Sporting Clays Technique: How To Deal With Teal

Mark Chesnut

You’re cruising along, enjoying a round of sporting clays and suddenly faced with a target that sends your spirits on a downward spiral. You know that you’re likely to miss, and then start thinking about all the wrong things.

For many shooters, the springing teal is one of the targets most likely to cause such heartache. However, the teal doesn’t have to be your kryptonite if you take the time to learn what the bird does and how to break it consistently.

NSCA Instructor Don Currie likely knows as much about teaching people to break teal as just about anyone else in the country. Here are the strategies he uses for success on how to deal with teal.

Two Types Of Teal

“There are two categories of teal,” Currie said. “And I think there are two different ways to take a teal, depending on which of those categories they fall into. First, there’s the teal that basically is going straight up or nearly straight up, and then coming straight down. In that same category is one that is coming slightly in toward you. The other category of teal is the one that is rising and going away from you.”

Currie said shooters must adjust their thinking depending on which of those types of teal they are about to shoot.

“If you have a teal that’s basically just going up and coming down, which is the most common, or you have one that is coming slightly in—in other words, as the flight of the bird progresses it’s not moving any farther away from you—the most predictable spot to break that target is just after it stalls,” he said.

As Currie explained, however, it’s actually more complicated than that, since most birds aren’t going straight up or coming straight down.

“What a lot of shooters will miss on that particular target is the behavior, or the character, of the target as it comes off the peak,” he said. “You can have a springing teal that’s going up and when it comes down, it’s coming down at about a 5 o’clock direction. And you can have another one, and when it starts to come down, it’s coming down at about a 7 o’clock direction. A lot of folks are just trying to shoot right at it, not understanding that once it hits the peak, it’s not coming straight down, it’s going a little left or a little right.”

Currie said one solution to these problem birds comes long before the shooter ever moves into position and calls for the bird.

“During your pre-shot planning, make sure you understand what the target is doing after it peaks,” he said. “Watch that target go all the way to its peak, then watch it go all the way to the ground.

“And notice the location of the trap. If the target ends up 20 feet to the right of the trap from your perspective, you know that target’s going left to right—it’s not from 12 to 6. It’s going up at about 1 o’clock, and it’s coming down at about 5 o’clock.”

NSCA Instructor Don Currie likely knows as much about teaching people to break teal as just about anyone else in the country. Mark Chesnut Photo

That Other Teal

Currie said the second type of teal is the one that is moving away from the shooter as it rises and falls. Consequently, waiting to shoot it at the apex could result in a very long shot.

“By the time it gets to the top, it’s either out of range or is a little farther than you’d like to be when you try to break a target,” he said. “So, let’s say the trap is at about 20 yards, but the bird is peaking about 60 yards away from you. That type of target really needs to be shot as a swing-through.”

Currie said one way to understand how to shoot this target is to visualize the rising teal moving away from you as a quartering bird that is at 90 degrees. That gives some perspective on how the bird is moving and how to break it.

“Think about a quartering bird where the trap is 30 yards to your right and is quartering at a 45 degree angle in front of you,” he said. “Let’s say you’re going to break it right in front of you. You would normally hold back about a third, let the target come to the gun a little, then just give it a little push through the target and break the target. If you took that same quartering bird and moved it 90 degrees where it’s now the teal we talked about—going straight up but going away from you at about a 45 degree angle—we want to attack it in the same way.”

The Eyes Have It

Setup and where the shooter is looking are both important to breaking both types of teal targets, but even more critical for the longer one, Currie said. For the first type of teal, shooters have plenty of time, so their eyes should be focused about halfway between where the trap is and where the target is going to peak.

“You just make a slow mount and then pull the trigger,” he said. “But your eyes should be at the spot on the target that is in the direction the target is going. In other words, if the target is going straight up and straight down, your eyes should be at the 6 o’clock, because when you pull the trigger that target is on its way down.”

On the longer teal going away from the shooter, Currie keeps his gun in a position that yields a quicker mount.

“For the teal that’s going away from you, I tend to be somewhere between half draw and pre-mount,” he said. “I’d be a little bit out of the gun, but I might be, say, three or four inches off my cheek, because it’s a quick bird.”