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Right before SHOT Show 2018, I had the opportunity to travel to North Texas on a hunt. I’m in Texas several times every year, as this is one of my favorite airgunning venues. I hunt hogs, predators, small game, and the occasional exotic, so coming to Texas to hunt is not out of the ordinary for me. However, the objective of this trip was going to be something special! Umarex intended to release their new .50 caliber Hammer precharged pneumatic air rifle at the SHOT Show and had invited me down to Bowie Texas to hunt with it! Was I available? Oh, heck yeah I was! The fact that this was Umarex’s long anticipated entry into the big bore market segment was exciting enough, but I’d been talking with the developers for over a year and had used the Hammer a couple times while we were filming segments of the American Airgunner. It was Impressive on many levels, and I was itching to get some field time with this rifle! When talking about big bores, power is always the first topic that floats up, and this rifle generating an honest 700 fpe over three shots was something to talk about. The Hammer uses Umarex’s proprietary Lightspeed Valve system, which on a 4500-psi fill provides three regulated shots at 3000 psi. This is a very important feature: most big bore air rifles are not regulated and utilize a significant volume of air with each shot, reducing the pressure with each successiveRead More →

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Hunting the Aberts tree squirrel in the Arizona mountains! I do a lot of squirrel hunting and have done, ever since moving to the Midwest almost 20 years ago. Up until that time, about the only squirrel hunting I had was ground squirrels in California, Arizona. And New Mexico and this is more like prairie dog hunting than being in the woods after tree squirrels. But once I got to Indiana, I really started to focus on this tree dwelling small game species! My first couple years I did alright, but not great……. then I met Randy Mitchel on one of the airgun forums and he invited me to hunt with him in Kentucky. I drove down a few times to hunt with him and picked up quite a few hints that started to improve my game significantly. As a matter of fact, I started to limit out so regularly that I placed self-imposed bag limits because I didn’t know what to do with the quantity of squirrels I was harvesting. It quickly got to the point that I was traveling all over the Midwest and Eastern states to hunt squirrels, fox, grays, and I even started going after specific color phases. On a backpacking trip with my son in Colorado I ran into the Aberts squirrel for the first time, and thought they were an incredible looking little animal, the coloration and tufted ears made them about the coolest squirrel I’d ever seen. A few years later I wasRead More →

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I was on a deer hunt earlier this year in Texas, the first season in which game animals could be taken with an airgun. Eventually I ended up taking a buck and a couple does, but one day earlier on I’d passed on a couple small deer when a flock of Rio Grande turkeys walked in. I wanted a Rio Grande with an air rifle, and thought I’d take the opportunity being presented. I was hunting with the AirForce .357 and took the shot at about 35 yards using an archery-oriented shot placement up front and low. The turkey shot up in the air and came down about 30 yards away, piling up where he landed and not moving a twitch after. A couple things to comment on, the shot placement and the gun I used. As far as the shot placement, I’ve taken a lot of turkey with an airgun now, with about half taken with head or neck shots and about half with a body shot. Initially, I only used headshots, and when the bird is close and locked in on a decoy this is a good option. What I found worked better was placing my pellet at the base of the neck, especially when the bird was facing away. A friend down in Virginia, that’s taken more turkey with an airgun than anyone I know, told me he started using body shots with good results. His provision being that this placement worked better using a .25 caliberRead More →

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Ten years ago I wrote a booklet for Crosman on hunting small game in South Africa with the Marauder. At the time the company was going through some changes, and they ended up never moving forward with it. My relationship with Crosman broke down, and I ended up scraping the project. Those days are over, the people I disliked dealing with are no longer at Crosman, and I came across this PDF as I was cleaning up my hard drive. Its a bit out of date, but still (I hope) interesting. Feel free to peruse or download!Read More →

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I’ve had this very cool and unusual lever action rifle out for a couple hunts this year, and just edited a video from a pickup hunt for rabbits during down time on a hog hunt down in Texas a couple months ago. Have a look and let me hear what you think about this rifle.Read More →

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I’ve just arrived home from our 3rd annual prairie dog shoot in South Dakota, and was hanging with a group of guys I’ve come to look forward to seeing every year. I have to tell you, that this was by far the roughest year we’ve had, due to thunderstorms, constant rain and drizzle, and some of the thickest and most tenacious mud I’ve encountered. What was unusual for me was that even though I’d brought along a half dozen rifles, a couple compressors and tanks, and a case of pellets, I never pulled the trigger this weekend. Since it was such difficult conditions and not too many dogs surfacing, I decided to let the other guys shoot and I walked along filming. I have a pretty good eye for picking out partially submerged PD’s, and think I helped put the guys I hunted with on a few more dogs, but still the numbers were low. In towns where we’d normally drop 20 in an hour, getting a dozen in a day required some hard hunting and covering a lot of ground. Again this year, FX was the most used rifle, there were a couple Wildcats in .25 and .30, a few Impacts in .30, and a couple Crowns…. I brought my Crown .30 and Impact .30, but as mention didn’t have the opportunity to shoot them. I’ll be out of the country working most of June, but am off for another prairie dogs shoot in South Dakota then down toRead More →

