First sucessful hunt

[rangersedge]

I remember mine. Don't remember how old I was. Somwhere in single digits. Went rabbit hunting in small apple orchard we had next to our house. Spotted rabbit sitting. Aimed single shot .22 rifle at his eye and fired. He made a noise, jumped straight up to my eye level, and fell over dead. Mom used to fry up with white gravy and hard tack biscuits. Good eatibg.

What was yours?

[Snyd]

10 years old. I had to be 10 to take the hunters safety course. Grampa gave me the Ithaca mod 37 featherweight 20 gauge and took me goose huntin. I shot a honker with it, Taffy the big ol' Chessie retrieved it. I miss them both.

[bula]

My first worth mentioning successful hunt also ended with a rabbit in hand. Though mine was skewered with an arrow. Lots of frogs and such went down before the rabbit. There is a M37 20ga in the room with me now. It's bigger brother, a 16ga keeps it company. I no longer have the 12 ga.. 

[contender]

I don't recall the exact hunt,,, but I know my first hunting was with a 22 & for gray squirrels. I was about 6-7 at the time. It wasn't until I was 11 I was "allowed" to "own" the rifle though. A hand me down from my brother. I still have it. I took a lot of squirrels before I got my first deer. It was when I was 16, and I do remember those details. Tree stand, laying out of school with a buddy, my first real deer gun, a Marlin 30-30. Opening morning,,,, a small 6 pt buck came down a hill, I lined up a heart-lung shot, fired, & he leapt straight up, turning to run back up the hill he'd come down. I was scared he'd get away,, so I started "windmilling" that lever action at him. Shots were not hitting him, until my next to last one, hit him in the neck. He flipped over backwards, and slid back down hill to me. I learned that day that a spine hit deer is DRT.

[sixshot]

Would have been Sparrows with a BB gun in 1950. Hit quite a few Blackbirds but don't think I ever killed one, they were too tough for that BB gun. Got in a real western shootout with my older brother maybe the next year & nearly put his eye out. I ran behind mom & dads car so he couldn't shoot back & when he raised up to file an official protest I fired a shot that hit him in the forehead, just above the eye. I took off running for the house & he was closing pretty fast when I hit the front door, mom saved me but not for long. I got a pretty good education with the belt over that one. Years later I watched him get shot with a shotgun from about 4 feet, he survived that one too.

Dick

[bigbrowndog]

Dick I tell people all the time I owe my ability to hit a moving target to my brother, be it with dirt clods, snowballs, pine cones or BB’s. I got lots of practice in my younger days. He was older and always seemed to hit and run, so I was always left having to hit a moving target.

My first successful hunt would also be birds and B.B. guns, still have the gun and it still flings BB’s

Trapr

[magnumwheelman]

my 1st was Grey Squirrels, with my lil single shot 410... my grandpa ( dad's dad ) died when he was a little kid, so he was raised by a single mother, a nurse in IL, outside Chicago, so she hated guns, as she saw a lot of emergency room shootings... so the guns & hunting thing skipped a generation in my family... as kids my 2 brothers & I pleaded for something to hunt the woods we were living on... I was the oldest, & finally about 14 I got my 1st gun, a single shot .410... after no one died the 1st year, & my dad saw the gun wasn't instant death & carnage like his mother had been my younger brothers got a 12 ga, & a 20 ga, bolt action repeaters... leaving me the oldest & with the smallest & single shot... forced me to become a better shot than they were

[rangersedge]

I couldnt count and maybe couldnt lift all the BBs fired through one bb gun i had. Shot that gun so much in so many positions that could hit with it out of proportion to its accuracy or rainbow trajectory.

Had lots of time and BBs were cheap. Lots of years ago.

Still have that gun, but didnt seem nearly as accurate for some reason last time i shot it. Maybe worn out, maybe just lost my familiarity with it, or maybe I'm not as good a shot now. Probably all of the above!

[38 WCF]

I was 7 or 8, with my Dad and an older cousin. Patch of Sagebrush at the mouth of the Right Hand Fork of Indian Canyon. Cottontail skirting about and several shots later I had my first.
Still hunt Deer in the area with my Grandson.

[azshaun]

My first successful hunt was jusy a few years ago in my elderly years...

Being the summer and sun rise coming up early, I left the house at 5am. Sunrise was due in 20 minutes... just enough time for me to get to Four Peaks road and find a spot.

I have my Taurus PT22 which I carry everywhere, my 41 magnum (6.5 in Blackhawk), and a box of 50 reloads I have been trying out. 215 hardcast swc under 20.5 grains Ramshot enforcer (Overkill, but wasn't overly encouraged I would find anything, as this was only my second try, and hadn't seen anything yet).

So I find my spot... get out of the car with my 41 ready. Start walking the desert... slowly... navigating around the plethora of cactus... going down one ravine and up the other... I see a hawk flying and land on a Saguaro cactus a few yards away. Other than that all is still except for the bugs being annoying... finally I turn right... figure I can go up the hill and see what's on the other side... remembering a friend said sometimes they can't hear you when you do that...

I get to the top of the hill and there are some cactus patches... a cottontail jumps out and scampers up ahead. 1st sign of any life outside of a rabbit taunting me just as I turn off the beeline! So, I briefly go to my 41 but decide... it is really close... I better try my EDC. See what happens. Sure enough I get into the middle of the pack and about 10 ft in front of me is the cottontail hiding in a cactus. I line up my small sites and fire... missed! I stay still as it scampers to my left into the open... as I watch it stops about 18 feet away... so I line up again... one more shot and send a 38 grain hp through him. In about 10 seconds he stops moving. No expansion that I can tell... but completely pass through. Entered right behind the rib cage on the right and exited right before the other front leg on the left.

So my first successful kill was with my edc .22lr from a pocket pistol. Proved to myself that Hal Swigget was right about the 22LR: "In my opinion,.22 LR offers a far wider range of uses than ANY OTBER CALIBER. You can have fun with it; you can eat with it, you can defend yourself with it and yes, even kill some mighty big game with it-if need be. As to how it is carried makes little difference-so long as it is handy which means with you all the time."

[lazytcross]

There were countless swallow, sparrow, squirrel, and blackbird hunts leading up to this, but my first time for something with a season was duck. My grandpa and I went down to the river bottom on our property. In the middle of the meadow there was a coolie where water would sit after a spring flood. We crept over the edge and Holy Crap Ducks Bang. Here was about 5-6 BW teal. One never made it out of there alive. I still remember my grandpa asking me if I had picked out just ONE duck and shot at it. I replied Yes. Knowing full well that I had just shot at the blob of ducks flying away.
We then loaded up our prize and headed back for coffee (milk) and cookies. Grandpa parked the ol Chevy down by the barn and we went in. By the time we came out the cats had found my duck! (A trick that I later found out my grandpa used to dispose of ducks and feed barn cats at the same time!) I have to thank him for that though. Here I am years later and I can still picture every detail. That wouldn’t be true if we had just ate it!