First Time Doggin This Year

Ernie Bishop

First doggin trip of the year. I primarily spotted for Glenn and Dennis. Denny was using his new 6.5 Creed XP. Concerned about making kills at any distance, a little alone further distance, were soon allayed. Glenn was using a 243 Win rifle. It had been approximately 20 years since he had gone prairie dog shooting. Both Glenn and Denny ended up shooting my 22 creed XP at ranges from 200-350 yards or so.   Denny with a couple of dogs, just shy of 500 yards.  Pretty good for a newbie!

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Denny hit a dog in the back leg somewhere around 958 to 980 yards with his 6.5 Creed, but the little critter wandered off and went into a hole. And another dog at about the same distance one of the shots was so close to the top of his back, you have to wonder if the bullet didn’t make a reverse mohawk. It was fun to see him have such good success. His first shot with my 22 Creed, he got a double at 333 yards. I shot my 22 Creed too at the very end of the day (love this XP) a little bit and cleaned up on quite a few dogs. A good first outing. Denny wanted me to shoot his 6.5 Creed, and after a few shots I killed a dog in the 580 yard range. Nice shooting XP!  After Denny left it was just Glenn and I, and one of his shots was at 17 yards.  I said, “Well that will be the shortest shot of the day,” only to be proved wrong about 20 minutes or so later.  I also had what I believe is my shortest pd kill ever...14 yards! 22 Creed vaporized it.

 

Below are Denny’s thoughts about the day.  This was his true first time to do any kind of field shooting with a XP-100.

“It continues to amaze me how much of a head game distance shooting or even just hand gun shooting (new to me) is.

Right out of the gate I nailed my first dog, exploded the second one, then remembered scoping myself. After this occurred, I went what seemed like an endless eternity of flinching and bad shooting. After a while longer I started to relax and enjoy it more and found my rhythm. I then hit my 2 distance dogs not quite 2/2 though.

When we went to the second stand, I felt like I was on fire getting several dogs (200-250yards) in a short period of time. At this time, I started looking at a few dogs in the 940-980 range. Which I always thought was impossible for me as a shooter. After a little bit of wind and elevation adjustment I got dialed in and was told the dog I shot at was limping away, a hit but not a kill. This was so exciting. A few shots later Glen and Ernie started to do a hoop and holler saying I just gave a dog a 147gr haircut, and this was the last shot out of my creed.

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But before leaving for a wedding rehearsal I needed to attend I asked Ernie to shoot his 22creed. First shot I pulled my first ever double (333 yards) then in peer excitement I called out another dog and Glenn was ready on the spot. And man did that “rock dog” explode to pieces (Around 340 yards).

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It was very exciting to see what you're capable of doing when you get out of your own head, and trust what a mentor is teaching. As excited as I was about my own shooting, I still have to give props to Glenn for shot of the day. With his 243 he flipped a dog approximately 5 feet in the air and landed about 8 feet from where he stood.

 

All in all, a fantastic day spent with great people.”

ojr

Sounds great I wish we had that here.

JerryBobCo

All I can say is WOW!  You guys are way out of my league.

Great shooting!

Linefinder

Ernie,

Reminds me of two shots in particular....

I once whacked an old mature dog with my 6mm Rem at 80 yards (75 grain Vmax at 3700 fps), that landed a tape measured 21 feet behind the mound he'd been sitting on. I know he didn't hoof it there, because upon trigger break he launched vertically straight out of the FOV of my scope.

Another time several of us were having a heckuva day, ( I later estimated we accounted for around 1200 that day alone) and SixGun was sitting 25-30 feet to my left. I'd just popped one and had settled back into the scope looking for another target when a pdog comes streaking thru my FOV from low left to high right at about a 30 degree angle. SixGun had thumped him with his 22-250 and a sight to behold, it was. While we didn't measure the distance, I think that dog got at least a 40-50 foot head start toward wherever he was headed.

Mike

Ernie Bishop

JerryBobCo said:

All I can say is WOW!  You guys are way out of my league.

Great shooting!

