8-1-2009 PD Hunt--Ton of Pics, Many Graphic Ones
Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 6:00 pm
My son finally found some time to go out prairie dog shooting with me this past Saturday. He hadn’t been out shooting with me since late May of 2008!!! I know he enjoys the shooting, but it’s hard for him to find the time to hunt. He works a 5-day a week job and many times goes in on weekends and works one or two more days. Plus, he runs the sound board for a band on many weekends. Anyway, we decided to stop at a local café and have a hearty breakfast before going to battle with the fierce North Dakota prairie dogs. We left Williston a couple minutes after 9:00 a.m.
We arrived at our parking spot on the SE end of the dog town at 10:07. Since my son usually uses my Lilja barreled .17 Remington and that is now at my gunsmith’s getting a new stainless steel Lilja Remington Varmint contour barrel in .17 Tactical, I let him use my Tikka Master Sporter in 22-250 for the day. The loads I usually shoot in that rifle have such a long overall length that they won’t fit in the magazine. As a matter of fact, they are seated so shallow in the neck that you have to be real careful in handling the rounds so the bullet doesn’t fall out of the casing neck due to rough handling!!! I know how to handle that ammo and don’t mind shooting the rifle as a single shot, but these young folks seem to like the repeaters. Anyway, I had some 40 gr. Nosler and 55 gr. Nosler reloads that fit in the magazine I wanted him to use so he could use the rifle as a repeater.
I set up my target box 100 yards from a nice little knoll and we both took our rifles and ammo to do some sighting in. After he shot a couple fouling shots we did one click to the left and the next shot hit dead on for windage and 1.75" high. That would get the job done. The 55 gr. load hit 1.25" high and .5" left. I also let him shoot a couple of the extremely long reloads and they were hitting 1.125" high and 3/8" right. Now, if we can just remember where the 55 grain Nosler BT bullets and the long 40 gr. Nosler BT reloads are hitting, we won’t have to adjust the scope.
I shot a few shots with my 39 gr. Sierra reloads out of my Savage 12VLP in .204 Ruger, just to satisfy myself that it was shooting where it should. I had to tweak the settings a bit because it was hitting higher than I usually have it set. I thought it was hitting a bit high on the last outing and I was right. We got done sighting in, loaded up our gear and a large quantity of water and left the pickup at 11:05 a.m.
This dog town is visible from a fairly decent gravel road and close to several towns so it gets lots of hunters. The prairie dogs were extremely wary and shots were few and far between. We stopped hunting at about 12:30 and gathered up some of the PD bodies in the last spot we had been shooting to do some photography work. Here’s a photo of our two rifles and five of the prairie dogs that fell victim to our deadly barrage of bullets.
The prairie dog on the left at about 10 o’clock is one of those that has very dark brown fur. The one at about 3 o’clock on the right is one my son shot with a 40 gr. Nosler BT at a distance of about 220 yards. There’s just a thin piece of skin holding the front and rear parts of the body together. Here’s a close-up of that dog:
My son has one of those fancy digital SLR cameras that is probably at least a 10 megapixel model and it does everything except tap dance! I used my old 7 megapixel digital camera. We each snapped a bunch of photos of various flowers and other things of interest around the dog town. Here’s a few flower photos:
Blue flax blossoms:
I think the one below is a Prairie Evening Primrose, but I’m not positive:
The one below is a purple Harebell:
The reddish-orange blossoms below are on a Red False Mallow plant:
Someone will have to identify these yellow blossoms as I don’t know what they are, but they are beautiful!!!
By the time we got done snapping photos of the dead prairie dogs and our rifles and snapping dozens of photos of various flowers, it was almost 1:00 p.m. The fence behind the pile of dead PDs and our rifles had two places where the barbed wire had been shot and was broken. My son carries a Leatherman tool with him and we found some old barbed wire lying in the pasture and he fixed the fence. The photo below is of the fence-fixer at work. He found a 2002 quarter on the ground right near where he is fixing the fence!!!
We walked up to a lone juniper tree on the SW side of a hill and sat in the shade and had our lunch. There was just enough shade for two people and we could get our rifles and backpacks in the shade too.
