Sparrow carnage
I was fortunate enough to grow up on a farm and learned to do battle with the wily English sparrow in many different ways. Our favorite tactic was to hunt them at night in the barn on cold winter nights. Get a good pellet gun and a flashlight and you're set. Every cat on the place would follow us from building to building waiting for their chance to dine on fresh sparrow.
Sometimes after a miss, they'd fly but since it was dark, they didn't navigate very well. They'd fly low and slow trying to get their bearings. Many times the beam of the flashlight, tracking the sparrow, would catch the blur of a feline plucking the sparrow from midair.
We used birdshot loads occasionally from a DA High Standard but the range was limited. My brother shot some on the wing with the pistol at close range. Sometimes if we shot them sitting, the bird shot would drive their feathers into the rafter and pin 'em up therel.
We also would carry an old tennis racket with us. If one of these "feathered mice" would fly by, the tennis racket would come into play. It's amazing how far you can launch a sparrow with a tennis racket.
Occasionally, we'd whack 'em with a 12 gauge (trap loads) during daylight missions, but Dad didn't see the humor in that. Shotgun shells were too expensive to waste on sparrows.
When we could get away with it, we'd do a "drive by" on 'em. The house had a "U" shaped driveway around it and we'd put our gunner in the back of the old Scout 4x4. The sparrows were not afraid of a moving vehicle so we could drive around the house to the back where the trees and the sparrows were. Soon as we were within range, the driver would stop the Scout and the gunner would open up with dramatic effect. You could not approach them on foot with a firearm in hand, so they left us no choice but to go "drive by" on 'em.
Wristrocket slinghots are devasting on sparrows, but it takes a great deal of skill to hit a sparrow with a slingshot. But man what a ball bearing or a marble will do to a sparrow!
We naturally used Daisy BB guns, but we found their range inadequate. The Daisy's were much better suited to wasp nests and the big brown buzzing grasshoppers in the barnyard.
