Disclaimer: sorry, no pics.
Last Saturday I went out to the corn fields of a farmer that gave me permission to shoot there to diminish the amount of groundhogs.
The corn was just taken down, but he hadn't had time to mow the edges of the field to clear the long grass and weeds. When I did an initial walk-around (more like bushwhack-around) of the nearest fenced edges of the fields I found about 7 groundhog burrows. I marked all of them, because I hadn't remembered to check if they were _active_ burrows, by looking for swarming flies and such.
Yeah, I'm pretty new at this.
After finding a good high spot which visually covered 4 burrows and making sure I stayed downwind I set up my tripod and kept scanning the field of stubby corn stalks.
After half an hour I had still not spotted any movement so I tried my luck along the fence of the field with 3 horses where I had marked 3 more burrow locations. No deal either; I saw the back half of a groundhog as I accidentally chased it into a big pile of discarded boards, pallets and other trash. He wasn't going to come out anytime soon and none of the other burrows provided any groundhogs.
I went back to my original high ground in the corn field, by this time shadows were getting long, less than an hour before sunset. After scanning for about 10 minutes I spotted a big groundhog scurrying around, taking its regular 15 second pauses to make sure nothing dangerous was going on. That behavior is exactly their undoing: I lasered him at 54 yards, checked my dope card taped to the stock of my .22 410E, held .8 mil dots high, held half a mildot off for the wind and squeezed the trigger. I was happy to see I hit well: the hog tucked its head immediately, did a little tremble with its legs while it slowly rolled into its back and then laid still.
I waited another 15 minutes, hoping another groundhog would venture out, looking for leftover corn cobs, but it was going to be just the one for the evening.
I went to retrieve the groundhog and saw that the pellet hit between the eye and the ear.
As as soon as you guys tell me how I can spot and target more than 1 groundhog per evening, I will have more successful outings to report on. But to be honest, I'm actually quite happy I got the one.
Last Saturday I went out to the corn fields of a farmer that gave me permission to shoot there to diminish the amount of groundhogs.
The corn was just taken down, but he hadn't had time to mow the edges of the field to clear the long grass and weeds. When I did an initial walk-around (more like bushwhack-around) of the nearest fenced edges of the fields I found about 7 groundhog burrows. I marked all of them, because I hadn't remembered to check if they were _active_ burrows, by looking for swarming flies and such.
Yeah, I'm pretty new at this.
After finding a good high spot which visually covered 4 burrows and making sure I stayed downwind I set up my tripod and kept scanning the field of stubby corn stalks.
After half an hour I had still not spotted any movement so I tried my luck along the fence of the field with 3 horses where I had marked 3 more burrow locations. No deal either; I saw the back half of a groundhog as I accidentally chased it into a big pile of discarded boards, pallets and other trash. He wasn't going to come out anytime soon and none of the other burrows provided any groundhogs.
I went back to my original high ground in the corn field, by this time shadows were getting long, less than an hour before sunset. After scanning for about 10 minutes I spotted a big groundhog scurrying around, taking its regular 15 second pauses to make sure nothing dangerous was going on. That behavior is exactly their undoing: I lasered him at 54 yards, checked my dope card taped to the stock of my .22 410E, held .8 mil dots high, held half a mildot off for the wind and squeezed the trigger. I was happy to see I hit well: the hog tucked its head immediately, did a little tremble with its legs while it slowly rolled into its back and then laid still.
I waited another 15 minutes, hoping another groundhog would venture out, looking for leftover corn cobs, but it was going to be just the one for the evening.
I went to retrieve the groundhog and saw that the pellet hit between the eye and the ear.
As as soon as you guys tell me how I can spot and target more than 1 groundhog per evening, I will have more successful outings to report on. But to be honest, I'm actually quite happy I got the one.
