Blowgun Hunting | Beginner’s Guide

What Is a Blowgun?

A Blowgun is about as basic of a weapon as you can imagine, it’s a tube that you shoot darts through with the help of your exhalation. A Blowgun is often called a blowpipe or blow tube. 

How hard and how far you can shoot all depend on your respiratory muscles and your technique when firing. And it’s ridiculous amounts of fun as shooting a Blowgun is quiet so you feel like an assassin compared to when you hunt with your normal rifle.

I think no one has missed Tim Wells videos on YouTube where he goes hunting everything from a rabbit to a wild hog with a blowgun. I saw his videos a few years ago and that’s when I started playing around with blowguns – and I never regretted it as it’s so much fun!

How does a Blowgun work?

This question is in reality best answered with a video so I’ll put one right after this where it shows you exactly how to work a Blowgun. But all you have to do is to put a dart inside your tube and blow into the tube. You need to make sure that there’s no air passing on the outside of the dart in the tube, hence why the darts have a cone in one end. 

A practiced blowgun specialist can fire darts that fly as fast as 350 feet per second. Custom mouthpieces that collect the air pressure makes this possible, but a tremendous amount of work is still required to get such enormous speed.

What are the benefits of hunting with a Blowgun?

Ok, we’re gonna overlook the fact that it’s just extremely fun for a while and list actual advantages to using a Blowgun when hunting:

1. Total silence, no need for hearing protection and you can hear everything.
2. It might sound corny but you feel like you’re one with history when hunting with a blowgun. You’re keeping an old tradition alive.
3. You will usually get more than one chance to kill the prey you’re hunting as the first dart normally doesn’t spook them if it’s a miss.
4. You don’t need to prepare anything and there’s no technology involved, you can just pick up your blowgun and get started, no need for charging batteries or cleaning pipes before going hunting. I love the simplicity of blowgun hunting.
5. It’s so cheap, compared to all other kinds of hunting I do this is the cheapest one. Although I have to admit it I’m really good at making all my hobbies very expensive, but it’s very hard to make hunting with a blowgun expensive.

What are the downsides to hunting with a Blowgun?

There are quite a few downsides if we compare it to normal hunting with a rifle or a bow:

1. The Range – You really can’t shoot very far with any kind of accuracy unless you have the lungs of a marathon runner. I myself wouldn’t shoot farther than 20 yards which is usually perfectly fine for the hunting I do.
2. It’s easy to miss, these darts have no weight and not even close to the punching power of an arrow or a bullet, so you need to keep in mind that the smallest leaf or wind will immediately affect the dart.
3. It’s unreliable – I mean unreliable in the sense that it requires your own performance to be good and that you perform the same kind of exhale for every shot in order to get consistency. So in reality it’s reliable if you have practiced enough, which I obviously haven’t.

How To Aim a Blowgun?

You hold the blowgun with both your hands and have both eyes open when firing. You make one quick and steady blow in the tube and basically hope that you’re hand-eye coordination is on point. 

I can’t really describe it better than that, it’s an art form that requires a ton of practice to perfect as it is so simple yet there are so many factors that affect the end result. I will include a movie here for you to look at that hopefully explains this better than what i’m doing right now.

What Are The Best Blowguns?

We have made this list taking into account:

• User reviews
• Our own experience
• Bang for the buck

Best Blowgun For Beginners

Venom Blowguns Made in USA 36″ is a 36-inch Velocity Blowgun, Aluminum .40 caliber blowgun with tactical peep sight. Made from lightweight aircraft quality seamless tubing. Includes foam grip, mouth and muzzle guard, high-quality finish. Includes dart quivers with 12 darts and 8 super stun darts, cone color may vary.

This is a really nice starter blowgun as it’s easy to use and you get everything you need with the purchase. Also the price is quite reasonable for the quality of the blowgun you get. You can for sure hunt small game like quails and other birds with this blowgun.

Here is a link to the cheapest one right now on Amazon.