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I was going back over some of my hunts from the last few years, and found this article on an interesting bullpup I took out on several hunts. Let me know if you like this stuff from my archives, and if so I’ll post some more. While visiting the Pyramyd Air booth at the SHOT Show in 2015, the good folks at AirArms pulled me aside to show me a gun they were working on. It was a bullpup prototype, and they wanted feedback on it. I had some ideas to share as did many others, but the important point is that AirArms were asking before going into production. And when I saw the prerelease gun at this years show it had evolved, proof that they had been listening. Named the Galahad, this gun leverages the companies technology assets using some elements from their existing products, but it is an original where it counts. The trigger assembly, the stock design, the cocking mechanism were built to get the best out of a bullpup configuration. Did they realize their objective to build a superior bullpup?  What constitutes the best of breed is difficult to define, because it is very subjective. I will say that in my opinion AirArms did it right; the power is optimal for small to medium game (adjustable power with high power setting), the accuracy achieved in my range work promised a solid 50 yard small game gun, the proven multishot magazine works without a hitch, the gunRead More →

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Hello everyone, sorry I haven’t been posting much, been out of country for work and just getting caught up since returning. Before starting I’d like to thank all of you that have been registering on this site, with all the uncertainty around YouTube’s policies on shooting and hunting, I want to have another way to reach out to you all with content. So, the last hunt I went on before heading abroad was another trip down to Texas. I took the AirForce Texan .357 on a hog hunt outside of Abilene, on a smallish property of a couple hundred acres a few miles outside city limits. This is a wide open property that connects some much larger farms, and gets a fair bit of hog traffic. I arrived at the blind situated over a feeder, on the back forty of this farm property where I’ve seen pigs, but never had the opportunity to shoot. The landowner, a friend named Shawn McDonald, asked me if I could throw a couple bags of corn in one of the feeders when I got out to the property. Seems it had malfunctioned in heavy winds and dumped all the corn in one go, and some other guys had seen that it was empty but not had a chance to refill it. I was going to fill it, then make my way to another blind further back, but it had been raining and I was in a rental 2 wheel drive SUV that I didn’tRead More →

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Last month I was out in Texas and took the Air Venturi Seneca Aspen out for a few rabbit hunts. The rifle is a multi-pump PCP platform: the air reservoir takes an initial fill from either an external air source (like any PCP), or can be pumped up from empty using the integrated pump. The difference between this mechanism and a traditional mulit-pump designs such as the Benjamin and Sheridan rifles, is that once filled (250 BAR), the gun can shoot 10-15 pellets before it needs to be pumped. In this respect it is like a standard PCP ……. except the pump is built in which makes this a self contained powerplant. This freedom from an external air source has always been the advantage of the spring piston air rifle, and the Aspen could be a good fit for airgunners that have stayed away from PCP’s because of costs and the amount of gear required. You might have to spend several hundred dollars for the PCP rifle, then several hundred more for fill gear which ramped up the initial investment. Will the Aspen the cost is under $400.00, and you don’t need anything else. I have a comprehensive collection of tanks and compressors, but still like the idea of having a rifle that can always be ready to shoot packed in my camping rig or kayak. The Aspen is inherently accurate, and importantly, easy to shoot accurately. There are two power settings, though I confess I haven’t worked with theRead More →

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Been down in Texas since last week, and man have I put in the miles. When I went to pick up the truck I’d reserved, they didn’t have one available…… always makes me think of the Seinfeld episode, taking the reservation isn’t the important thing…. keeping it is! Anyways, I got a white Jeep Cherokee’s with 4 miles on it,m and it is being returned with over 1600 miles. I’ve been east, west, and south hitting three different properties. The bad news, I struck out one my last javalina of the season…. they just weren’t moving. However, got some great rabbit hunts in with the lever action Hatsan Vectis and the multi pump PCP Seneca Aspen, and will have some videos and article combining out on those. Will let you know when and where those are being published. Then last night out at my buddy Shawns Salt Fork Ranch property outside of Abilene, in the last moments of light, I had a chance at a tank of a boar hog with the AirForce Texan and Devastator bullet combination that has done so well for me this year. Got some good video of this that will be on American Airgunner.Read More →