Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters A Close-in Deer Rifle

"I also learned it was much easier to hit game running away, whether straight away or at an angle like trap shooting than when crossing through intervening cover. This largely due to what I call for lack of a better description, "the picket fence effect" wherin over magnified, blurry, intervening cover can make it difficult to time a shot when there's a clear path from bullet to game."

You keep insisting that you know more than anybody else about shooting close-range game, including this quote. But as far as I can tell from your posts, you hunt only in New York, and maybe another neighboring state or two.

You might be interested to know that hunting winter jackrabbits in Montana mostly involves hunting sagebrush--because that's what they use for both food and cover. Depending on the year and location, it's generally knee-high, and sometimes waist-high. When they're in the sage "thickets" they're typically found in during the colder months, one of the best methods for hunting is after a fresh snow, when you can track them into a thicket, which can be anywhere from 20-100 yards wide.

You can then walk around the edge of the thicket, to see if their tracks leave. If they don't, then you go back to where their tracks enter, and follow 'em up, keeping your eyes open. Sometimes you'll find the jack "hiding" under a sagebrush--where they can be very hard to see because the white-tailed species (the kind we primarily have in Montana) turns white in the winter. Sometimes all you can see is their dark eyeball, and if so can get a very close-range shot.

But more often they jump and run, and they're not only running through 1-3 foot high sagebrush--some even between "thickets"--but they bound as much as 10 feet, meaning the target is not only moving fast, but up and down--unlike a cottontail. (And yes, we have plenty of cottontails in Montana too--and I've hunted plenty of them as well.) This can get pretty tricky.

Mule deer also bound up and down unless running flat-out, and in fact usually do when jumped in thick cover, like what is known as "peckerpole" lodgepole pine. The timing is interesting here too. I've found it easiest to hit them by timing when they hit the ground, rather than at the peak of their bound--the opposite of jackrabbits bounding through sagebrush, which are often only visible (and hittable) at the top of their bounds.