It was August 30, 2009, and it had been almost a month since my son and I were out prairie dog hunting and we finally found a day when we could go hunting together again. My wife and I went to church that morning and my son came over to my house after church and we got out stuff loaded in the pickup and headed out of town around noon.
We got to the spot we usually park at around 1:00 p.m. The wind was whipping along at 15+ mph. Not ideal shooting conditions, but sometimes you just have to play with the cards you are dealt. Since I had cleaned the barrel on the Tikka Master Sporter in 22-250 that he was going to use today, I set up a target box 100 yards east of where we were parked. I also needed to shoot a few fouling shots through my new toy, my .17 Tactical. The mirage factor was terrible!!! The old lines on the target kept moving up and down and sideways. It was almost impossible to know the precise moment to squeeze the trigger with the mirage problem.
Anyway, we did our best and started getting our gear ready to go. About then we heard a prairie dog barking at us to the south of us across a big deep washout. I wanted to get first blood for the .17 Tactical, so I ranged the prairie dog at 160 yards, got into prone position, and chambered a round loaded with a Danzac coated 25 gr. V-Max bullet. I acquired the target and squeezed off the shot. WHAP!!! The .17 Tactical got its first blood on its first shot at a live target.
Here’s photo of the victim. I placed a loaded .17 Tactical shell alongside his left front foot to try to give you something to compare the PD to, but it isn’t the best. This was a HUGE prairie dog and had real dark fur too. He was extremely wide across the back and hip area. I wish I would have had a scale with, but he was missing some of his inner parts, so I couldn’t have gotten a real accurate weight on him.
I had Jeff take a “Hero†photo of me by the first kill for the .17 Tactical. If you noticed the head phones and bean bag hanging off my left hip, they are on a belt clip I bought from Sinclair International especially for carrying the head phones there. The headphones get a little warm on your head when it is in the 80 to 100 degree range temperature-wise!!!!
I think the high winds were keeping the prairie dogs down in their dens. These prairie dogs seemed highly educated to the sound of a rifle shot and also well aware of what a human being walking in their town meantâ€â€TROUBLE!!! Most of our shots were at distances from 150 to 250 yards in winds blowing 15+ mph. Opportunities for shots were few and far between.
The .17 Tactical started out shooting GREAT! The second victim of my .17 Tactical was one of the closest prairie dogs I shot at all day. This one was about 150 yards away and was only giving me a view from his throat to the top of his head. Here’s the way he was laying when I found the den he was in:
The 25 gr. V-Max really pulverized his head. The bullet actually forced the skin of his neck up under his chin as you can probably see in the photo below.
I took a branch from a dead sage brush bush and fished him up out of the den. Here, you can see the skin stretched up from the back of his head up over onto his nose. There’s a piece of his skull on the skin below his nose and just to the left of the green weed.
The picture below gives you a view from the back of his head. You can see the inside of his mouth, including the tongue. His head was a MESS!!!
Here’s a photo taken from the location of the mound of the prairie dog in the photo above. It shows Jeff lying up on the little ledge overlooking the prairie dog town. He blends in pretty good, except I knew where he was.
Unknown to me, he took a photo of me taking a photo of him!!!!
We kept on the move and missed our fair share of shots. Jeff was having a heck of a time hitting the prairie dogs. By about 4:00 p.m. he had taken 9 shots and only hit three prairie dogs. I did have him using some 40 gr. Nosler BT loads that were in brand new brass. The Tikka 22-250 doesn’t shoot real accurately when you fire form new brass. I have experienced difficulty hitting my target with those fire forming loads over the years and he was having the same problem. When he fired the last of those fire forming shots, his hit percentage improved considerably.
Jeff snapped a few photos of blossoms that turned out pretty nice too:
Just before we stopped for lunch, Jeff sneaked up on a berm that used to be part of an old oil well sludge pit and popped a prairie dog at about 75 yards in distance. I had to walk over there and take a “Hero†photo for him and also take some close-ups of the damaged dog.
The 40 gr. Nosler Ballistic Tips bullets he is shooting leave the muzzle of the 22-250 at about 4,010 fps and really messed up this little prairie dog.
We stopped for lunch around 4:25 p.m. After lunch we laid back in the shade of a juniper tree and tried to take a short nap. About 5 minutes into nap time a flock of magpies began flying around our resting spot and kept us awake for a while. They flew off and we dozed off again only to be awakened 10 minutes later by the sound of CRUNCH!! MUNCH!! CRUNCH!! MUNCH!! We woke up to find a cow grazing on some green grass not more than 20 feet away from us!!! More cattle were grazing and heading our way and since we didn’t relish the idea of getting stepped on by a cow we decided to get up and do some more prairie dog shooting.