After lunch, we took about a 25 minute nap and when we woke up, there were two Black Angus bulls coming from the west and heading right towards us. The big one of the two had to weigh a ton!!! He was HUGE and was also extremely mean looking. They got to about 75 yards of our shady resting spot and the big bull began to dig in the dirt of a prairie dog mound with his left front hoof and threw dirt and dust up to his hind quarters. The wind was out of the west and that action spread the dust and dirt all over the left side of his body. He did the same thing with is right front hoof. The little bull did the same thing. Then they started walking towards us again. They got within about 25 yards and I picked up the rifles and moved them up against the east side of the juniper and took the backpacks and moved them over there too. The big bull got closer to us and you could see that flies were almost totally covering his whole left front shoulder and there were also thousands of them on his hind quarter too. It must be miserable for these cattle when the flies get that thick. He kept moving closer to us and I finally hollered at him, “HEY, GET OUT OF HERE!†and he began to move off to the south and east of us. I’m not sure what I would have done if he had decided to get a bit closer, but I did have a softball-sized rock in my hand. Maybe a sharp rap on the nose would have deterred him from further advances
Maybe I would have been running too fast to administer the sharp rap on the nose 
Anyway, the two bulls meandered over the hill and never came back.
We discovered a few more beautiful flower blossoms and snapped more photos as we headed to the NW end of this dog town. Here’s a couple photos of some Rocky Mountain Bee blossoms.
This photo below has an actual bee visiting the blossoms busy gathering pollen!!! You can see the pollen on its back legs. My son was in the right place at the right time to get this photo!!!
The three trees you can see in this photo below are close to the NW end of this dog town. We worked our way towards those trees.
About 100 yards from the trees, I spotted a rattlesnake skin sticking out of a prairie dog hole. It had to be all of 4 feet long after I got it pulled out. I was pretty happy there wasn’t a rattlesnake still in the skin. I understand they get pretty ornery when they are shedding their skin. Here’s a photo of the skin alongside the Tikka for perspective.
Here’s another plant with tiny light violet blossoms alongside the quarter Jeff found:
When we got to the trees we thought we’d sit in the shade and rest a bit, but the mosquitoes evidently had the same idea and they were attacking us mercilessly. I had my insect repellant spray along and sprayed both of us down real good. The mosquitoes were still hungry, but somewhat reluctant to try to drink our blood after my spray job. After a brief rest, we headed toward the NE corner of the dog town and my son stood behind me with his fancy camera taking multiple photos while I shot several prairie dogs. Here’s one of those series of photos.
I think use of a tripod would be advantageous for better quality photos. It would have also helped to have had prairie dogs that were a lot closer than this one to get better images too even though Jeff has a super-powerful long-range lens.
When we walked up to check out the damage on the prairie dogs in the action photos, I discovered a small toad. Here’s a photo of the toad taken by Jeff with the lucky quarter placed alongside the frog for perspective:
We started our walk back to the pickup at about 3:50 p.m., but made several stops to pop prairie dogs and to take more photos of flowers, insects, and dead PDs. Here are some insects you don’t want to mess withâ€â€red ants crawling near the entrance to their mound. There a couple of winged ants in this photoâ€â€one is red and one is black. I wonder if either one is the queen?
Jeff noticed what looked like some egg sacks inside the entrance to a prairie dog mound earlier in the day. We could see the funnel-shaped portion of a spider web but didn’t see any spider. Around 4:00 p.m. Jeff spotted three more egg sacks inside a prairie dog mound and this time he also spotted the spider sneak back down into the funnel-shaped entrance to her web. This first photo shows her funnel-shaped entrance and the egg sacks:
The next photo shows her sitting amongst her egg sacks. We were pretty sure it was a black widow spider.
You can see the spider clearly in the first photo below. I teased her with a small grass stem and wiggled parts of her web that were close to the egg sacks. She came up the edge of the mouth of the mound and then she retreated to the eggs. The egg sacs, as you can see, are oval, tan to light brown, papery and about ½ inch long. They hold from 25 to 750 or more eggs, which have an incubation period of 20 days. We didn’t stick around to see them hatch!!!
