Small Game hunting and Clay Shooting

Earlier in the semester, my friend Rene invited me and my roommate to do some small game hunting with him and his neighbors. However, Charla could not get off work, I decided it was still something that I would like to see and do.

So last weekend I went with Rene back to his town, Markelo, to do just that. 

Small Game Hunting

Now, I'm not completely sure if we do this style back home because I don't think its as easy for us to do. 

So, their whole neighborhood is a hunting club and they hunt small game on their collected properties. They split the group up, some have shotguns to shoot the game, while others have sticks and are the runners or chasers. (I was of course a chaser). 

(See pictures above) the green is the outline of a "drift" and the green "x's" are some trees or brush. The blue is a little creek, the orange circles are the hunters with shotguns, and the pink circles are the chasers. In the second picture the dashed circles represent us as we moved across the drift, and the dotted orange lines represent the hunters shooting, and there are little hares and a pheasant. 

So when we got to a drift, we would all get out on one end, while the hunters were shuttled to the sides and other end. Then when we got the signal we started walking forward in a straight line (for safety reasons) making noises and trying to call out the animals from their hiding spots. 

Sometimes animals would appear out of no where, but we had to call out whether it was in the air or on the ground and what direction it was going (and of course this is all in Dutch). So for me I was basically observing or yelling out "there!" when I saw something. 

At first I was doubting how much we would see and get, but by the time we left the first drift I knew it was going to be a very good day. We saw a ton! Even in what would look like an empty field, hares would pop out of the ground not 10ft in front of me. It was crazy. 

Now here is a video of some hunting footage and photos I took: Hunting in Holland

Otherwise here are just some of the pictures...

Clay Shooting

The next day Rene and his dad took me Clay Shooting. Surprisingly enough, I have never shot a gun before, let alone an over-under shotgun. But I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try it. We got 5 shots at each of the 5 stations. The first was one that was shot up in the air towards you, the next was one that rolled along the ground (like a rabbit), then one shot away from you, the next was a little harder-it was shot going right to left along the hill, and then finally a little faster going left to right. I got one at each of the first 4 stations and then none at the last. So a 4 out of 25, but that's still 3 more than I thought I was going to get.

So again, I made a short video about it: (video coming soon, waiting on footage from Rene)

And also here are some pictures...

Rene's dad

I hit it :)

Rene

Rene