Long Range Ground Squirrel Hunting-TD257 Style!

Recently, I managed to get out with a couple of local YouTube hunting buddies.  BWalton and HunterOne.  I've posted and hunted with BWalton (Baxter) before but had never met HunterOne (Toby).......TILL NOW!  On this adventure, we head to a local area in the mountains that Baxter managed to receive permission to hunt on years ago.  Toby's and I are 1st time visitors there and the farm did not disappoint.  Watching previous videos from BWalton, I had loned to shoot this property with him.  The location and property are breathtaking.

  

As usual, we start off sighting in and it didn't take very many shots to get to center.  This was a good thing as the morning temperature was roughly 34+ degrees.  California has a way of being beautiful and HOT looking when its actually cold.  After all its the desert.  After sight-in, we all pick our spots that we wanted to occupy in the field. The field is roughly 300+ yards by 600 yards.  The draw for me coming to this local is that it would offer me long distance shots.  200+ yards and further.

The action proved to constant despite the cold weather.  Ground Squirrels in California don't necessarily hibernate and will sunbath and feed year round long as the sun is out and it feel moderately warm to them.  I was having slight issues with the guns performance due to the cold weather.  My Air Rifle is custom and the tolerances are close.  Many parts of the rifle are aluminum and some are steel.  This means the gun gets either very cold (winter months) or very warm (summer months).  The orings in the breech tend to drag along the barrel when its cold.  And this was the primary issue of the morning.  With a few short and long distance practice shots, I got a feel for the performance.  The 1st squirrel was at 60 yards and I missed slightly left of the squirrels noggin.  The next shot was dead on.  Ground Squirrel 1....down!  The next GS was 139 yards away but despite my gun shooting slightly lower speeds than normal, my mil-radian scopes hash marks still hold true for 12 yards each mark.  So it was still easy figuring out which hash mark was dead on at 139 yards.  At the shot, it dropped slightly to the right of the squirrel but dead on vertically.  A minute hold left on the 2nd shot provided a square upper torso hit which DRT'd the squirrel in its hole. The gun was becoming better and the morning was starting to heat up slightly.  The next bunch of shots down range found their marks with no follow up shots necessary.  My furthest shot was well over 200 yards but unfortunately, because of the dead/brown alphalpha stalks, distances over or near 200 yards became very hard to range accurately.  So i don't have an EXACT range number but trust me, it was well over 200 yards.  Our pesting session ended on a high note with BWalton and HunterOne shooting my TD257.  BWalton was up first and made a very near miss on a GS at over 210 yards.  He gave the gun over to Hunter1 and he managed to tag a GS at a lasered 194 yards.  His response was music to my ears.  He simply said, "WOW, THAT WAS EASY".  BWalton and HunterOne were very extactic to shoot the 257 that they have heard a lot about.  It lives up to the hype.

These are only a handful of pest that we took that day.  The rifles are from left to right: HunterOne's Hatsan Carnivore .30 cal tuned by BWalton.  Another Hatsan Carnivore 30 cal that BWalton was testing for 1 of his customers.  Tofazfou's TD257.

Left to Right: HunterOne, Tofazfou, BWalton

Tofazfou YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/tofazfou/videos

BWalton YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgeuw4_-CMvgevEFLGMFSFA/videos

HunterOne YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtWPWVSfSgJR0Z_zoLfrBmQ/videos

Stay Tuned for more HPA Adventures!

Tofazfou