After we got home and we zoomed in on one of the photos where we could see her abdomen, and as you can see in the photo below (if you squint real hard), we could detect the red coloration on her abdom
We kept heading south towards the pickup. Jeff spotted some prairie dogs out to the west and I spotted several off to the east southeast. We separated to pursue the crafty prairie dogs that had us surrounded. I heard Jeff shoot and could also hear the WHAP sound of his bullet hitting a prairie dog. That made the two prairie dogs I was lining up on disappear down into their den. I spotted another prairie dog a bit further out and ranged him at 275 yards. He was the only customer around, so I thought, “Why not give it a try?†He was lying broadside to me and I held right at the top line of his back and gently squeezed off the shot. I could hear the WHAP!!! and I could also see red mist and parts of the PD go flying. I picked up my rifle and backpack and walked out to where I had hit the prairie dog for a photo op. Here’s the “Hero Photo†you have all been waiting for so anxiously. That’s the 275 yard PD in front of my rifle and me.
Here’s a close-up photo of the damage done by the 39 gr. Sierra at 275 yards:
Jeff shot a couple more times and he connected on those shots too. He set his rifle down and started walking out to where he had hit the PDs to take some photos. He spotted this nice looking pale violet blossomed plant and got a good photo of it.
Here’s the Tikka and the last prairie dog Jeff shot on Saturday. He stepped this one off at 175 yards.
Here’s a close-up photo of that decimated prairie dog with parts spread all over. The 40 gr. Nosler BT bullets chronographed at 3,965 fps at the muzzle and while they really blow up the prairie dogs, they have been very fur friendly on the coyotes I have shot with that load.
We didn’t rack up big numbers today, but once we figured out where our rifles were hitting on the shots over 200 yards and used the Leica 1200 Laser Rangefinder to determine the exact distances, we did OK. Out of the first 5 shots Jeff made hits on 3 and missed 2. Jeff shot 22 shots total for the day and connected on 18 of them so he did darn good after the first 5 shots. He had 15 hits out of the last 16 shots he took. I was shaky on my first 6 shots, hitting on only 3 of them!! I have an excuse though, most of those shots were of the 225 to 250 yard variety and once I saw my shots were hitting a tad high, my hit percentage increased quite a bit. I shot 20 shots during the outing and connected on 16 of those shots, so of the last 14 shots I took, I hit on 13 of them, with the second to the last shot of the day being the 275 yard prairie dog.
It was a fun day of shooting and spotting for one another and an excellent day of fellowship with my son. It doesn’t get any better than that!!! Well, I hope you all enjoyed the hunt as much as we did!!!
We arrived at our parking spot on the SE end of the dog town at 10:07. Since my son usually uses my Lilja barreled .17 Remington and that is now at my gunsmith’s getting a new stainless steel Lilja Remington Varmint contour barrel in .17 Tactical, I let him use my Tikka Master Sporter in 22-250 for the day. The loads I usually shoot in that rifle have such a long overall length that they won’t fit in the magazine. As a matter of fact, they are seated so shallow in the neck that you have to be real careful in handling the rounds so the bullet doesn’t fall out of the casing neck due to rough handling!!! I know how to handle that ammo and don’t mind shooting the rifle as a single shot, but these young folks seem to like the repeaters. Anyway, I had some 40 gr. Nosler and 55 gr. Nosler reloads that fit in the magazine I wanted him to use so he could use the rifle as a repeater.
I set up my target box 100 yards from a nice little knoll and we both took our rifles and ammo to do some sighting in. After he shot a couple fouling shots we did one click to the left and the next shot hit dead on for windage and 1.75" high. That would get the job done. The 55 gr. load hit 1.25" high and .5" left. I also let him shoot a couple of the extremely long reloads and they were hitting 1.125" high and 3/8" right. Now, if we can just remember where the 55 grain Nosler BT bullets and the long 40 gr. Nosler BT reloads are hitting, we won’t have to adjust the scope.
I shot a few shots with my 39 gr. Sierra reloads out of my Savage 12VLP in .204 Ruger, just to satisfy myself that it was shooting where it should. I had to tweak the settings a bit because it was hitting higher than I usually have it set. I thought it was hitting a bit high on the last outing and I was right. We got done sighting in, loaded up our gear and a large quantity of water and left the pickup at 11:05 a.m.
