You will probably have heard it at some point on a clay ground from the back of the cage “You’re behind it mate”. While it is meant well, there is little more irritating than this kind of unsolicited advice. Another supposedly self-evident truth that is trotted out repeatedly on a game day is “You don’t miss ‘em in front”. But is it true or are these just lazy stereotype remedies from well-meaning amateurs?

LONG BATTUES - DIFFERENT SHOT

If you have spent all summer shooting long battue targets on your local clay ground and are used to seeing a gap between your muzzle and the clay you may find yourself having to adjust when it comes to game shooting. It is no good simply getting further and further in front of the birds following a miss thinking that this will fix the issue. Most instructors on a clay ground will explain the three methods of connecting your shot string with the bird. Swing through, pull away, and maintained lead. Maintained lead has been employed very successfully by some shooters who rely on an almost superpower like gift of hand-eye coordination, and it can be necessary in certain situations. Some top-level American skeet shots shoot nothing else and have runs of hits that go into the hundreds, but for most of us mere mortals, it can lead to problems as there is little or no relationship between barrel and bird. If you try maintained lead on driven game you may get lucky but most of the time you won’t. Pull away (sometimes referred to as ‘The Method’) starts on the bird and the muzzle accelerates away from it until you are comfortable with your lead picture when you squeeze the trigger. This relationship established between muzzle and bird gives you two vital pieces of information to your subconscious: firstly you have some idea of how fast the bird is travelling; secondly, you have some idea of its line of flight and angle. This again for game shooting can be successful but you can end up in the weeds as you come to rely too much on deliberate movements and seeing the gap. Once it stops working you try to rectify it with a bigger gap when what is more likely is that you have stopped your gun swing and poked. This leaves us with ‘swing through’. The natural fluidity of swing through means it is the method of choice for almost all game shooting because it helps to prevent you from measuring. You sometimes hear the issue of measurement referred to in other sports, particularly tennis as players "getting tight”. The attempt at controlling a shot leads to the very opposite result than the one hoped for. If you fail to appreciate the difference between pulling away from a clay to a pre-judged lead and swinging through you can end up shooting in front without realising it.

MORE COMMON THAN WE THINK

The veteran commentator on all things shooting sports Mike Yardley agrees:

“Missing in front is far more common than most people think," he said. "It’s a particular malady for clay shooters transferring to game. The reason for this is the standard clay pigeon travels at 50mph, similar to a pigeon in straight and level flight, but your standard pheasant is usually flying under 40mph and partridges are around 30mph all dependant on wind of course. The gun can make a significant difference. I have found that I can shoot driven pheasants well with a 32” twenty bore and when I compared the shooting qualities of a 32” and a 30” gun and we did this experimentally at one of the London shooting grounds. I found that I was leading birds roughly speaking 10% less than I was aware of with the longer gun and although this suited driven pheasant, I was perplexed when I got to the clay ground and realised I had to extend my lead pictures. Of course in some situations on a clay layout you will miss in front as well and a good example of that is a pair on the centre station in skeet where the second bird is often missed in front because it's a quartering shot rather than a crossing one.

LEAD PICTURES

Adam Calvert, professional game shooting coach from Oxfordshire found the same:

"When I'm shooting a lot of clays, particularly high tower stuff, I tend to see far more lead than when I’m shooting pheasants." he said.

"The danger is that you carry those lead pictures across into your pheasant shooting, and I see some clients do exactly the same. We are making clays go faster and higher sometimes because we need the safe fall out distance for the clays. If we are not careful some of those targets become un-pheasant like. I see a lot of pheasants missed in front. I also think that people overestimate distance.

Mike also believes it can be an indication of more subtle issues:

"As a professional coach" he said "you see many people missing in front often on the right to left target at closer range if they are right-handed and have a master eye issue.” It is certainly not that all birds are missed behind or offline then.

DIFFERENT SWING THROUGH TYPES

For the majority of game shot at reasonable ranges some variation of swing through is employed. Whether this is point and push (starting on the tail feathers of the bird and coming through the line and firing) or inserting the muzzles behind the bird a similar distance you judge you want to be in front of it. The beauty of swing through is allowing your internal computer to do the almost impossible calculation to get your shot to fly into a bird (birds never, ever fly into shot) 40 yards away doing 35mph with a moving gun. It is only when our conscious brains get involved telling us we were behind the last one that we falter and find ourselves overcompensating with too much lead.

TOO MUCH YOUTUBE

It is possible that our modern gadgets and communications have influenced this issue and made it worse for some. Watching a lot of Aimcam footage posted on social media can make some people poke more and then try compensate with over leading. Similarly too much YouTube watching others in action can make you think that every bird needs more than one proverbial five-bar gate. The camera can distort our perception of height and lead.

Adam agrees: "YouTube can lead to false lead pictures as the gun being filmed opens up that gap. When I am instructing I see double the lead than when I am shooting. I remember Simon Ward [a professional shooting instructor from Yorkshire] saying to me the biggest thing that will ruin your shooting as an instructor is watching too many people and not doing enough shooting yourself. Seeing bigger and bigger leads that sometimes work will scramble your in-built computer and you will start to see your clients pictures and what works for them. They are not the same pictures that you will use yourself."

BRAIN PERCEPTION

This is a perception created in the brain difference similar to firing a shot into a bank or a pattern plate where the perception of recoil is far greater than when shooting at live quarry. Once you are aware of it you can guard against it.

NO SUBSTITUTE

There really is no substitute for time spent in the field building a broad range of imagery that we need for a successful shot on birds at different distances. This isn’t so that we can deploy specific deliberate moves - as we have discussed the thinking that ‘birds at distance A need forward allowance B’ leads to problems, this is so we can allow our on-board computer to do most of the work for us with subconscious imagery we have built up over time.