Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Long Range Hunting LR Hunting - Why?

I take it you have never hunted over a big field of winter wheat?

Too interesting. I am not a long range hunter.......because.........I don't possess the skills to shoot that far. If I did I would be!!!


Be it 70 yards or 700 yards you hunt your way..........others will hunt theirs!


This isn't the place to rain on ones parade!!!

Last night at work my boss informed me that he shot his kudu while it was running, and he was in a moving vehicle from a distance of 573 yards. Is he the greatest or what? He says he shot it "freehand". I was so impressed.
I normally use a rest of some kind to make a shot at half that distance.
whelennut

Cacciatore,
I could show you some places in Minnesota where you cannot see five feet in front of you and can hardly walk it is so thick.
This is where the big deer go after opening day. I could not even get a pistol through there. So it is better for me to sit on a power line right of way and shoot at them as they go across. I learned this from my father-in-law. These deer are usually walking but sometimes running. I am not fast enough to hit the running ones because the right of way is not very wide.
I have made shots that infuriate my brother in law because he say it is to far. (I made the shot though)
He has a cheap rifle and a cheap scope and he never practices.
So it is to far for him.
I have a custom barrel on a Model 70 with a target scope on it.
I have put many rounds through it at measured distances and I know the trajectory. I only take shots that I am confident that I can make. They have not all been clean kills but taking shots at 50 yards in the swamps at alerted and running deer would not all be clean kills either. Somebody tell me how you can be certain that every bullet goes as planned when there are trees in the way and the deer can move at any instant. If it isn't moving already. My brother in law and I have almost gotten into a fist fight over this several times. He came really close to losing it one year when I paced off a kill at only 225 paces?
We had a lady miss a deer at 20 feet this year with her 30-30.
A friend of his I might add. I took one at 300 this year. It was
the only shot I had all season. For me that was a long shot but I don't have a problem with the guys on this board if they take shots at twice that distance, more power to them.

And used no holdover either cause the moving vehicle offset the drop....

Whelen,
I have hunted in the easter part of Minnesota many times with pumpkin throwers. I am originally from LaCrosse, WI and do most of my hunting in that county. It seems almost everything around LaCrosse is steep and thick. So i'll pass on the trip to see some thick places. I have unfortunately grown up being told "you go walk up that ridge and through that brush......and don't make a big circle around it.....go through the center." I used to carry a 20ga Remington 1100 with a short barrel and trimmed stock in case one were to get up and lick me in the face.....I hated carrying it. I would have been better off in my old football spikes and something to cover every inch of my body. I still have scars from some of the berry bushes. In fact I have had to wear a patch for 3 weeks after getting a scratch on my eye.
I also shoot IMO decent equipment....7mm WSM A-bolt with a 3-9x50 Leupy on it and I practice quite often.
I have made some longer shots and some short shots.
I also never said that I that anyone can be certain everything is going to go as planned. My point was only to understand why someone would intentionally wait for a longer shot to increase the difficulty when they were presented with a closer more certain shot.

Here is one I took in 96' in Minnesota with a 12ga pumpkin thrower. I love hunting the rut there.

NICE buck.
Jeff

Thank you sir. It was a fun hunt.

Dragging is 218lbs field dressed butt out of the woods wasn't though. Luckily that was when I was in good shape or I still may be dragging 11 years later.

Cacciatore,
Nice buck! I was just trying to explain that to some folks in Northern Minnesota 300 yards is a crazy long distance poke and hope. Mostly because they buy the cheapest equipment they can find at a discount store and never practice at all. ((or very little) I wouldn't wait for a longer shot myself but maybe they are bored and want to challenge themself. I don't understand why people wait to get one with bigger horns because where I hunt you may only get one chance all week. It is different everywhere.
I know people who never got a shot all season and were very jealous that I got one little doe.
I try not to condemn anyone for the way they hunt if it is legal.
We need to stick together if possible.
We had a fourteen year old shoot one a mile south of us that dressed out at 256 lbs. (I'm jealous)
whelennut

I did not intend to condemn anyone. I am all for sticking together....or I wouldn't bother coming on here.
I don't have a problem with long range shots if the person is comfortable with them. I just didn't understand the logic behind passing on the closer one for a longer one.

I apologize if it sounded like I was condemning it. I would never tell anyone they should think as I do or feel as I do. I just didn't understand.....call me thick.

We have to remember, and I am/was guilty, heated debates over keyboards are such. I can't see your face, expressions, tone of voice, we can't continually carry this conversation on face to face, by the fire, most things would resolve with a few laughs in the end.

Cacc, ain't been in WI or IL in a number of years. I remember I was in Janesville WI in taxidermy school and saw a "big doe" on the way to Gander Mountain years ago, being from TX wanted to see the store. Thought the doe was big.... local guys laughed and called it a fawn or yearling. Sure enough about that time, a "doe" stepped out. We have some dog deer here, its the size they need to be to survive, yours are the same way. They are large for sure. Best I ever shot was down south, rack wasn't much(I never see a good set of antlers seems.... and can't afford to hunt the good areas anyway....)but he was 224 gutted. That deer was big to me. 300wtby 180 partition, the neck stopped the bullet!! I had to shoot him again with a handgun to finish him..... PS wouldn't have to shoot 4-6 deer for sausage if they were your size either...

Jeff

I hear ya. For the record, I would never get into a heated debate on here......debate sure....but never heated. I enjoy hearing others experiences, ideas, knowledge, etc. When I don't understand something, I ask.


224 is a big deer.
We do have some big deer where I hunt back home. I shot a 168lbs field dressed doe two years ago. I had to look twice to make sure it wasn't a buck.

bushcraft,

Your analogy is weak at best....

