GTA
General Discussion To Gateway To Airguns => Hunting Gate => : PBJ March 04, 2007, 11:56:00 AM
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-----Bored to death with rabbit season over and the squirrels still sleeping (too cold here in the high desert) so I rolled out my target bench (see post on Air Gun Gate "Shooting Gallery" and thought I would shoot my CO2 AR2078 bulk fill with some of the Gamo Tomahawks I got in my last order from MidSouth. I have a 6 power BSA scope on this gun (came on my CFX - the scope is a dog) and was getting bored with putting pellet after pellet on top of each other at 10 yards when I noticed in the edge of my field of view what looks like two red banana leaves sticking up in the air next to a Joshua Tree. Shift my shooting angle (I was using a Slik Universal camera tripod as a rest) and there he was, a nice big year old jack rabbit (they are in season year round here in California - no limit) and I thought: "Will this low power CO2 knock down a 16"+ jack at long range?" - well I held over his back an inch or so and let fly. The AR2078 is very low recoiling and I saw the pellet hit him in the heart/lung area - dust flew off his fur and some of the fur even floated away on the wind. I loaded another pellet and shot again, this one broke his left rear leg as I did not lead enough (he was moving slowly into the brush). I knew that I was low on CO2 from the sound of the last shot and so I went into the other side of the garage and got out my CFX. loaded another Tomahawk and put one right through his kill zone and he went into the jack rabbit death spin in the dust. I paced off the first shot and it was 56 paces - right at 52 yards with my normal stride.
-----I shoot Predators and Gamo Hunters and the Gamo Tomahawk did the job as well if not better than the either of them. The back leg bone was a clean break and one of the heart/lung shoots was a pass through - he was making bubbles on the off side.
-----By the way, when I changed guns, I thought I had lost him into the brush but then I saw what I thought was my jack, I put a free hand shot on him at 45+ yards and held too far back, butt shot and angry, that jack hit it into the brush and ran right past my first jack that was sitting in front of some Cholla cactus. If I had used a rest (Bi-Fur Pod - Varmint Al style) I would have had two jacks in the picture and not one. I tracked the second jack but lost him as they move very fast if not hit with a near fatal shot on the first go round.
-----I am still waiting to go north to Tule Lake when it warms up to shoot Belding Ground Squirrels. If you have a varmint season where you live, post the best time to shoot and some info for us game starved nothing to shoot air gunners!!
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That is one fine jack, Bob. I'm still amazed by the length of their leg's and ear's.52 yrd's, very nice shootin indeed. Started off with a CO2 and finished with a springer, a well rounded hunt.Again nice shot and I'm glade that you finished the job, great pic too. :) huntin,Ed
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Great story PBJ, great pic as well. I sure wish we had jack rabbits where I live, I'd be in airgun hunting heaven. I've heard that people don't eat the jacks, as they're so tough, but I wonder how they would come out in some type of slow cooking method, stew, crockpot, that sort of thing?
Jeff
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MMMMMMMMM Yummy Jeff..Ed
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-----You can eat jacks, especially the ones that are not over a year old
----We don't eat rabbits/jacks here in the high desert until late season when it gets cold- no fleas!!
----There are some great posts on other forums on cleaning rabbits and what to watch out for in the way of disease
----The jacks are eating my trees, Cholla cactus and even young Joshua Trees, they need to be thinned out
----We had a mountain lion and two bobcats in the neighborhood this week, I love the high desert!!
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That is a nice lookin Jack there PBJ! Here in the noreast we don't get to see many pics of them there hare. Love the story bout the hunt too. Sounds like you did every thing possible to collect your quarry. I like those tomahawks in my CFX. Very accurate. Send Jeff that Jack. I bet he can make a good stew with it after he adds my Starling Stew Helper I will send him LOL!
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Jeff, load up your gun's. We'll stop by DanoInTx, get some Dillo's and head over to PBJ's and get some Jack's. Heck let's just do a USA tour. We'll visit each member and do some hunting to boot. Ed
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Hey, Ed, if you guys time it right, my neck of the woods has lots of marmots. They can be a real pest if they get under your house, they really tear stuff up. Don't know if anyone eats them, though :-)! We also get over run with small ground squirrels in places, too. Probably too small to eat, but small, fast, challenging targets. Later.
Dave
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Hay Bob,
Great eyes, and fine shootin !
Must be great up there in the high desert with nature all around ya !
Hear in the east we don't eat our bunny rabbits untill after the second hard frost, due to worms..