Best Blowgun Under 30 dollar

Cold Steel Professional .625 4 ft. Blowgun has an effective range out to 20 yards, and, with practice a skilled user can hit a two-inch circle at amazing distances and deliver a heavyweight dart capable of penetrating a half-inch sheet of plywood! It is delivered with a mouthpiece, rubber ferrule, dart quiver, and 36 darts (15 Bamboo Darts, 15 Mini Broadhead Darts, and 6 Stun Darts).

This is a budget Blowgun with everything you need, I bought this for my friend who wanted to try out Blowgunning and I was really surprised on how good the quality felt and how much Blowgun you get for your money. Here is the link to the cheapest one on Amazon right now.

Best Overall Blowgun

This is the Blowgun of Blowgun’s: Cold Steel Twopiece Blowgun and in my opinion the only blowgun to match the Slockmaster from Tim Wells but this one is 20 USD cheaper than his Slockmaster. Although I’m a huge fan of Tim Wells and love his blowgun movies I do like my 20 dollars as well.

The Cold Steel Twopiece Blowgun features a large caliber .625 Magnum barrel that is capable of shooting darts that are faster and heavier than other models on the market. Comes with a mouthpiece, rubber ferrule, dart quiver and 36 darts (15 bamboo darts, 15 Mini broadhead darts, and 6 stun darts).

With this blowgun you can easily shoot rabbits, squirrels, turkeys, etc. It’s actually quite amazing the force you can inflict with this blowgun once you get some practice in using it. I highly recommend you check it out here on Amazon.

Cold steel has made a lot of really sweet Blowguns and unless you want to go for the big one you really ought to check out the little brother which is called Cold Steel Big Bore and is in reality almost as good as the Twopiecer.

Blowgun Accessories

Best Blowgun Darts

Cold Steel Broadhead Darts is by far our favorite darts that we keep using over and over. Really sturdy and a great overall blowgun dart. Nothing too fancy but it does the job really well.

We have tried so many different types of blowgun darts over the years but either they are too soft so they bend after the first shot, or the quality of the cone is horrible so air will press out on the sides of the tube. Cold Steel Broadhead Darts has for us been really consistent in their quality so I would highly recommend you go and get yours on Amazon. Here is the cheapest right now.

What Animals Can You Hunt With A Blowgun?

You have probably seen Tim Wells “slog” everything from a wild boar to different fish but I would say for the rest of us the most common game for Blowguns are:

• Doves
• Ducks
• Pheasants
• Squirrels
• Rats (it’s very good practice)
• All kinds of birds
• Coons
• Fish
• Rabbits

Blowgun Fishing

Its extremely fun to blowgun fish and it’s very hard, atleast when you get started. I’m not sure if Tim Wells was the guy who invented it but i’m very certain that he was the guy who made it famous.

He has a few movies where he goes over the procedure and what you need to get started. But basically you attach a normal fishing reel to your blowgun and the line to one of your darts. It’s important to have darts that stay inside the fish once you hit. The real challenge is actually to wheel the fish in and not just to hit it.

I suggest you take a look at a few of Tim Wells videos to get the hang of it.

How to make a blowgun?

I think this is the most-watched movie on YouTube in regards to Blowguns, it’s a guy who makes a laser-assisted blowgun for under 3 bucks with the help of a few PVC-pipes. Really suggest you have a look if you’re interested in making your own Blowgun with things you might have at home or that you can buy for almost nothing at the local hardware store.

How to make poison darts for blowgun?

We never use poison on darts as it’s really not a humane way of killing animals, but traditionally it was very common to dip your darts and also arrows into poison. It was often used by tribes in the amazon. The strategy was quite often to shoot a monkey with a dart with poison and wait until the poison took effect and the monkey would fall down.

I have never tried it myself and I really wouldn’t if I were you either but there are some guides on Youtube if you are interested.

Conclusion

This is one of those things that is too much fun not to try! It’s like hunting with a slingshot. It’s perfect to get your kids started hunting with a blowgun and then continue to archery before going for shotguns and rifles. Happy hunting my friend!