Cocktail Hour

Peter Yeats reveals a fun way of improving your hunting skills with a little bit of improvised target practice

- Peter Yeats

The expression ‘keeping your eye in’ is often used to describe target practice, or plinking, but it can be so much more than that with a little planning to get what you want back from a session, and it doesn’t have to mean less fun, either.

I like to use swizzle sticks (cocktail stirrers), bought very cheaply online, for my practice targets and there are several reasons for that. Each end of the stick provides a different target; The larger disc, which is about two centimetres in diameter is just slightly larger than a kill zone, so a clean hit represents a successful shot, whilst clipping the edge is a miss. This makes it an ideal hunting practice target, stuck in the ground at various, measured hunting ranges. I tend to place mine at 5-yard intervals because I can match these to the scales on the Hawke Chairgun app on my phone. I measure the distances either with a tape measure, tedious but very precise, or my Hawke laser rangefinder which is accurate to within a yard and very easy to use. No prizes for guessing which I use most!

MINIMUM STRAIN