Improve Your Hunting Rifle Accuracy With These 6 Marksmanship Aids

July 30, 2022, 02:01:06 AM

Improve Your Hunting Rifle Accuracy With These 6 Marksmanship Aids

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The use of marksmanship aids like bipods, tripods, and shooting bags can vastly improve a hunter's accuracy in the field. Bill Buckley

These items are the best pieces of gear to improve your hunting rifle accuracy in the field.

The post Improve Your Hunting Rifle Accuracy With These 6 Marksmanship Aids appeared first on Outdoor Life.

The use of marksmanship aids like bipods, tripods, and shooting bags can vastly improve a hunter's accuracy in the field. Bill Buckley

Shooting off a bench is great for checking your rifle’s zero and getting a handle on its precision, but it has nothing to do with hunting rifle accuracy and making accurate shots on game in the field. After all, there are no cement benches in the woods. Whether you’re still-hunting through timber, stalking along a river bottom, sitting in a treestand over an ag field, glassing an alpine meadow, or perched high on a mountain ridgeline, you’re going to shoot better if you have some kind of aid that you know how to use. Here are six of the best field-expedient shooting aids you can use. I’ve relied on all of these over the years to make cleaner, more ethical shots on game.

hunting rifle accuracy with bipod — The author steadying his shot with a bipod and shooting bag. *Bill Buckley*

Shooting Bag: The Best Rifle Accuracy Aid

A properly constructed shooting bag with lightweight fill is the most useful of all marksmanship aids. If I were allowed only one extra support, this would be it. Old-school sandbags are nothing new, and it wasn’t unco*mon for shooters to make their own squeeze bags from socks filled with rice or plastic beads. But those earlier iterations lacked the capabilities of today’s bags. Don’t confuse the two.

There are several good models to choose from, but my favorites are the waxed cotton Game Changers from Armageddon Gear. When filled with a premium lightweight fill, like Git-Lite, these bags beco*e truly remarkable tools.

How to Shoot Off a Bag

You can employ the bags any number of ways, but when shooting off rocks, stumps, branches or other surfaces they work best when you lay them lengthwise under the stock of your rifle in front of the triggerguard. That position maximizes the contact between the stock and bag, improving stability, and positions the rifle at its natural balance point.

With a bit of downward pressure on the scope with your non-shooting hand, the rifle can beco*e incredibly steady. I use this technique in co*petition and in the field.

Why is this specific co*bination of bag material—waxed cotton—and fill—Git-Lite—preferable to homemade solutions? The waxed cotton grips the stock and the shooting surface better than Cordura and other materials, which tend to be slippery. And the fill, unlike beads you might find in a hobby store, takes a set when put under pressure so that it behaves like sand, but at a fraction of the weight. Regular plastic beads will slip and slosh around and aren’t nearly as capable. It’s little surprise that every USSOco* unit has taken to using these bags in the field.

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Bipod: The Essential Hunting Rifle Accuracy Accessory

The biggest tradeoff with bipods is between size and portability. Shorter legs do better at keeping a rifle’s weight from skyrocketing and prevent its balance from beco*ing too muzzle-heavy, but they’re limited in terms of elevating a barrel above the ground. Longer legs can position the bore above vegetation for a clear shot but can make carrying and handling the rifle awkward. There is also a direct correlation between the ability of a bipod to create a steady shot under a variety of circumstances and the bipod’s weight. The most stable bipods tend to be the heaviest.

This is to say there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. The specific type of bipod that will work best for you depends on the terrain you hunt and the distance you intend to shoot. For rifles with a swivel stud on the fore-end, the Harris bipod is still tough to beat. They are fairly light, durable and don’t cost a pile of money. There are cheaper Harris knock-offs available, but I’ve found many of them to be poorly constructed. Get a model that swivels so you can get level on uneven terrain. Legs that extend from 9 to 13 inches are the most co*mon and are a good choice if you can shoot off rocks or otherwise get above grass and brush. Otherwise, look at the models that have legs that go from 12 to 25 inches, which are suitable for taking sitting shots.

If your rifle has a section of Picatinny rail on the fore-end you have a lot of other options to explore. MDT makes some excellent (and expensive) bipods for co*petitive rifle shooters but recently has introduce the GRND-POD, which incorporates many design elements of their flagship bipods at a more affordable price. The legs quickly adapt to a variety of terrain and the bipod has 40 degrees of cant on tap to level the scope’s crosshairs.

Another great hunting bipod is the Atlas V8 series from B&T Industries. This is another premium product with easy-to-adjust legs that will work on uneven ground while providing excellent stability.

Some bipods co*e with the ability to pivot for shots on moving targets. Avoid these. Even shooters who deal with moving targets in co*petition and elsewhere don’t care for this feature. You don’t really need it, the pivot system adds weight, and under recoil the legs can pivot out of position decreasing accuracy.

How to Shoot with a Bipod

When it co*es to shooting with a bipod, the best technique is to get square behind the rifle so that your shoulders make a “T” with respect to the rifle. Apply a bit of forward pressure on the recoil pad to take up slack in the bipod’s legs. You’ll hear this referred to as loading the bipod. The amount of pressure to exert can vary, but a good guideline is to picture the force it would take to pin a hardcover book between your recoil pad and shoulder without having the book slip to the ground.

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