To bad for the Prairie dogs

I finally got the granddaughter out to shoot here big game rifle. She is 12 and it's here first season. She's been shooting some from age 3 but never AT any thing other that paper with a deer rifle. She is going to use her mom's ,the one I've been using for the last three years, Savage 243. It's a very good shooting machine,and we've tuned the shells to "In the same Hole" shooting. BUT it's a fairly light gun and some very hot loads. She will be hunting with 75 gr speer moving "FAST" but for now we loaded some "Trail boss" 85 gr speer, loads going like 1800 fps.They are VERY low recoil and not nearly as loud.I have it "O'ed" at 100 yards and it will put them in a clover leaf group. We , a bud and myself went out to one of our BIG prairie dog town that Never gets shot, so they where running every place and don't all go down there holes when you shoot. I'm talking many thousands of dogs in a town that over two miles long and a half mile wide. We start out shooting up on the brake and snipe the edge dogs then we work our way down as we kill them all off. We shot from 8:00 to noon , we could shoot as fast and as hard as a person would want, in fact you have to stop once and a wail to cool the guns. A perfect training mission for the girl. She had so many targets to shoot at it was hard for her to pick one. She would put the gun up on the sticks look through the scope and find one and shoot at it and where ever it came back down on the sticks there was a different dog in her sights. There was a 15 to 20 mile cross wind so we did do a lot of "Shootin" ,not as much killing. Her count was 40 shots-ten dead dogs, she shot my 22/250 some too and got 1 or two but didn't like the noise or recoil. I shot 55 shells and lost count at 20 prairie dogs. The bud was over the next ridge and was WAY more serous, and ripped off 90+ shots in the four hours and kept a good tally which was 40 confirmed dead... All in all we had a great time and the weather was very nice, the walk back was harder. Against the wind UP the brake and around 3/4  mile but the water and lunch was very enjoyable. We will do it several more times before hunting season, then I'll re sight in the hunting loads and not tell here, the one she will shoot at here first deer , she will never notice the differance... 

 

Edited by d4570

Woo Hoo.

Looks like a great day with your new hunting buddy. I hope she gets a bigger deer than all of us this year. Looks like she will be ready.

Way to go.

Wing master

good job there with the lite loads for summer "training" for the granddaughter.......pics are always nice....she should be ready by fall for the big buck.....is gramps ready to gut and drag??????????