The sniper course while difficult and challenging is not all based on accuracy. Shooting is only one requirement to pass the course. Remmber the weapons they use are built by master armorers and are capable of holding a required 1 MOA typically better. However, they are using factory match ammo while good not the best.
LrHunters are using custom rifles built for the purpose and using handloaded ammo that has been tuned, fine tuned and retuned, to achiee optimum accuracy.
To be an accomplished LRhunter you need years of practice in all types of situations and conditions.
So easily does the ignorant public view LRhunting as buying the biggest magnum you can and sitting upon a hilltop trying to throw lead as far as you can.
Years are spent understanding and learning ballistics and how it affects bullet flight and the charactieristics of downrange perfomance. No easy task and there is new information all the time. I will easily go on record and say most LRhunters are as accomplished as any SRhunter. More often that not have a better understanding and put to use a practical application for true bullet perfomance and ballistics than most SRhunters.
I will also go on record and say most LRhunters spend way more time yanking triggers and fine tunig their shooting techniques and skill than most if not all SRhunters. I have met very few ( keep in mind I have guided for years and now own an oufitting business )SRhunters that have an understanding of what a bullet does past 300 yards and very little if any idea what ballistics are and how a rifle and it's components really work together to achieve accuracy.
You call it what you will Shooting or Hunting.
I will go again, on record and say that most if not all the LRhunting friends I have spend just as much time afield scouting and paterning/learning the habits of their intended quary as any other type of hunter. Again we just don't go look for the spot with the best vantage point.
Ignorance is bliss...
maybe you and a few others should take some tme a get to know a LRhunter. You might just find we have more in common with the SRhunter than you think.

Your boss is either one of the best shots in the world, extremely lucky, or tells really good fish stories

Your rebuttal, while lengthy and almost entirely tangential (while remaining true to the core statements made by so-called long range "hunters"), skirts the concept of shooting at something that has absolutely no chance of discovering or detecting that it is being hunted...thereby merely reducing the activity to a shooting exercise. Sure you've got to know some basic habits of the animal you are shooting at (hopefully), but you might as well be "hunting" a steel gong, a paper target or the far of freshly laid cowpie.

Now, if you really want to sharpen your hunting skills or increase the challenge...take up a spear!

Not my balliwick mind you, but there is a fellow hereabouts that has been doing so succesfully every year for some time now...with deer and elk...on the west side of our state - which has some of the thickest underbrush found anywhere.

He's kind of a brute of a fellow and I find it humorous when everyone takes their bragging about "bow hunted this" to "rifle hunted that" when he walks in the place.

Bush/Wyo

Allow me, if I may, to jump in here. I've got a spear, a few bows, and a few long shots to say the least under my belt....

The deal here with some folks is that they insist they are holier than others in the definition of the word hunting and that at XYZ yards its no longer hunting. Thats fine with me. A bit anal IMHO but still ok.

What I insist on though, is that the skill level to each "extreme" end is the same, with the skill of the long shot, again IMHO being harder to come by.

I say this and have no spear kill yet, haven't really tried it more than 2 times. But I say it having a recurve kill at 3 yards on the ground, not in a tree... The years it took to get that kill were fewer than the years it took me to learn longer shots and the conditions that go with that skill. I've put in a LOT more time shooting, than "learning" to hunt. I've got much more success hunting much quicker than it took me to understand 600 yard shots to the point that they became chip shots. 1000 is still not totall perfect but getting there.
I'll also add that I can quit shooting at times, and when I come back I'm rusty but ok generally. When I quit hunting for 10 months waiting on th next season, I fall right back into the groove as good as the last season. Of course there are, IMHO, many more things one has to know to shoot vs the few things one needs to know to "hunt"

Call er what you feel best with, black rifle, hunting rifle, assault weapon or whatever, skill is still required. Hunting or shooting is just a word.

Jeff

So, let me get this right. Your goal is to let the animal discover it is being hunted so as to give it a fair chance? Not sure if you realize this, but that often leads to a running animal, which would mean a running shot, which is really not the best scenerio. This also reduces your activity to shooting excersize.

While a marginal attempt at discrediting my rebutle. Your saying that every tree stand hunter is participateing in a shooting excersize as well. Afterall, isn't that what treestands are for? You know, setting youself above the line of site dressed in camo (save the orange requirement) and hopefully lofting your scent above the animals detection as well? All in an attempt to insure the animal does not know your are there. Hmmm, kinda like....

So what is your point really? If there is one. Or, maybe you just wanted to be heard. Which only shows that you arn't here for anything constructive, just to be confrontational. Which is again, weak at best, because you're ignorant about LRhunting as your parallels are weak.

Did the deer he was hunting have a gun or something? I failed to be impressed. I see nothing difficult about killing a deer with a spear. I would assume a large percentage of us who bowhunt have been close enough to do it many times.

What the guy does is no different from what any of the rest of us do. He takes a particular aspect of hunting and works hard to refine his skills to the level necessary to succeed.

rost495,
As far as I know it's not illegal so I am all for long range shooting/hunting. You can only watch a trail for so long. Anyhow I want to see if I can take a big buck next year and I think my best bet is getting where I can see a long ways and then take the shot. Near or far. Instead of arguing about right or wrong,
how about answering a question for me? I think I remember you refering to the 7mm Magnum as NOT on the cutting edge of technology. OK, what is your choice for cartridge and what bullet weight would be ideal for deer up to 250 lbs? Say your shots were limitd to a maximum of 600 yards because of adjacent privately owned property. My first choice would be 7mmMag with 160 Sierra BT because I have one already and it works.