ain’t practice). Instead, preview the course and spend your time at the stands that present shots typical of waterfowling – high crossers, incomers and shots where the target is dropping in the kill zone. Concentrate. Try to learn something with each shot. Droppers are particularly important, because a target on a descending trajectory presents a problem for many shooters; and, of course, ducks coming to decoys present precisely that sort of challenge – as does the broken winged cripple that will be so hard to find unless you rap it solidly a second time before it hits the water.

Remember the objective. You are practicing in order to reduce or eliminate cripple loss as a moral imperative, an obligation that goes with the right to hunt. If you decide to invest the time and money required to become a Master Class sporting clays shooter, more power to you. But the time you will spend in that exercise mastering rabbit targets, battues, chandelles, extremes of speed and distance, true pairs presented in a manner deliberately to confuse the eye, will have no direct bearing on the objective of limiting cripple loss. Sure, almost any shooting practice will make you a better shooter. Limitations of time and economy of resources suggests a more focused exercise, concentrating on the most relevant target presentations.

A few more points will round out the discussion, again with reference to the moral imperative.

Consider that the diameter of a standard sized clay target is roughly equal to the distance between the tip of a mallard’s bill and the back of its head. That head is what you should visualize when you practice. If you take a lesson, your instructor will harp on the notion of target focus, i.e. concentration on the leading edge of the target as your reference point. In the field, the tip of the duck’s bill becomes that point. If you don’t concentrate on that point, your eye will be drawn subconsciously to movement, which usually means the bird’s wing tips. Ducks come equipped with swept back wings. Thus, when you are looking at the whole bird, your true focal point – the place where your eye is directing your hands and the gun – will be about two-thirds of the way back toward tail feathers. Birds hit in the back end generally fly on just far enough to die unrecovered. More often than not, those cripples would die instantly if the hunter had had an intense visual focus on the tip of the bill when the cerebral cortex signaled the finger to pull the trigger.

While practicing and working on target focus, take careful note of the types of targets that you have trouble hitting. In other words, be conscious of your personal, low percentage shots. Be honest with yourself. Everybody’s got some sort of shot that gives them fits, just as some Major League baseball players can’t hit a high fastball. Discipline yourself to pass up those shots in the blind. And also concentrate on learning to assess range, if necessary by pacing off the distances from the shooting stand to the kill zone at representative stations, using target size as a proxy for a mallard’s head to give you a visual frame of reference. Responsible duck hunters should think of forty yards as maximum normal range and take longer shots only under special, rare circumstances, such as, for example, the overhead incomer where a wing break will drop the bird directly toward you.

Sure you can kill birds at longer ranges and some of those kills will be memorable. The odds of a crippling shot and a lost bird increase at an exponential rate at ranges exceeding forty yards. It’s a matter of simple physics and geometry. At fifty yards, a one inch deflection of the barrel moves the centerpoint of your pattern about six feet, while the pellets lose energy at an accelerating rate. In short, you have no margin for error at all. Personally, I don’t believe that those long shots, spectacular and gratifying though they may be, demonstrate the proper respect for our birds. They celebrate excess rather than prudence or responsibility.

Books have been written about the techniques of shotgun skill. Sporting libraries contain dozens of quality instructional videotapes. Fine instructors are generally for hire at reasonable rates on most sporting clays courses. It is not the purpose of this column nor am I particularly well qualified to replow those furrows or summarize those teachings. My point is that as hunters we owe our quarry the duty of attempting to eliminate crippling. That imperative begins with practice to gain the art of skillful, judicious shooting. Let this discussion be the start rather than the end of that process.

In Part II , we will take up some of the other factors.