Trip report -- ground squirrel hunt in Nevada
Toby Bradshaw
north central Nevada near Winnemucca (you didn' think I'd tell you
*exactly* where we went, did you :). Lee couldn't leave work until Friday
afternoon, so he was planning to drive all night and meet us in Nevada.
For the past 10 years or so we have shot ground squirrels in Washington,
Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. One of out favorite early season haunts had
been near Enterprise, OR, but the cheapest nonresident license is now over
$100, so we decided to try some new spots in Nevada where varmint hunting
is free and no license is required.
We crossed the Cascades east of Eugene, OR and drove southeast past some
great jackrabbit and ground squirrel shooting in the vicinity of Silver
Lake, where hundreds of white pelicans were out on the water and sandhill
cranes were flying overhead. As usual, driving towards Lakeview, OR we
saw many mule deer even though is was about midday and sunny.
We drove towards Denio Junction, NV on highway 140, which is desolate even
by basin-and-range standards. We passed through an antelope range and saw
quite a few feral burros mixed in with the antelope. The ground was
littered with a smoky gray obsidian, some chunks bigger than a softball.
We broke some of the bigger pieces with a .45 to bring home as souvenirs.
When we finally stopped in Winnemucca ("City of Paved Streets" is their
motto) we just had enough time to scare up a few jackrabbits before dark,
but by this time of year the dumb ones are long dead and we couldn't get
any shots in the heavy sage. We checked in the local bar for some tips on
where to look for ground squirrels, but nobody had much useful
information. We lost the obligatory dollar each playing the quarter slot
machine in the bar, and hit the sack. Lee rolled in about 3:30AM
Saturday, but mercifully didn't knock on our door. He just crawled in the
back of his pickup, pulled on his sleeping bag, and crashed.
It was just below freezing Saturday morning, clear and sunny with a brisk
wind starting to kick up. After breakfast, we asked at a local general
store about ground squirrels. The proprietor was a helpful woman with a
good working knowledge of ground squirrel distribution in the area, and
after taking into account the time of year and mildness of the winter,
sent us to a nearby settlement to make further inquiries. Luckily, we
quickly ran across a retired gent from Tacoma who ran a local hunt club,
and had pheasant leases on many of the nearby ranches. He whipped out a
map of the valley and circled several hotspots for "gophers", as ground
squirrels are known over much of the west. After checking with the
landowners, who were only too happy to have ground squirrels shot out of
their alfalfa fields, we scouted around for some likely-looking areas. We
were sent to some alfalfa circles where the gopher damage was so bad that
the irrigator wheels couldn't negotiate the many burrows and collapsed
earth! The ranchers were paying trappers $1 per gopher tail, so you know
varmint hunters are welcome! The ranchers wanted us to shoot badgers
(holes for cows to break legs in), ravens (peck out calves' eyes), and
coyotes (ranchers don't seem to need a reason to kill them) as well as
gophers, but we confined ourselves to rodents and a couple of crows
(ravens are protected and we didn't get shots at badgers or coyotes,
though we saw some of both). We got to see lots of other interesting
wildlife, including a golden eagle splitting a flock of ravens with a
vertical stoop from about 1000 feet up (the three of us are all falconers
and so have a special interest in this kind of thing) and several prairie
falcons zipping around looking for errant pheasants (of which there were
many).
By noon we had shot some ground squirrels with everything from a Colt .45
to our .222s and .223s, but hadn't gotten into the kind of "target-rich
environment" one really looks for in a ground squirrel shoot. Finally, we
came upon one of the "hotspots" on the map, and a quick glassing revealed
an alfalfa field bristling with Richardson's ground squirrels!
We set up in earnest, then, shooting off the hoods and canopies (by
standing on the tailgate) of our trucks with bipods and sandbag rear
rests. I was shooting a Rem 700V .222 /Leup 6.5-20X with 40gr Ballistic
Tips (chronographed at 3420fps using 24gr H322, 10-shot group at 100 yards
the day before leaving 0.640") and a Rem 541-T (got to have rimfire when
the centerfires get too hot !). Jerry had his .45, a .223 Win 70 HV/Leup
12X, and a .222 Rem 722 sporter/Weaver 6X, and Lee had a .223 Rem
700V/Leup 4-12X and a Marlin semiauto .22. Jerry and Lee were both
shooting 50gr Speer TNTs at 3200-3400fps (depending on rifle).