This dog town is visible from a fairly decent gravel road and close to several towns so it gets lots of hunters. The prairie dogs were extremely wary and shots were few and far between. We stopped hunting at about 12:30 and gathered up some of the PD bodies in the last spot we had been shooting to do some photography work. Here’s a photo of our two rifles and five of the prairie dogs that fell victim to our deadly barrage of bullets.
The prairie dog on the left at about 10 o’clock is one of those that has very dark brown fur. The one at about 3 o’clock on the right is one my son shot with a 40 gr. Nosler BT at a distance of about 220 yards. There’s just a thin piece of skin holding the front and rear parts of the body together. Here’s a close-up of that dog:
My son has one of those fancy digital SLR cameras that is probably at least a 10 megapixel model and it does everything except tap dance! I used my old 7 megapixel digital camera. We each snapped a bunch of photos of various flowers and other things of interest around the dog town. Here’s a few flower photos:
Blue flax blossoms:
I think the one below is a Prairie Evening Primrose, but I’m not positive:
The one below is a purple Harebell:
The reddish-orange blossoms below are on a Red False Mallow plant:
Someone will have to identify these yellow blossoms as I don’t know what they are, but they are beautiful!!!
By the time we got done snapping photos of the dead prairie dogs and our rifles and snapping dozens of photos of various flowers, it was almost 1:00 p.m. The fence behind the pile of dead PDs and our rifles had two places where the barbed wire had been shot and was broken. My son carries a Leatherman tool with him and we found some old barbed wire lying in the pasture and he fixed the fence. The photo below is of the fence-fixer at work. He found a 2002 quarter on the ground right near where he is fixing the fence!!!
We walked up to a lone juniper tree on the SW side of a hill and sat in the shade and had our lunch. There was just enough shade for two people and we could get our rifles and backpacks in the shade too.
After lunch, we took about a 25 minute nap and when we woke up, there were two Black Angus bulls coming from the west and heading right towards us. The big one of the two had to weigh a ton!!! He was HUGE and was also extremely mean looking. They got to about 75 yards of our shady resting spot and the big bull began to dig in the dirt of a prairie dog mound with his left front hoof and threw dirt and dust up to his hind quarters. The wind was out of the west and that action spread the dust and dirt all over the left side of his body. He did the same thing with is right front hoof. The little bull did the same thing. Then they started walking towards us again. They got within about 25 yards and I picked up the rifles and moved them up against the east side of the juniper and took the backpacks and moved them over there too. The big bull got closer to us and you could see that flies were almost totally covering his whole left front shoulder and there were also thousands of them on his hind quarter too. It must be miserable for these cattle when the flies get that thick. He kept moving closer to us and I finally hollered at him, “HEY, GET OUT OF HERE!†and he began to move off to the south and east of us. I’m not sure what I would have done if he had decided to get a bit closer, but I did have a softball-sized rock in my hand. Maybe a sharp rap on the nose would have deterred him from further advances
Maybe I would have been running too fast to administer the sharp rap on the nose Anyway, the two bulls meandered over the hill and never came back.We discovered a few more beautiful flower blossoms and snapped more photos as we headed to the NW end of this dog town. Here’s a couple photos of some Rocky Mountain Bee blossoms.
This photo below has an actual bee visiting the blossoms busy gathering pollen!!! You can see the pollen on its back legs. My son was in the right place at the right time to get this photo!!!
The three trees you can see in this photo below are close to the NW end of this dog town. We worked our way towards those trees.
About 100 yards from the trees, I spotted a rattlesnake skin sticking out of a prairie dog hole. It had to be all of 4 feet long after I got it pulled out. I was pretty happy there wasn’t a rattlesnake still in the skin. I understand they get pretty ornery when they are shedding their skin. Here’s a photo of the skin alongside the Tikka for perspective.
Here’s another plant with tiny light violet blossoms alongside the quarter Jeff found:
When we got to the trees we thought we’d sit in the shade and rest a bit, but the mosquitoes evidently had the same idea and they were attacking us mercilessly. I had my insect repellant spray along and sprayed both of us down real good. The mosquitoes were still hungry, but somewhat reluctant to try to drink our blood after my spray job. After a brief rest, we headed toward the NE corner of the dog town and my son stood behind me with his fancy camera taking multiple photos while I shot several prairie dogs. Here’s one of those series of photos.
