The Right Tools For The Job

I received a phone call today from a gentleman who was in need of some pigeon control. I was all too happy to provide it as I haven't had this sort of work for a few months. I'll be up to my eyeballs in it soon now that a long-term control contract with a large entity has been struck between them and my employer, but in the meantime I get just a sprinkle of this kind of thing.

I arrived on site, walked around a bit to get an idea of where the birds were roosting, then I pulled my rifle out of my truck and got to work. I had two types of pellets with me, Beeman Silver Sting pellets and Crossman Copperhead High Velocity hunting tip pellets. The Beeman pellets performed like they always do - like crap. I don't know why my rifle doesn't do well with those (a Gamo Shadow 1000), but it's the truth. Those pellets are a problem.

I know this to be true because I switched to the Crossman pellets, and after that it was like I could not miss! Within one hour I had taken ten pigeons, and except for a missed shot directed up into the darkened rafters of a truck shed, every shot brought down a pigeon, and most of the time the kills were instant (three birds are stuck on a roof at the work site because they just dropped dead after being hit - the Beeman pellets only wounded them most of the time).

Since pigeons mate for life, any given population of them tend to be 50/50 males and females, so out of the ten that I shot this afternoon roughly half of them are probably female. They're the ones to get since killing off the females of a species dramatically reduces their reproductive capacity (hence why state controlled hunting of various game animals features laws that require that hunters only take male animals). Pigeons reproduce all year long, take roughly two months to raise young from egg to flight, and they begin a new clutch just before the previous one leaves the nest. Thus, even though I've only taken about five females out of the population today, I've eliminated up to 60 potential pigeons over a one-year time span. That's a lot of pigeon poop that won't exist now! All because of a different brand of pellet than what I had been using.