Wednesday 15 April 2009

Interesting reading on internal ballistics

I have been reading on reloading and found this very educational little gem: http://shadowspear.com/vb/showthread.php?t=9340

Friday 3 April 2009

Hares in Ireland II

Well, I have now spoken to a conservation officer and to a ranger. Both have made inquiries and they both concur with my own findings. It is perfectly legal to shoot hares in Ireland with a rifle. If you want to use a rifle that is not deer legal, as I would recommend, unless you are using something like KJG or Impala bullets which require reloading or having ammo shipped from Germany or Austria and on which I will expound later. The smallest cartridge legal in Ireland for shooting deer is .22-250 which from a humanity POV I'd abolish, but it will still make quite a mess out of a hare.

So if you want to shoot hare with a .17 HMR or .22 Hornet, you'll need to have it stated in your cert.

The origin of this myth appears to be that the law says that it is legal to shoot hares with a shotgun. Since no other protected species can be shot with both shotgun* and rifle, only 'vermin', somebody must have deduced that the inclusion of the shotgun is an automatic exclusion of the rifle and the myth stuck and got perpetuated.

*birds only with shotgun (why?) and deer only with rifle (I effin well hope so)

Thursday 2 April 2009

On binoculars

One of the things one needs for hunting is a good binoculars.

Now there are options. First there are the big three which happily will set you back a grand for a stalking binocular (8*42 or similar). Then there is a second rate where you'd expect to around 300 € for those same binoculars. Now contrast and clarity especially when it is getting dark won't be quite as good, but your rifle scope won't show you all of that anyway - partly because you're only looking through it with one eye.

Or one can look for Carl Zeiss Jena 7x50 Binoctem on Ebay where one can get them for maybe 50 € ...