150+ Cormorant Day

Yesterday in sunny El Salvador, the Ministry of Environment in cooperation with the Salvadoran Hunters Association organized a pest control expedition to an island in Lago Suchitlan. The mission: kill as many invasive cormorants as possible. There’s about 70k of these non indigenous birds and they do a number on the native species, not to mention the fish in population in the lake. And on the islands that they nest in, the trees are black with birds and everything else is white with bird shit.

It’s basically an airgunner’s dream scenario. There are essentially infinite targets at ranges between 10 and 70 yards. Because the birds are in nesting, they will literally just sit on a branch as their friends an family members are picked off right next to them.

The vulcan in .22 performed nearly flawlessly. I shot it either 275 or 330 times (I lost count of how many refills I did) without any major issue other than a bit of difficulty seating the pellets. Accuracy was exactly what I knew it would be (being my only pcp I also use this gun for field target and bench rest, and have a few medals to attest to its accuracy). My longest kill of the day was a head shot at 60 yards. My second best shot was a two-for-one double headshot at 35 yards on a nesting pair. Although I lost count after the first magazine, I must have dropped at least 150, and perhaps as many as 200 or more.

These are very, very tough birds, so shot placement was of paramount importance. Incredibly, there were several instances in which I landed a solid upper chest or neck shots that didn’t seem to bother the birds at all. In a couple of cases they continued to sit on a branch like nothing happened even as copious amounts of blood poured out of entrance and exit woulds through the upper chest cavity! Pretty impressive given that my gun is producing 32 fpe at the muzzle with the jsb 18s. They invariably dropped after a follow up head shot, of course. But I must admit that at that moment I kind of wished I had picked the .25 (though to be fair another guy with a .25 sumatra reported experiencing similar behavior).

Previously I had done the expedition with my .177 hw97, and was only able to bag 45-50 birds on the day. It was after carrying that big heavy gun around in dense brush and 95 degree heat, and cocking it 100+ times in a row that I decided that I needed a powerful, .22 pcp bullpup for this sort of work. I was particularly pleased with how well the little guy handled in tight spots. Where other guys with bigger guns got held up by the undergrowth, I was able to slip through to find shooting lanes.

I’d post pics but my camera phone suffered an accident.

Anyway, nothing new here. Just another happy Vulcan shooter killing copious amounts of the local unwanted wildlife.