2019 Trip #1 Central Colorado April 6 – 7, Ash and Myself
First trip of the year; usually by this time of the year I’ve been out at least three times. The weather has been a real bummer. Just when it starts to clear-up and dry out, along comes another snow storm. We don’t go on rancher land when we might get stuck. I can get through; I just don’t want to dig up their two tracks. Sooner or later they would have to fix them.
This time of the year the females are underground giving birth or tending their young. If we see they’re females we’ll not shoot them. Sometime at 250 yards it’s hard to tell. The young will not make an appearance above ground until around the middle of May.
The first ranch we planned to spend two days shooting, they had poisoned some of it. The rancher has to try and keep ahead of the numbers of prairie dogs to protect their land. Grass is hard to come by in the hot dry summers. Most of Colorado is HIGH DESERT with hot dry windy days. They want their cattle to eat the grass not prairie dogs.
The rancher had to take us around on his 4-wheeler and show us some land that hadn’t been poisoned. So we didn’t get to start shooting until around one o’clock and stopped near five o’clock. We shot right at 100 dogs in that time, not real bad for the questionable weather months.
Had to stop and put up a target to check my zero. I didn’t get a chance to check it at the range before we left, it was off a foot or so. I was amazed. Taking it in and out of my soft case had moved my settings. I had noticed it was near zero on both elevation and azimuth, so I re-zeroed both. WRONG, it was off a lot more. My friend spotted as I shot and we were able to get both rifles back on target. They were zeroed but at a different zero from before, lesson learned.
As we checked into a Motel that night the lady running the front desk asks what we did. My response was “We shoot prairie dogs”. She returned with “I might know someone”. That got us in contact with another rancher 40 miles away to shoot his property the next day.
The day didn’t start well, cool, overcast, and windy. And I’m talking 20 to 25 mph winds.
The wind would shift every time we would get lined up for a few shots. It would go from a quartering wind, to head wind, to cross wind in mere seconds. Any hit beyond 200 yards was a hunting accident. We fought the wind and coolness until around one o’clock. Then the wind stopped, the sun came out, and it warmed up nicely.
We didn’t do badly for an Early Summer day. The two of us shot 314 prairie dogs, me 146 of them. I missed to many time trying to sight-in the first day.
I didn’t take a suppressor with me because the rifles I chose to use I didn’t have a thread adapter for. The next time I get to Phoenix Weaponry they are supposed to have an adapter and three other rifles I left them to thread ready.
2019 Trip #1 using two rifles
I used my 223 AI and 222 Rem 700 rifles for this trip.