I think use of a tripod would be advantageous for better quality photos. It would have also helped to have had prairie dogs that were a lot closer than this one to get better images too even though Jeff has a super-powerful long-range lens.
When we walked up to check out the damage on the prairie dogs in the action photos, I discovered a small toad. Here’s a photo of the toad taken by Jeff with the lucky quarter placed alongside the frog for perspective:
We started our walk back to the pickup at about 3:50 p.m., but made several stops to pop prairie dogs and to take more photos of flowers, insects, and dead PDs. Here are some insects you don’t want to mess withâ€â€red ants crawling near the entrance to their mound. There a couple of winged ants in this photoâ€â€one is red and one is black. I wonder if either one is the queen?
Jeff noticed what looked like some egg sacks inside the entrance to a prairie dog mound earlier in the day. We could see the funnel-shaped portion of a spider web but didn’t see any spider. Around 4:00 p.m. Jeff spotted three more egg sacks inside a prairie dog mound and this time he also spotted the spider sneak back down into the funnel-shaped entrance to her web. This first photo shows her funnel-shaped entrance and the egg sacks:
The next photo shows her sitting amongst her egg sacks. We were pretty sure it was a black widow spider.
You can see the spider clearly in the first photo below. I teased her with a small grass stem and wiggled parts of her web that were close to the egg sacks. She came up the edge of the mouth of the mound and then she retreated to the eggs. The egg sacs, as you can see, are oval, tan to light brown, papery and about ½ inch long. They hold from 25 to 750 or more eggs, which have an incubation period of 20 days. We didn’t stick around to see them hatch!!!
After we got home and we zoomed in on one of the photos where we could see her abdomen, and as you can see in the photo below (if you squint real hard), we could detect the red coloration on her abdom
We kept heading south towards the pickup. Jeff spotted some prairie dogs out to the west and I spotted several off to the east southeast. We separated to pursue the crafty prairie dogs that had us surrounded. I heard Jeff shoot and could also hear the WHAP sound of his bullet hitting a prairie dog. That made the two prairie dogs I was lining up on disappear down into their den. I spotted another prairie dog a bit further out and ranged him at 275 yards. He was the only customer around, so I thought, “Why not give it a try?†He was lying broadside to me and I held right at the top line of his back and gently squeezed off the shot. I could hear the WHAP!!! and I could also see red mist and parts of the PD go flying. I picked up my rifle and backpack and walked out to where I had hit the prairie dog for a photo op. Here’s the “Hero Photo†you have all been waiting for so anxiously. That’s the 275 yard PD in front of my rifle and me.
Here’s a close-up photo of the damage done by the 39 gr. Sierra at 275 yards:
Jeff shot a couple more times and he connected on those shots too. He set his rifle down and started walking out to where he had hit the PDs to take some photos. He spotted this nice looking pale violet blossomed plant and got a good photo of it.
Here’s the Tikka and the last prairie dog Jeff shot on Saturday. He stepped this one off at 175 yards.
Here’s a close-up photo of that decimated prairie dog with parts spread all over. The 40 gr. Nosler BT bullets chronographed at 3,965 fps at the muzzle and while they really blow up the prairie dogs, they have been very fur friendly on the coyotes I have shot with that load.
We didn’t rack up big numbers today, but once we figured out where our rifles were hitting on the shots over 200 yards and used the Leica 1200 Laser Rangefinder to determine the exact distances, we did OK. Out of the first 5 shots Jeff made hits on 3 and missed 2. Jeff shot 22 shots total for the day and connected on 18 of them so he did darn good after the first 5 shots. He had 15 hits out of the last 16 shots he took. I was shaky on my first 6 shots, hitting on only 3 of them!! I have an excuse though, most of those shots were of the 225 to 250 yard variety and once I saw my shots were hitting a tad high, my hit percentage increased quite a bit. I shot 20 shots during the outing and connected on 16 of those shots, so of the last 14 shots I took, I hit on 13 of them, with the second to the last shot of the day being the 275 yard prairie dog.
It was a fun day of shooting and spotting for one another and an excellent day of fellowship with my son. It doesn’t get any better than that!!! Well, I hope you all enjoyed the hunt as much as we did!!!
Great story Silverfox! 
