Deer are for Wimps

Every week, I find new justification for my war on squirrels.

I put a blind in my yard. I sit in it and shoot [at] squirrels. I leave it set up so I don’t have to go through the hassle of taking it down and setting it up all the time. I have been leaving one of my precious plastic red Adirondack chairs in it.

This area was soaked with rain last week, so I couldn’t shoot. Yesterday I went out to resume my campaign of rodent “harvesting,” and when I looked at my chair, I saw rodent poop, bits of acorn, shreds of red plastic, and chew marks.

That tears it. You can slash my tires, toilet-paper my trees, short-sheet my bed, and make me watch Ellen, but you do NOT mess with my Adirondack chairs.

I take back what I said about Ellen. That was extreme.

One good thing about the chair damage is that it assures that I am on solid legal ground, shooting nuisance squirrels out of season. They are damaging my property, and that’s all I need to prove.

I got myself some special squirrel ammunition. It’s called CCI Quiet. The version I bought has bullets that fly into three pieces after hitting a squirrel. The word CCI uses to describe it is “segmented.” The package advertises a low speed of 710 fps, which is about like an air rifle. You can shoot it without ear plugs.

Yesterday I set up some targets to sight my rifle in for it.

I have neat targets, by the way. I think I’ve solved my expensive-target problem. Birchwood-Casey sells 2″ Shoot-N-See bullseye stickers. You get 9 to a sheet.

This is a great product. Most of the time, my shots stay in a 2″ circle, so why am I paying for 5.5″ and 8″ targets? It’s stupid. Now I only pay for the paper I use.

As background, let me say that I’ve been having a discussion on a shooting forum. I withdrew because the thread turned into a loop. I say A, and another person responds with B, thinking he has proven me wrong. I respond with C, proving him wrong. His response: B. I don’t want to read B 300 times.

I was trying to find out whether experienced squirrel hunters thought it was humane to try to shoot squirrels in the head. I shot one in the head three times and still had to stamp on its skull with my boot in order to kill it, so I was highly suspicious of people’s claims that they always went for head shots.

Given their stupidity, squirrels have surprisingly large brains. They are about an inch long. Nonetheless, they are not easy to hit with a .22 unless you prepare and do things right. As I found out, you can hit a squirrel in the head and not even knock him out.

Typically, squirrels get shot with .22 rounds at distances of 50-100 feet. Hitting a 1″ target with a .17 HMR at 100 feet is very easy. A .22 is another story. They’re not very accurate. To be able to hit a 1″ squirrel brain at realistic hunting distances with a .22, you should be able to hit a 1/2″ target reliably when you’re seated and using a rest. It’s harder to shoot accurately while hunting. If you can hit a 1″ target over and over from 100 feet with a typical .22, under suboptimal conditions, you need to join a circus, because you’re a phenomenal shot.

I set my targets up yesterday to see what I could do. I found that the rifle was pretty accurate at around 60 feet. Hitting a squirrel brain was not out of the question. Then I shot at a squirrel at 100 feet, using a chart to allow for bullet drop. He did a backflip, and I figured he was toast. He landed behind a tree where I couldn’t see him. Later, when I went to check, I found no squirrel and no blood. I had missed.

I set the targets up at around 90 feet, and I found that I shot 2″ groups. That’s not good enough for squirrel head shots at 100 feet. It’s not even good enough for body shots.

I looked around on Youtube, and I learned that my results were not bad. I saw a video of some guy shooting the same ammunition from a bolt action .22 (more accurate than my semiauto) with a rest, and his groups were huge, too.

He didn’t shoot ridiculous, misleading three-shot groups. He shot 10-shot groups which actually mean something. Everyone occasionally puts three consecutive rounds into a very small area. It’s meaningless unless they can do it consistently. Shooters don’t talk about this, because 10-shot groups would turn a lot of 1-MOA shooters into 3-MOA shooters.

In the video, the shooter is getting 12 MOA. That’s 2″ at 25 yards. Fine for shooting coons by your trash cans or for shooting squirrels 10 yards off. Useless for my squirrels.

Here’s a shot of his target.

The lines are 1″ apart. There is no way this guy could hit a squirrel brain at 25 yards. If you stapled the squirrel to his target, which is an unusual occurrence in a hunting situation, almost none of his shots would hit the brain.

His aim point was the bottom of the black bar. Assuming he corrected the scope, he would still be putting most shots around the edge of a big circle centered at the point of aim. And predicting the point of impact would be hard at different ranges. At 10 yards, he was pretty much dead nuts on the center of the bullseye, but at 25, he was not only high, but off to the left. I wouldn’t be able to predict that. If I moved up or back, I would compensate for elevation, but I wouldn’t expect big changes in windage.

I’m assuming this guy isn’t a horrible shot. I think that’s true, because his results seem typical.

If I can’t do it, and the guy with the bolt action .22 can’t do it with a bench and rest (really a clamp–a Caldwell Matrix), how are all these other guys doing it while walking around in the woods?

There are two answers.

1. Most of them aren’t doing it. They lie like crazy.

2. The ones who are doing it are using better ammunition. And still lying a little.

You say you only shoot squirrels in the head. Okay. How many shots did you take last year? How many produced dead squirrels with ruptured brains? How many wounded squirrels did you have to chase? How many missed entirely?

