Trap shooting game
Looking for a fun way to keep your target practicing interesting, or maybe slightly more challenging? This is a game my father taught me, and the he and his friends developed while trying to get rid of some multi colored clay pigeons they had lying around their gun club. Not only is it effective, but fairly easy to set up.
All you need is at least three people (two shooters and one puller), though adding more people will add to the difficulty and interest of the game. You will also need multi colored pigeons, one color for each shooter. If you can't get a hold of enough different colored pigeons, spray paint them, just make sure you let them dry first.
The puller loads the trap with the pigeons, randomly intermixing the colored pigeons. There should be no set pattern to the color of the pigeons that are loaded, only that there should be an equal number of birds for each shooter. Only the puller should know the order of the birds.
The shooters stand, the fire arms must be at your hips. Each shooter must also be wearing an armband that corresponds to a pigeon color in the trap. The puller will call the first bird, but after that the puller may pull when ever he feels (obviously hold up if someone needs to reload). If the color of the bird matches the color on your arm band, that is your bird.
The game is great for building your target recognition skills and speeding up the rate at which you take aim. Give it a try, but always remember, safety first.
You brought back some memories with your article. The multi colored trap shoot, basically, came about as a way to enhance our hunting skills. Trap, in this country, is shot with the shooter facing the field with the shotgun up to his shoulder with the safety off & ready to track the target as it clears the house. With the multi-colored shoot we would normally have 5 shooters on the 16 yrd. line and all shooters would have the shotgun at the waist with the safety on. when a bird was launched the shooters would have to identify the bird matching their armband, bring the shotgun to the shoulder ,disengage the safety, track and shoot the bird. Most of the hits were a bit farther out than a regular trap shoot. Another variation we would do, when all the shooters were familiar with each other, would be an informal competition to see who could hit the bird at the farthest distance. We were shooting over a cleansing pond at a gravel company and could get more distance than the average trap range. One of my favorites was the quail walk. In this shoot one person at a time would start walking from the 16 yrd. line toward the trap house, the shooter would have his shotgun at the waist with the safety on. Somewhere between the 16 yrd. line & the trap house the bird would be launched & the shooter would not have much time to get on target. This type of shooting was much more difficult than standard trap shooting but I wonder if sporting clays might not be more challenging.