Nick4050
FNG
- Joined
- Aug 16, 2024
- Messages
- 70
I just got home from a family trip to Wyoming, where we snuck in a couple days of prairie dog shooting. We had a great time, with hundreds of dogs shot and plenty of fun "long range" opportunities from 400-600 yards, with my longest confirmed kill at 629.
I pieced a rifle together last minute for the trip; an old Savage 12FV in .223 I hadn't shot in 10 years, an MDT LSS chassis I scored on the classifieds forum, Razor LHT 3-15 I stole off another rifle for the trip, and a Spartan Valhalla bipod for prone work. I got lucky and found an awesome load with a bunch of CFE-223 and 60 grain Nosler BT Varmint bullets I already had, which held .64" for my 12 round test group.
I've done quite a bit of prairie dog shooting in the past, but it was all with .17 HMR's and AR's. Since then I've gotten a lot more serious about rifle shooting and the gear side of things, which made a HUGE difference in success. It was so much more fun shooting an accurate rifle that was dialed in enough to make proper drop/windage adjustments, as opposed to the traditional kentucky windage and "hold a little higher" methods of the past. I also brought along a pair of 16x Sig Zulu stabilized binos, which were a gamechanger for finding dogs and calling misses. They were 100% the best tool we had out there, and whoever was using them was always picking out more dogs than anybody else looking through riflescopes or spotters.
We live in Alaska, so it's quite a ways to travel to shoot these things. I really wish we had something similar to shoot at up here, I can definitely see how such a high volume of spotting, ranging, and live shooting practice would help improve skills that'd cross over into big game hunting. Even stuff as simple as getting familiar with efficient shooter/spotter communication when talking the shooter into finding a target and calling impacts correctly. While driving back to the airport we (jokingly) questioned why anyone would ever want to poison/gas prairie dogs off their land, and considered the logistics on what it'd take to import some home to develop some towns of our own.
Cabela's exclusive Model 12 FV in .223 with an MDT LSS chassis, Vortex Razor LHT 3-15 in PMR rings and bubble level, and a Gen 1 Spartan Valhalla bipod. Side note: Since joining this forum and falling into the scope drop test rabbit hole, I've been turning away from Vortex/leupold scopes and switching my rifles over to Nightforce. I was pleasantly surprised to find that despite the bumpy flight down in a cheap case and two days of constant frantic dialing back and forth, the scope held zero great and the tracking was spot on.
Top group is all 12 test rounds I loaded up for a "confirmation" group after my brief ladder test.
Only ended up having time to get 420 rounds loaded up for the trip. Anything under about 200 yards was shot with .17's, which helped conserve the "precision" ammo.
Unfortunately didn't take many pictures while out shooting, but we did all kinds of positional shooting including off of shooting sticks, fence posts/rails, kneeling, and prone with bipod/rear bag.
I pieced a rifle together last minute for the trip; an old Savage 12FV in .223 I hadn't shot in 10 years, an MDT LSS chassis I scored on the classifieds forum, Razor LHT 3-15 I stole off another rifle for the trip, and a Spartan Valhalla bipod for prone work. I got lucky and found an awesome load with a bunch of CFE-223 and 60 grain Nosler BT Varmint bullets I already had, which held .64" for my 12 round test group.
I've done quite a bit of prairie dog shooting in the past, but it was all with .17 HMR's and AR's. Since then I've gotten a lot more serious about rifle shooting and the gear side of things, which made a HUGE difference in success. It was so much more fun shooting an accurate rifle that was dialed in enough to make proper drop/windage adjustments, as opposed to the traditional kentucky windage and "hold a little higher" methods of the past. I also brought along a pair of 16x Sig Zulu stabilized binos, which were a gamechanger for finding dogs and calling misses. They were 100% the best tool we had out there, and whoever was using them was always picking out more dogs than anybody else looking through riflescopes or spotters.
We live in Alaska, so it's quite a ways to travel to shoot these things. I really wish we had something similar to shoot at up here, I can definitely see how such a high volume of spotting, ranging, and live shooting practice would help improve skills that'd cross over into big game hunting. Even stuff as simple as getting familiar with efficient shooter/spotter communication when talking the shooter into finding a target and calling impacts correctly. While driving back to the airport we (jokingly) questioned why anyone would ever want to poison/gas prairie dogs off their land, and considered the logistics on what it'd take to import some home to develop some towns of our own.
Cabela's exclusive Model 12 FV in .223 with an MDT LSS chassis, Vortex Razor LHT 3-15 in PMR rings and bubble level, and a Gen 1 Spartan Valhalla bipod. Side note: Since joining this forum and falling into the scope drop test rabbit hole, I've been turning away from Vortex/leupold scopes and switching my rifles over to Nightforce. I was pleasantly surprised to find that despite the bumpy flight down in a cheap case and two days of constant frantic dialing back and forth, the scope held zero great and the tracking was spot on.
Top group is all 12 test rounds I loaded up for a "confirmation" group after my brief ladder test.
Only ended up having time to get 420 rounds loaded up for the trip. Anything under about 200 yards was shot with .17's, which helped conserve the "precision" ammo.
Unfortunately didn't take many pictures while out shooting, but we did all kinds of positional shooting including off of shooting sticks, fence posts/rails, kneeling, and prone with bipod/rear bag.