Well, Ed's on line so i'll admit, I won't eat them until after the second hard frost, but I don't mind the flees at all. hahaha
Keep those pohtos and stories commig, it keeps my spirits up !
Thanks,
Bill
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Do you have the gun tuned at all? also if so what kind of fps are you pushing to make a kill at 52 yards?? im not doubting it at all just curious :)
thanks,
Jason
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Flea's, I dont have flea's. that's my really cool white necklace and I've been taking my worm med's. Oh were talking about the rabbit's, my bad hehe. Ed
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-----Jason, at that distance I made two shots that made a "stop" and not a kill; it was the third shot from the CFX that finished the job. I had good placement on the first shot and a bad but lucky hit on the seccond. The jack was sitting on his hind legs and gave me a great vertical target for the first shot. My guess is that my actual point of aim was near the top of his head and the shot hit his chest. The second shot I aimed at just over his back and hit his hind leg - no big credit to me there. I shoot at dirt clods and empty plastic bottles when there is no game and I find that even beginners can make contact at 25-35 yards from a bench rest. Once you get the Kentucky guess on pellet drop, you can hit at extreme distance if the wind is light. If you can hit a plastic water bottle, all my guns shoot right on through both sides if there are a few rocks in the bottles. At 30+ yards, full bottles will suffer real damage and often fall over if hit above the middle. Shot end to end, the white caps will almost always come off if not shatter at that distance. PS: just checked again, 56 paces from the base of the tree to my bench. Also I noted that I have about 8' of downhill to this spot, need to work on my angled shots. If you get out to the Joshua Tree National Park area, drop me an email and come by to shoot and visit!!
----Mike M. tuned the gun for max speed. I bulk load and rarely get 25 full power shots but then I only shoot from next to the siphon bottle at my shooting station in the garage. I do not own a chrony but my guess is that the AR2078 is pushing the limits of a CO2 gun as it vents a bit for the first few shots. Here in the high desert at 4000' with a gun that is warm to the touch I would be thinking we are getting close to 700FPS. That day the AR2078 at ten yards badly bent an NRA turkey silhouette that I was silly enough to shoot at 10 yards+!!
-----This jack was sitting still and I had been on the target bench for an hour and had the BSA scope holding a zero that allowed me to put pellet holes touching as long as I did not goof up. There was almost no wind and I had perfect light (good thing as the scope is only 6 power and very hard to keep the image clear). The first shot made him stand still but the second broke his leg in two, the bone was a clean break. The third shot was from my CFX that CDT tuned and it had a chrony of over 960FPS for ten shots when he sent it back to me (with Gamo Hunters). The CFX shot was a clean through, must have missed everything but the lung. I walked up, put another pellet at point blank range (6") right into the brain and he still kept on breathing. You have to hunt on these high desert jacks to see how tough they are. I usually only get a shot on 1 out of ten that I jump as they are gun shy and I cannot hit anything at 40 yards that is moving unless it is with a Ruger 10-22 and lots of kicked up dust to follow to the target (none of my hi-cap mags will feed so I stick with 10 shots).
-----We shoot on a football field in the early summer on cotton tails and there we have the best ranging device possible, 4" white lines at five yard intervals plus lots of banners/flags to show us the true wind. We shoot prone to allow for the average shot of 35-40 yards (obviously no cover in 2" tall Kentucky Blue) and I post below the result of about an hour of hunting by three of us using my old Mendoza (no speed freak - I doubt it hits 600FPS), a Crossman 1077 CO2 that was such a weak performer that I gave it away and my CFX. To tell the truth, I did not do that much better with the CFX than the other two did with my lender guns. If you can hit them, especially if you can get in a follow up shot, they go down. Robert Beeman says that 3-6FP is all it takes for thin skin game and he is right.
------I almost never shoot offhand as I am not as steady as I once was; I use sticks, a camera tripod or a bench rest with a leather glove on my forend hand.
------I have shot almost every day since I got my .177 CFX, mostly on small game and during the 6 month cotton tail season it is a rare day that I do not bag one or two of those plant eating machines and so I have a fair amount of experience in what my gun will do. If it was a squirrel in a tree, I would embarrass myself as we don't have many trees out here and only birds use the trees. I don't shoot birds as the high angle shots put my neighbors in danger.
Bob
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We have tularemia (ususally kills the host rabbit/jack) here and that goes with the first frost. Once it gets cold, it stays that way. It was 11 degrees in January and we had some snow. I re-post a winter shot below of some cold weather shooting this year.
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SOOOOOO jelious... I want to go hunting in the mountains!