We adopted our usual procedure of watching each other shoot, which is
especially useful (and fun) on a windy day like we were having. On the
crosswind shots we'd be holding a foot into the wind to hit them at 250
yards or so. A standing Richardson's ground squirrel isn't quite two
inches wide, so they're a challenging target. They don't stand still for
long, either, so you have to take what shots you can get. We had shots
from as close as 50 yards (if less that that, rimfire or .45 time -- at 50
yards the centerfire .22s really put on a show with a body hit) to as far
as you wanted to shoot, but we weren't hitting anything consistently past
about 275 paces. We got lots of head or head-and-shoulder shots, as well
as feeding and standing squirrels. It's a thrill to hit them at 50 yards
offhand with a .22, a blast to knock one over at 300+ yards by holding 6
inches high and 3 times that much into the wind, and a riot to splatter
them at 20 paces with a .45. There's just no way to screw up a gopher
shoot when the little varmints are swarming out of their dens in the
spring!
When you get to a spot like this, there's no break for barrel cleaning or
other niceties. Anybody stopping to clean a rifle would be driven insane
by the constant bark of your friends' rifles and the cries of "FLYING
SQUIRREL!" when an abdominal hit sends one cartwheeling with various body
parts headed in different directions. It would take more patience than
any of us has to sit there in the blowing dust with a cleaning rod while
there are squirrels to be shot! That's why the medium centerfires like
the .222 and .223 are so nice for this kind of shooting. The have modest
recoil and muzzle blast for comfort, plenty of punch and reach for these
little varmints, and they don't foul barrels nearly as badly as the bigger
.22 centerfires.
For the next 4 hours we shot continuously without moving the rifles except
to pivot them on the bipods (you should see the bipod "skid marks" on the
hood of my truck!). By 5PM the squirrels had called it a day, and we had
fired over 100 rounds apiece of centerfire rifle ammo. The Ballistic Tips
had performed well, expanding at all ranges and causing tremendous damage
at ranges of less than 150 yards or so. However, the TNTs have a definite
edge in the "flying squirrel" department, and I may switch to them even
though they don't shoot quite as well in my .222 as the Ballistic Tips.
We noticed about 1 out of 100 bullets of each type would ricochet, so
neither seems to have a clearcut advantage in that department. We cleaned
the powder residue and copper from the centerfire rifles that night in the
motel room, and slept the sleep of the happy varmint hunters.
Sunday dawned clear and sunny, with afternoon temperatures headed to 60F,
and the wind had died to just about zero; perfect gophering weather. We
drove around a little looking for a high concentration of squirrels, but
didn't find anything to match what we'd seen the day before. So, by 9AM
we were back in Saturday's alfalfa field. We parked about a quarter mile
from the previous day's position, hauled out the sunscreen, rifles, and
ammo boxes, and got to work. The golden eagles, ravens, rough-legged
hawks, red- tailed hawks, ferruginous hawks, weasels, and badgers that
were cleaning up the remains of yesterday's shoot headed to safer
territory when the rifles started booming. We shot uninterrupted until
1PM without moving the rifles, so abundant were the squirrels. At 1:00 we
moved another quarter mile, had a Coke and a Milky Way, and went to it
again. The ranch foreman brought his wife and kids (3 and 5) to watch the
doings. He had never seen anybody shoot gophers with centerfires before,
and was pretty impressed with the range and terminal performance. I let
him take a couple of shots with my rifle, and after he turned down the
scope magnification so he could find the target, touched off the Jewell
trigger (set at 4 oz.) on a few gophers. Then he dragged out his "coyote
rifle", a Ruger mini-14 with a Bushnell 3-9X scope. He wanted me to sight
it in for him, since he had been missing a few coyotes. Actually, it was
pretty close already and the first 5 shots went into about an inch at 50
yards using the cheap ball ammo he brought. The next 5 shots were badly
strung out, presumably because the barrel had gotten hot. We put the
mini-14 in the shade to cool off. Without lead flying over their heads
for the last few minutes, the ground squirrels had gotten bolder and we
picked off a bunch with the .222s and .223s. The foreman's kids had two
dogs, one of which liked to mouth the gophers and the other of which liked
to eat them! I gave the kids some chunks of obsidian and told them they
could make arrowheads out of the volcanic glass, which excited them no
end. After a while I pulled out the mini-14 again, picked out a ground
squirrel about 100 yards away, and sent it into orbit with a round of ball
ammo. I pronounced it fit for coyote hunting, and the foreman was duly
appreciative!
