No air gun expert here but 3 years ago I got my first... A .22 cal. Benjamin Trail with the Nitro Piston 2 system (break barrel). Seems awful quiet to me but some guys tell me there's others that are even quieter. My maximun range on squirrels is maybe 20 yards but it works for what I need it for. Even squirrel hunted with it just for grins. Chronographed it and getting 736-832 fps velocity depending on pellet weight. I was told .22 for fur, .17 for feathers which influenced me to .22 but it seems that I could have done much the same with a .177 but like I said; I'm still a relative newbie on air guns although I've been impressed by some of the other Crosman stuff, also.
I have the same one in .177. I was having a huge problem with squirrels raiding my fruit trees and probably killed about 200 of them over the course of 2 years. The .177 works fine on squirrels with the right pellets, and I was making kills out to 40 yards.
I live in a residential area about 40 miles from San Francisco, so I have to be pretty phuqin sneaky when I shoot around the house (I usually set up in a spare bedroom and shot at them as they would go in and out of their dens on the hill across from my house). The rifle isn't whisper quiet, but it was quiet enough that no neighbors ever heard enough to get curious. They did, however, wonder why there were so many dead squirrels.
