Reading the wind with an air rifle: what a 40-yard drift test shows

A properly windy practice round left one of the country’s most experienced hunter field target (HFT) shooters doubting his own wind calls, and the answer he went looking for applies to any air rifle taken out on a breezy day. Writing in Airgun World, Gary Chillingworth describes a session at Springfield ARC, just outside Chelmsford, in “a steady 15mph with gusts of up to 30mph”, where he missed only one or two of his first 10 targets before the round fell apart.

What went wrong in the wind at Springfield?

The round, as Airgun World tells it, only came right again “once he stopped aiming off and kept his aim point inside the kill”. That was the puzzle. In Chillingworth’s account, “the rifle did not seem to be taking much wind at all, certainly compared with other guns he has shot”, and with the last two rounds of the UK HFT series coming up and more wind in the forecast, he wanted to know exactly what the Blackwolf was doing “before he talked himself out of good shots again”.

The 40-yard card test

The method, filmed for Back to Basics with Daystate on Shooting & Country TV, is simple enough for any shooter to copy on a club range or a quiet field. He waits for a 10 to 12mph crosswind, pins a card with a single black line high up a tree at 40 yards, aims straight down the line and measures how far five pellets drift. The discipline is in the detail: “Use exactly the same pellets, fill pressure and setup you compete with, or the results tell you nothing.” Then it is back to Springfield for a full round in the gusts, with his advice on reading the wind as he goes, from flags and feathers to the trees behind the target.

How much wind should you give a shot?

Chillingworth’s own question is the one every airgunner asks, and he has the standing to answer it: an Essex airgunner who shot for England at the HFT World Championships in 2012 and 2013, he has written for Airgun World since 2008. His advice is to use the first shot as a baseline and adjust from it for longer and shorter targets, and to listen as well as look, because “wind often blows in cycles and can switch direction suddenly”. A feather on the barrel shows the wind at the peg, “but always check the foliage behind the target, as the wind downrange can be quite different”. Targets high in a tree generally take more wind, because “wind moves faster the higher it is, because there is less on the ground to break it up”, and in a strong blow the tree itself can move, along with any support the shooter is leaning against.

Why the margin matters beyond the HFT course

For the keeper on the rat run or the farmer thinning woodpigeons off the rape, the point is the margin. “Wind eats into the space you have to aim at,” Chillingworth writes: on a 25mm HFT kill, holding in the middle leaves plenty of room, but using the bottom of the kill as an aim point for range shrinks the usable width to around 18mm, and a rifle that drifts less in a crosswind leaves far more margin for error. A head shot on a rat or a pigeon offers no more room than that, which is why knowing exactly what a rifle does in 12mph of wind is worth an afternoon with a card and five pellets. His last word is on clothing, and it applies on the pigeon hide as much as the peg: “A hoodie lets a cold wind straight through, and by the end of a long round you can be frozen, which does your shooting no favours.”

What happens next?

The episode is on Shooting & Country TV, and Chillingworth’s full account, with the drift measurements and the gusty round, is in Airgun World, linked first below. The last two rounds of the UK HFT series follow, in whatever wind the autumn brings.