A buddy came up to me at Church Sunday and told me that he wanted to introduce me to a buddy of his who is a missionary from Thailand.
He’d been watching the Olympic pistol airgun competition and wanted to get an airgun pistol. He’d told him that I was into airguns.
I’d just received the new UMAREX Side Lever Gauntlet II .25 cal. airgun and needed to test it out.
Of course, in a hot second we had a trip to test it out lined up. Surprise, surprise. I mounted a scope on it and was good to go.
A few of the pigeons I got. I’ve found the JSB pellets to be deadly on small game.
D-day soon hit and we hit the trail. As we were leaving, I noticed the steel was showing on the front left tire so we slapped on the spare right fast.
While cruising along at 80 mph we had as blow-out on the spare. It got shredded before we could get shut down.
By now we were warmed up and jumped out and put back on the original tire in record time and were soon off again.
By now we were faster than most Indy 500 Pit Crews. We may have found a new career.
We got to our destination and set-up a target to throw pellets at. To sight in your guns, you need to have a stable shooting table and sand bags or you just won’t be able to properly sight in your rifles.
The handiest set-up that I’ve found is the Caldwell Stable Table. It folds up semi compact and is easy to store but is still functional.
We sighted in the rifles I wanted to shoot and had a good time. I have a handful of airgun pistols but only one is accurate enough to hunt with so I didn’t take any pistols, just rifles.
After we got the guns, all sighted in, I said let’s go shoot a few pigeons so we ran to a nearby feedlot.
It’s always hot this time of year so I never have pigeon hunted much past June so I didn’t know what to expect.
I was pleasantly surprised, there were quite a few. I shot pigeons for a couple of hours and then figured we’d better get home.
Before we left though I wanted to clean our birds. I told him how good pigeon poppers are and that we’d burn some steaks and make some poppers on Saturday night.
I’d met with Case knives in January at the SHOT Show and they’d recently sent me one of their new Trapper knives to test.
As a kid I’d used a trapper knife to skin the catch off of my trap line and was interested to see how that design would work on breasting out birds. It worked fine. I think any smaller blade knife would work for breasting out birds.
On pigeons and doves, I just breast them out. They make awesome poppers. Since a dove breast is smaller, I’ll just slice the breast in half but on pigeons I’ll cut each breast into 3-4 slices. To prepare the poppers is easy.
Place the sliced breast in a bowl and marinate. I’m sure that there is a perfect marinade but I just use whatever.
I like any of the vinegarrete dressings or this time I used soy sauce and Worcestershire
Sauce. Marinate 4-24 hours.
Then slice jalapeños and onions or green peppers. Lay a slice of jalapeño, onion and pigeon on a half slice of bacon and roll it up and pin it together with toothpicks.
Yes, you can cook them in a black skillet or in the oven but they are 10x’s better on your smoker. I cooked mine on my Camp Chef pellet grill at 350. When the bacon is done, you’re good to go.
Cream cheese in them is also great. This will work on any of your game birds.
What great appetizers.
Tom Claycomb is a hunting enthusiast and writes a bi-monthly column for Great Basin Sun.