Is This The End Of The High Life?

The move from lead to steel is likely to force Guns to rethink their range, says Mike Swan

- Mike Swan

In the early 1990s, when we had a voluntary phase-out of lead for shooting over wetlands, my old mate Charles Nodder and I had a little try with some steel cartridges out on the Medway mud. It was not very scientific, more a first dabble.

Being young and keen, we hit the road from Dorset at about 2 am, with a view to being out on the Kent shore for morning flight. In those days, with wigeon and teal the main quarry, I usually used 28g lead 7s and my first 14 shots at dawn put five birds in the bag. From then on, I changed to steel, following the conventional advice to go up two sizes, and ended up shooting another 10 ducks, including a single pintail, for 32 burned.

If you do the sums, the cartridge to kills ratio goes from 2.8 to 3.2 to one, which is hardly significant. Add in that two of the 32 were used to finish off wounded birds on water during the tide flight and you could only conclude that there was no significant difference.

But what about the high ones? Now, I will confess right here that most of those birds were not long shots. Pulling at extreme range on the foreshore is a recipe for wounding and when the tide is in, ducks can easily escape the best of dogs by diving and disappearing. These were all shot at what I judged to be sensible ranges, but I did not hold back on what I considered to be fair chances. One rocketing wigeon killed with the second barrel was certainly memorable, so I think that part of the experiment was fair.