Firebird Reactive Targets, Ltd., is headquartered in the United Kingdom − a Country that has sadly turned into an example of how thirty-something years of draconian gun control laws killed shooting sports and had little effect on society other than scapegoating thousands of honest citizens for the crimes of a handful of madmen and leaving them defenseless at the mercy of ruthless felons, not to mention the imposed decline of the once flourishing British gun industry. And nonetheless, Great Britain still holds a number of brave shooters who defied the Mass-Media and politically-dictated general bias, refusing to yield to political correctness and continuing to legally practice their shooting sports with what little guns were left after the mass bans and confiscations, or forced buybacks, of the 1980s and 1990s.
The bulk of shooting sports in the UK nowadays consists in clay shooting, being conventional and sporting shotguns the "easiest" firearms to obtain a license for in Great Britain. With hindsight, it's just normal for the product we're talking about today to have been developed for said purposes. First of all, clay shooting can be sometimes boring − we don't wish to upset or offend our clay shooters friends, but imagine if that's the only gun sport you can ever practice? − and anything that may spice it up a little bit can only be welcome. On the other side, we all know how hard it has been for the industry to provide the world of competitive − sometimes Olympic − clay shooting with truly reliable high-visibility clays that would provide a 100% certain, positive confirmation of being hit, that would be useful both in training and in competition and would remain highly visible even when shooting against a cloudy sky or with otherwise unpleasant weather conditions.
Well, Firebird Reactive targets might have got it totally right, with its Shooting Star.
The "Shooting Star" is a 65mm disc-shaped target designed as an exciting enhancement to clay pigeon shooting. It is basically a pyrotechnic device, and it will ignite upon impact from a high-velocity projectile − such as a shotgun pellet − in order to reflect a direct hit producing a pyrotechnic reaction. The reaction is effective and exciting, resulting in an explosion of white smoke, bright flash and a fairly loud bang. It has a very high tack double sided tape attached to the back making it very straight forward and very quick to attach to a standard clay. One of its key design features is that it is shallow enough to allow clays to stack in an automatic trap thrower as they would normally, so that it may be used on shooting ranges for training and competition alike. It is most effective when shot as a driven or crossing bird, as the "Shooting Star" Target will only ignite if you actually hit it.
The Firebird "Shooting Star" targets are sold in 10-pieces boxes for UK£19.95 (US$30) in the United Kingdom. Edgar Brothers is the sole authorized source for the "Shooting Star" targets. Apart from this, the Firebird Reactive Targets company also manufactures other pyrotechnic/exploding targets, such as the "Sniperfire" 40mm and 65mm targets for handguns and shotguns, "Airflash" and "Airflash Quiet" for high-power airguns (the latter producing no loud explosion noise when hit, for indoors or backyard practice), "Airflight" targets for archery, and a specially designed variant for Airsoft.