Make it out this way and you would accomplish the same kind of things

Ernie Bishop

Linefinder said:

Ernie,

Reminds me of two shots in particular....

I once whacked an old mature dog with my 6mm Rem at 80 yards (75 grain Vmax at 3700 fps), that landed a tape measured 21 feet behind the mound he'd been sitting on. I know he didn't hoof it there, because upon trigger break he launched vertically straight out of the FOV of my scope.

Another time several of us were having a heckuva day, ( I later estimated we accounted for around 1200 that day alone) and SixGun was sitting 25-30 feet to my left. I'd just popped one and had settled back into the scope looking for another target when a pdog comes streaking thru my FOV from low left to high right at about a 30 degree angle. SixGun had thumped him with his 22-250 and a sight to behold, it was. While we didn't measure the distance, I think that dog got at least a 40-50 foot head start toward wherever he was headed.

Mike

Impressive!

Six-Gun

That day with Linefinder was one to remember.  To this day, I've never seen a pdog go into orbit like that.

Ernie, what your buddy described really brought me back to my first ever pdog hunt.  You see these tiny targets at distance and simply think it impossible to hit them that far out...until you do.

Ernie Bishop

It is really cool to watch someone break out of their own self-imposed box, and accomplish things they thought were not possible.

Spk

I'd like to think even I could've made that 14 yard shot...

On second thought, the offset would've probably trip me up.

Ernie Bishop

Spk said:

I'd like to think even I could've made that 14 yard shot...

On second thought, the offset would've probably trip me up.

I had to literally remind myself of it.

JerryBobCo

Spk said:

I'd like to think even I could've made that 14 yard shot...

On second thought, the offset would've probably trip me up.

That's funny.  I watched a guy knock the top of a prairie dog's head off at a laser ranged 794  yards, followed by a miss at 15-20 yards.  He blamed on his scope setting, but I think he got a case of buck fever with the critter being so close.

Linefinder

Jerry,

That wasn't the worst one. One time, Scootertrash and I decided to change locations. As we went through the gate, it turned out we were in the middle of a very small dog town. 

Short story even shorter, it was over really quick. I'd fired 8 shots in a bit over a minute, with the longest one being 80 yards....most considerably closer. I didn't cut a single hair....and we'd been thumping dogs at 500-600 yards all morning.

Mike

Ernie Bishop

Linefinder said:

Jerry,

That wasn't the worst one. One time, Scootertrash and I decided to change locations. As we went through the gate, it turned out we were in the middle of a very small dog town. 

Short story even shorter, it was over really quick. I'd fired 8 shots in a bit over a minute, with the longest one being 80 yards....most considerably closer. I didn't cut a single hair....and we'd been thumping dogs at 500-600 yards all morning.

Mike

That’s about the way it works sometimes.  
Thanks for sharing.  

Linefinder

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but I recalled another incident some may find amusing. (I had a lot of amusing incidents over the course of some 50K pdogs....)

One day, while shooting by myself,  there was a pdog in a hole about 15 ' from the end of my bench. He never showed himself, but squeaked and chirped at me all day.  After several hours of his incessant complaining, I'd had enough.

I walked over to his hole, stuck the barrel of my muzzle-braked .223 down it and lit one off, thinking if it didn't kill him at least it might shut him up.

I never heard him again, so that part of my plan worked. But, about 10 minutes later I happened to notice (observant fellow that I am), smoke issuing from the 4 mounds nearest my bench.

Here I am....in the middle of 5000 acres of tinder-dry prairie grass.....with a Ram 1500 half full of fuel parked in the middle of it with an inter-connected series of Cong-like tunnels seemingly blazing just below the surface.

First thing to go was my half-empty coffee Thermos. Next, 4 bottles of water. Then 3 cans of non-alcoholic beer.  Final Protective Fire was my bladder, which unfortunately, contained very little ammo. But my efforts seemed to have worked.

It was getting close to dusk, so I decided to wait until dark to see if there was any afterglow. My thinking was that if I had to tell the kind rancher that I'd burned up her pasture and killed her cows I'd just as soon die alongside them. Luckily, it didn't come to that.