After the foreman and his family left we really ripped into the squirrels,
since the later it became the more squirrels appeared in the "high
percentage" 100-150 yard range. We would occasionally have two squirrels
in the air at once, or shoot a copulating male off the back of a female
and get both with one shot. All of us had to switch to our alternate
rifles as the centerfires' barrels got too hot to touch. A couple of
stupid crows spiraled out of a flock to pick up some tenderized gopher
meat, and were added to the stack. The rest of the flock sat in the
treeline at a respectful distance, as you would expect from a normal crow.
Again at about 5PM the action went from blistering to nonexistent as the
gophers turned in for the night. We walked the field to examine the
bullet damage and pace off the shots we were getting. Once again, we
didn't find any piles of dead squirrels beyond 275 paces or so, though the
odd individual carcass could be found well beyond 300 paces. The lack of
wind on Sunday really picked up our kill percentage, and we had plenty of
easy shots due to close range, too. I don't know how many squirrels we
shot out of the field, but we had fired over 1000 rounds of centerfire
rifle, over 200 rounds of rimfire, and 50-100 .45 rounds in a day and a
half of shooting. Certainly we killed 300-400 squirrels at a minimum,
with Lee having the longest unbroken string of 14 consecutive kills. I
had honors for the biggest "splatter" when I shot a ground squirrel in the
neck and its head ended up over 20 paces from the point of impact (it went
so high the wind caught it, and blew it that far!). Jerry was the
pistol/gopher champ with 2 confirmed kills (but we scared hell out of a
bunch of them!). We drove back to Seattle Monday, ammo depleted and ready
to reload for Montana in June ...
All in all it was a great time, with perfect weather, tremendous shooting,
no other hunters, and no hassles of any kind. Ground squirrel hunting can
be like that, which is why I like it as well as any varmint hunting I've
done. Now that we have some contacts in the area, we can arrange to
return when first cut is made in the alfalfa fields, and all the young
ground squirrels have been born. That's when the shooting is at is very
best. The ranchers also said that they have been overrun with jackrabbits
in winter, having to kick them out of the way of the alfalfa rolls to get
fodder for the cattle. I left my card and said "Call collect when the
varmints get too thick!" I do love to shoot [at] running jacks with a
.22!
Toby Bradshaw -- Biochemistry SJ-70 -- to...@u.washington.edu
Banning guns to prevent murder is like banning matches to prevent arson.
Ralph Kinser
: Jerry and I left Seattle about 4:30AM the last Friday in March, headed for
: north central Nevada near Winnemucca (you didn' think I'd tell you
: *exactly* where we went, did you :). Lee couldn't leave work until Friday
: afternoon, so he was planning to drive all night and meet us in Nevada.
: For the past 10 years or so we have shot ground squirrels in Washington,
: Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. One of out favorite early season haunts had
: been near Enterprise, OR, but the cheapest nonresident license is now over
: $100, so we decided to try some new spots in Nevada where varmint hunting
Actully, for '94, Oregon lowered the nonresident hunter fee from $125.50
to $53.00. The nonresident fees for a Deer, Antelope and Big Horn Sheep
were raised $75.00 and non resident Elk tags were raised $90.00. This is
good news for small game and varmit hunters but bad news if you want to
hunt more than one type of big game.
: is free and no license is required.
stuff deleted ...
Ralph Kinser ral...@hpcvrdh.cv.hp.com
Hewlett Packard
Corvallis Division Corvallis,Oregon