Longest Starling Shot - Vote!!!

[Daniel Koster]

I was shooting at the corner of my fence where I have some targets set up when I saw a flock of birds land out by some trees in a field past my yard.

I grabbed my binoculars to see what was there and saw it was mostly robins. BUT, what's this? One lone starling in the group...??!?

So I set the magnification on my Hawke Airmax all the way up to 12x, estimated holdover and took the shot. Lower and farther to the left than I thought....RATS! But none of the birds moved since it was about 10 yds in front of them. So I held over where I thought it should be and fired. The BURST of feathers took me by surprise - I could hardly believe I hit it! I was jumping up and down like a little kid. I immediately called Tom to brag about it.

As usual, he wanted pics.


Well, I didn't have a chance to go out and retrieve the bird, but you can see the robins and the "lump" in the grass where the little starling is taking his dirt nap.

I had originally guesstimated it at 125 yds. Went back later and paced it off twice at 124 yds. I was on the money that day.


Well, here's the pic:



My fence is at 30 yds from where I set up to do target shooting.

The tree looks a lot closer than it really is - because I was using a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4 teleconverter on my 1.6x crop factor camera (Canon 20D). Comes out to 448mm zoom equivalent - those that shoot long telephoto know that it "compresses" distances...which is why it looks closer than it really is. But trust me, there's 100 yds between my fence and the tree on the right.

Like I said - PURE LUCK - but still, I took a chance and got it.

The gun is a Falcon-C carbine in .22 shooting 15.8 JSBs at around 840 fps.

Dan

[Tom Militano]

Dan, that's not fair. You're using skill and young eyes. That's a heck of a shot no matter how you did it. You da man!

[Frank]

Nice to see some fellow starling thumpers. I bought a Airforce Condor in 22 with the express purpose of sniping starlings.
Most of my shots are in the 50 to 70 yard range because of the way the trees/power lines are and I get quite a few. 5 or 6 on a good day, sometimes more. Some less.
My longest shot was on a starling sitting at the far and opposite corner of a 50x150 ft. lean to type barn, 50 yards long. From where I shot it was about 40 yards to the barn then the length of the barn diagonally. I figured it was close to 100 yards.
Funny thing was the starling heard the shot and just started to try and take off when the pellet hit him. They are smart birds and though I have a shroud on the Condor when they hear that phewtttt they make for the horizon.

[sawtooth]

ill be shooting many starling once my tko shroud arrives for my 2240. cant wait