The only instruction she gave  to me when she gave me permission to shoot her property was to be careful of my catalytic converter. "They can start fires in dry grass, you know".

Dear Lord......if she only knew.

Mike

Six-Gun

So, it’s muzzlebrakes - and not catalytic converters - that will end the west.

Linefinder

Six-Gun said:

So, it’s muzzlebrakes - and not catalytic converters - that will end the west.

Seemed likely that day.

Mike

Linefinder

I guess I'm in the mood to reminisce..........

Dan Johnson and I always got along well, but we had extremely different views on 2 things. He often opined that shooting a .223 Rem at pdogs beyond ~350 yards was, at best, irresponsible, and (unstated) possibly immoral. My personal experience was it was perfectly adequate to 650 or so. Beyond that a 6mm of some flavor might be a better choice. But to validate my point, one morning using a highly tweaked Win 70 in .223 Rem I killed 4 stone cold dead with 5 shots at 710-725 yards. That evening I emailed him those results, ending with.."Sleep tight, darling".  I was feeling pretty smug, though I was somewhat embittered that he never responded to that email.

Shortly thereafter he authored an article, subsequently published by G&A, that he gave me advance warning...."might irritate a few pdog shooters".  The gist was that in his experience, pdogging resulted in a lot of wounded pdogs flopping around on the ground like a bunch of eviscerated rodeo clowns.

In my experience, this wasn't true. Any weight of VMax landing at anything approaching 2K fps on any part of a pdog pretty much immediately reduced his body weight to mostly air. Scootertrash summed it up best with his response of, "You need to hang out with a better class of shooters".

Which is the long way of getting where I'm at....Bad shots happen. The more you fire, the fewer they actually are, but they will occasionally happen. Benchrest competition proves this....it's not your good shots that cause you to win. It's your bad shots that make you lose.

Rapier and I were punching pdogs one day.  It had been pretty successful, and by late afternoon a few hundred were shining belly-up in the afternoon sun. Then I winged one...bad shot. Okay, it happens. It managed to drag itself back down the mound before I could chamber another round.

A few minutes later I heard Rapier say,  "Hey, we've got company".

I was surprised the rancher would be out here, but it wasn't him.  It was an orange cat. In the absolute middle of nowhere. I mean nowhere. If you looked west you could sort of see Pikes Peak 120 miles away, but that was about all.

This cat walked across a few hundred perfectly dead pdogs,  pushed its overly large butt down the exact mound my bad shot had crawled into, and emerged a half minute later with a slightly live pdog in its mouth.

And walked toward the horizon. Which was a long, long way away.

I have no idea where that cat came from. I have no idea where he went. But, he carried that pdog farther than I could see through a Leupold 20X scope.

Sometimes misses bring some long memories.

Mike

Ernie Bishop

The brake story is precious.

So the moral of the last one is, There is even purpose for wounded pd...Makes all the other predators happier???

Linefinder

Damn, Ernie........

You can't use words like "precious" on a gun-board.

"Stupid" is more fitting and much more acceptable.

Mike

CHIRO1989

It's all about context......

JerryBobCo

Mike, your story about Dan gives rise to a few old memories of mine.  Like you, I liked and respected Dan, but he and I had our occasional disagreement.  I remember an article he wrote about shooting prairie dogs.  In the article, he stated how he would occasionally ask other shooters to take a break while he made rounds and dispatched all wounded critters.  He may be the only person to ever have done that.

minnesotashooter

Our longest confirmed kill, two weeks ago,  was 609 yards with .223 out of a Daniel Defense AR15 with a 10X SWFA scope. That’s a long fricken shot 

Linefinder

That's a waay long freaking shot with a 10X. I doubt I could even see a 600 yard dog at 10X, forget hitting it. I killed a whitetail at 389 with a 12X and he appeared small as a field mouse.

Congrats. Mighty fine shooting, pard.

Mike

Linefinder

Jerry,

That's the same article I was talking about.

He warned me a couple months in advance that a few of us weren't going to like it. He was sure right about that.

Mike