Family Squirrel Shoot 2010 Member Steven Hunter
I was able to shoot so much so quickly on this last stand is that there was a small dip in the ground up ahead of me about 50 yards away which allowed me to see into the grass a little better, and I had a very good view of the squirrels. I started off with my .17 Mach 2 and hit every single one of the fi rst 15 squirrels that I shot at, even though I shot up all 15 rounds in about a minute. I then followed that fl urry by going through 100 rounds of .17 HMR and 100 rounds of .17 Mach 2 in the same fi eld. What a great way to start off the hunt! Saturday morning dawned cold with scattered clouds
My dad is concentrating on the squirrels more than the beautiful scenery. Here he is shooting squirrels from his Caldwell Stable Table.
second straight year, we burned up many hundreds of rounds in one weekend. We stayed at the Honker Inn Lodge (a TVHM advertiser) in Northern California because they provide all of our food, shelter, and squirrel access for one daily rate. We got to the lodge just before 2:00 o’clock on Friday
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afternoon, dropped off our personal gear, and headed out to the squirrel pastures. There were a number of squirrels in the pasture, but we had to avoid shooting toward an irrigation system on one side and some buildings on the other side. That left us about a 45° angle of safe shooting, which really limited the number of shots we could take. We shot at this fi rst spot for about an hour and then
moved farther down the fi eld where we had a clearer fi eld of fi re. After we’d been shooting there for about an hour, another member of our party showed up. He spotted my truck as he was driving down the main road. Well, actually it’s the only road in the area, so he stopped and we chatted about how things were going. Then he headed for the lodge to stow his gear and prepare for the next day’s hunt. Awhile later I moved again. My dad didn’t feel like
moving his Caldwell Stable Table portable shooting bench a second time because we had only an hour or less of shooting time, but I ended up in a place that was really hot. I had a box of ammo for each of two different rifl es in loaded magazines and I went through all of them in a very short period of time. It could not have been more than 10 minutes. Part of the reason
Page 174 July — September 2011
or the last several years, my father and I have gone ground squirrel shooting with some friends. For the
over Goose Lake. The view of Goose Lake from the porch of the lodge was magnifi cent. After a big country breakfast, we went to a fi eld where we had not hunted before. The shooting wasn’t quite so hot that morning but still I shot up a box of .17 Mach 2, a box of .17 HMR, and a box of .17 Mach IV. My .17 Mach IV has a fi xed 15 power Weaver scope that can focus down under 10 yards. I used this feature to shoot a ground squirrel at a measured six paces. The bullet was still going more than 3,500 feet per second when it hit the squirrel. The results were quite dramatic! You really should make certain that you are not shooting into the wind when your target is this close to you. On the other hand, my dad shot a squirrel at a laser
ranged 147 yards with his .17 HMR. This is a really long shot when you consider that we were shooting at Richardson’s ground squirrels, which are about the size of a chipmunk. They make for an awfully small target. In the afternoon I started by shooting a box of .17 HMR,
a box of .17 Mach IV, and a box of .221 Fireball. We moved to a new location about fi ve o’clock and the action started to heat up again. I shot 150 rounds of .17 HMR in the next hour and a half. This makes two evenings in a row where I ended up with really hot shooting. I don’t know whether we are just getting lucky each evening, or the squirrels really start coming out as evening approaches so they can stock up on food for the night. Sunday morning was a beautiful day. It certainly was
the warmest day and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. As we headed out to the fi elds after breakfast, there were squirrels lining the main road. They were lying on the warm asphalt just at the edge of the road. I am not exaggerating when I say that there was a squirrel every foot or two for hundreds of yards. It was a little cool as we started shooting, but the sun
was shining brightly and there was absolutely no wind. The shooting was a little bit slower in this new fi eld because the alfalfa was high enough that the squirrels were not always visible. Instead of setting up my Caldwell Stable Table por- table shooting bench, I tried a little walking around shooting my .17 HMR. It is a lot more diffi cult to shoot a small target offhand than from the bench, but the change was fun. After a little while we moved down the fi eld another 50 yards or so until there were squirrels running all over the
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