How about a simpler set of questions? How many rounds did you shoot? How many squirrels did you bring home?

I think my gun, with CCI Quiet segmented ammunition, is only good for 60 feet. I think it’s good for 100 feet with better ammunition, provided I shoot at the upper body, not the head.

People told me some nutty things. One guy said that if I took body shots, I had to shoot for the aorta, not the chest. I had to point out that I can’t see a squirrel’s aorta. Besides, it’s tiny. It’s probably as thick as a pencil lead. If I can’t hit a 1″ brain, how am I supposed to hit a microscopic aorta I can’t see?

He then said I should aim at the aorta in order to get a good chest shot. “Aim small, miss small.” This is a sound shooting principle. It means you find the tiniest point of aim you can and focus on it. If you miss while shooting at a dime, you will probably confine your shots to a smaller area than you would had you been trying to hit an orange. Unfortunately, this only works when you can see what you’re shooting at. It’s dumb to even discuss it when you can’t see your point of aim.

I can find a squirrel aorta on a squirrel anatomy chart. I can sort of guess where it is on a live squirrel, if he looks at the chart and then poses exactly like the squirrel on the paper. Show me a real squirrel in a typical random squirrel position, and I can’t tell where the aorta is.

Incidentally, someone put up a squirrel anatomy diagram, and it was wrong. Having pulled out a few squirrel hearts, know where they are. they are way up high in the chest. On a person, it would be the top of the sternum, below the neck. The diagram showed the heart down near the belly. The aorta comes out of the heart, so if you put the heart in the wrong place, you also misplace the aorta.

I can’t believe I’m dignifying terrible advice with all this discussion.

It was a poor suggestion. That’s my point. If an aorta is a good aim point, a squirrel eye (which is visible) is even better, but a squirrel eye is not a good aim point at 100 feet, for a gun that can’t be trusted above 60.

If you shoot for the chest, you shoot for the center of the chest. That’s the best you can do, and any hit to the chest ought to do the job. If the bullet goes through the chest wall, you have a kill. You’ll shatter the heart, collapse the lungs, break the spine, tear up big blood vessels, ruin the diaphragm, or so something else that will turn the squirrel off.

I’m not sure what I should do. I like the quiet cartridges, because I don’t want to annoy people who live nearby, but I need to kill these miserable squirrels, and I don’t want them to suffer.

Should I take the scope off? If I’m going to shoot at 60 feet or less, a scope may be more trouble than it’s worth. For really close shots, the scope will make the gun shoot an inch or more low.

I have an air rifle which seems very accurate at 85 feet. I believe I can do head shots with it under 50 feet, and chest shots should work farther out. The pellets are light, however, so the stopping power may be lacking compared to a slower, heavier .22 round.

I could get myself some segmented high velocity .22 rounds, which should be more accurate than the quiet jobs. They will be noisier, but this is a farm, so I don’t really need to coddle the neighbors. Maybe I should stop worrying about the noise. It’s possible to spoil neighbors. I don’t want them to feel entitled to tell me what to do.

The .17 HMR will flat get it done, and range is irrelevant. As long as the wind is low, you will hit what you aim at. It’s noisier than a high velocity .22, though.

I no longer care about saving the meat. Pest control is job one, and butchering every squirrel will slow me down. The .17 HMR may open a squirrel up like a book, but I’m planning to throw the carcasses over the fence anyway.

I’ve learned that the word “accurate” means nothing on the Internet. A person will say a pistol shoots accurately, and then you’ll find out he shoots horrible 4″ groups at 7 yards. You have to see targets in order to judge, and you have to see large samples, not three-shot groups.

The .22 is an extremely disappointing gun for small targets. Clarification: to me, a coon’s skull is a big target, and a squirrel’s brain or chest is a small one. Also, people are completely full of it when they describe their accuracy (“My grandkids never miss golf balls at 50 yards”). Look at how serious shooters do using sleds, and then tell me you can hit a soda can, from the shoulder, every time at 100 yards. You’re a big fat liar. Man up and say it. The .22 is not an accurate weapon. Not in the same world where the .17 HMR and .204 Ruger exist.

Maybe your granddaughter hits the golf ball 50% of the time. Maybe you hit the soda can every third shot. Misses count, unfortunately. If you’re not hitting something 90% of the time, you can’t use the word “reliably” or the word “consistently.”

I understand why people say squirrel hunting is challenging. It really is, unless you use a shotgun. Any fool can hit a deer or a hog. They’re gigantic, they hold still, and they generally stay out of trees. Squirrels are small and jumpy. They sit on the ground. They climb a hundred feet up in trees. They’re hard to spot. The only advantage they give hunters is their abundance.

They’re stupid, too. I should admit that. You can shoot a squirrel in a certain spot and then shoot another 5 minutes later. I don’t know if larger animals will stick around like that.

I think I should put up some targets and see how well I can shoot Golden Bullets and Mini-Mags and so on. Then I should stick with whatever is most predictable. I can save the Quiets for the pistol and use it to blast wounded squirrels at close range.

I may get rid of the scope or even switch to the Nylon 66, which has no scope. Lots to think about.

People should respect my opinions. After all, I once put two .204 rounds through the same hole. I’m a 0.3-MOA shooter.