Jeff hit on a couple prairie dogs right after lunch and then we spotted two PDs by the same mound about 160 yards from our position and decided to do our “simultaneous shot act.†We got ourselves all situated, crosshairs on our respective victim and then I counted: “One, Two, Three, Fire!!!†and we both shot at nearly the same time. I couldn’t see both prairie dogs in my scope, but mine experienced lift off and did a helicopter act. Jeff said when he hit his prairie dog, it just tipped over sideways. Here’s a photo of the two rifles and the two victims. The Tikka Master Sporter is in for foreground and my .17 Tactical is in the rear.
Here’s a close-up of Jeff’s victim:
Here’s a photo of my part of the “simultaneous shot act.†You might be able to see that the helicopter action got his rear end completely twisted around just below his forearms. It almost looks like there are two different prairie dogs lying there.
Here’s a view of him from the other side:
There were pieces of him spread out over about 25 feet from the left of where he sat to the right of where he sat. Here’s a piece bone and flesh that flew about 8 feet to the right:
The trajectory and wind deflection charts on our rifles are only useful when you know the yardages and once again, the Leica 1200 Laser Rangefinder was an invaluable aid for making the hits that we did make. Most of Jeff’s missed shots were a bit high and we probably should have taken a few more sighting shots out in the prairie dog town or I guess he should have started aiming a bit lower. We’ll try to do better next time.
We began walking back toward the pickup around 7:30 p.m. We could hear prairie dogs barking up to the north of us and finally spotted them about 225 yards away. We crept a little closer and got to about 175 yards and decided that was close enough. We did our “simultaneous shot act†again and both managed to hit our target dog. Jeff’s shot took the head right off his PD. Here’s a photo of that prairie dog.
My shot didn’t decapitate my prairie dog, but it did clean out his body cavity quite spectacularly!
The moon was rising in the southeast, but it wasn’t very bright yet. Jeff snapped a couple of photos of the scene at around 7:45 p.m. He should have waited there another 15 or 20 minutes because the moon would have been a lot brighter then. Anyway, here’s one of them:
I still had 7 or 8 rounds of 25 gr. V-Max ammo I wanted to fire form before leaving and I also wanted to shoot a few of the 30 gr. BTHP Kindler Gold rounds to see what they did to prairie dogs. I found a bunch of prairie dogs just north and east of some trees that line an old shallow dry wash. I was liking the .17 Tactical build more and more as the day wore on. I finally shot the last of the 25 gr. V-Max rounds in that box and took out three of the 30 gr. Gold loads and placed in the magazine. I crossed the dry wash and set up on a tall prairie dog mound where I had a pretty good view of the mounds to the northeast of me. I spotted two prairie dogs out about 175 yards. I chambered a round, got one of them in the crosshairs and squeezed off the shotâ€â€WHAP!!!! That was a gratifying sound to me since this was the first shot I had taken with the 30 gr. Golds at a live target. I walked out to inspect the dead dog and it appeared like I had hit it right on the point of aim. I could see a small entrance hole just behind his right front elbow, and there was a BIG hole out the opposite side. I didn’t have my camera with me, so I don’t have a photo of that one.
My son had been snapping photos of flowers while I was shooting prairie dogs. He came across the dry wash and had my backpack with him. I walked back to him and we began walking back to the pickup again. We were just about to the place where we cross an extremely deep wash to get to the pickup when my son said, “Oh, Oh!!! There are a couple of prairie dogs up ahead.†He pointed out where they were and I went to my prone shooting position. By the time I got into position, there was only one PD still up out of the den. I squeezed off another 30 gr. Gold round and that nailed the smallish prairie dog, but good! Here’s a photo of the .17 Tactical and the second prairie dog I shot with the 30 gr. Gold ammo. This PD was messed up real good.
We didn’t rack up big numbers today. However, when you consider that Jeff only hit on 3 out of his first 9 shots, he did pretty good after that as I mentioned earlier. He wound up hitting 11 prairie dogs for the 22 shots he took. I was doing real good on my first three shots, hitting 3 for 3. I kind of got back to reality for a little while and wound up with only 4 hits for the first 7 shots!! I got my second wind and hit on 19 of my last 20 shots. My total for the day was 23 dead prairie dogs for 27 shots. Neither one of us got a double today and that’s where we usually make up for missed shots on many of our prairie dog outings. There just weren’t a lot of targets for us to shoot at today. We hunted pretty hard for about 5 plus hours and between the two of us we were only averaging 9.25 shots per hour!!! Pretty slow action by normal standards. One good thing though, we didn’t have to worry about getting our barrels too hot!!!!
Once again, though, I think we both had a fun day of shooting and spotting for one another. It was great to get out in the beautiful North Dakota badlands type country even if it was too windy and the prairie dogs weren’t plentiful. It isn’t always about bagging big numbers, but it is about getting out and about and the camaraderie between a son and father.
. Yes I really need one." 
