Rabbit Ranging Thumb Trick

Jamie Chandler reveals a ‘rule of thumb’ that could help improve your rabbit hunting skills

- Jamie Chandler

I’m sure I’ve bored you all to tears about the magnificent world of airgunning and the oh so very wide church of people and groups it covers, from all backgrounds and walks of life. There are readers of this very magazine from as far distant places to the UK as New Zealand and Malaysia, for example, who love airguns and their way of enjoying our sport. Distance, whether near or far, regarding fellow hunters and in so many other ways, is actually a fundamental of our sport.

For all my desperate blustering to the contrary, I am actually addicted to some modern gadgets and no more so than my rangefinder. It’s a piece of kit that I would argue is not just important, but in terms of humane dispatch of quarry and reducing the risk of wounding, almost essential to any reasonably minded airgun hunter. Before I bought into the need for rangefinders some 15 years ago or so, I would either pace distances from active warrens a few days before hunting them, use decoys as range markers over harvested fields, or count fence posts to gauge distance, and whether a shot was on or not. I became quite good at roughly ranging, but there were times were I grossly over- or underestimated, leading to frustrating misses, normally when the pressure was on, like at the end of a long stalk or pigeons further down a telephone wire than expected. Thinking back, I could simply have reduced the over/underestimation risk further by sticking to the more forgiving trajectory of a .177 pellet. Knowing me, I would have potentially thought about using the calibre more, then discounted it as fumble some for me, too easy and still not always perfect.