Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Rimfires Best 22LR load for terminal ballistics to about 150 on ground squirrels/PD's.

Any ideas besides Stingers?

Will stingers stay super-sonic out to 150??

I'd think any of the 40 gr. HP loads would do well enough, PowerPoints or CCIs latest version.

Stingers would more likely go whiffle-ball than not, I'd think.

I can't say "best" for your rifle but my Savage shoots Winchester-555s very well.
Nice audible Thwaaap! on prairie dogs and they are cheap.

I've had good results out to 200+ with Power Points. CCI Velocitors also hit hard, but haven't been quite as accurate, though it depends on the rifle.

The original Power Points (made in Australia) were my favorite ground squirrel rounds until Velocitors came out. The CCI load topped the WWs in both accuracy and velocity, and also made a decidedly larger "WHOP" at 100 yards. I've killed ground squirrels out to 125 or so with them with no trouble.

Thks. guys --appreciate the responses. I think i ordered every high vel. load i could find in the Midway catalog last week for testing, so i'll soon see.

Me thinks you will benefit most from pursuing accuracy rather than velocity.

I have found Velocitors to be the ticket for a hunting round in the .22LR, it's the only one I use now. Unlike MD's experiences, They have shot very well in my .22's. I would definetly try them.

The other day I just happened to be going through an old magazine and came upon an article on "The Longest Dog Contest".
Looks like JB did some fine 22RF shooting w/40 gr PP's, 232 yds on a prairie dog, and that wasn't good enough for first place.
Steve Timm nailed one at 342 yds in the 22 mag division to capture that title. The lowly rimfire is lethal farther out than one would imagine.

Yep, Johnny Barsness and Haviland were there. I believe it was Haviland's rifle.

Luck, sheer luck.

I aimed high, fired one shot and the prairie dog died

Same with me winning the Longest Dog with a centerfire. I was shooting Winchester Black Box Supreme ammo, fireforming the cases to .223 Ackley in my Lil Blue Thang.

I was killing dogs pretty well at 450 and 500 and decided to see if I could kill a dog at 684. The rules were "One Shot, No Sighters." So, I held where I thought I'd hit the dog and held way the hell high and into the wind.

My witness (which had to be a Winchester Exec) was Al Corzine, the inventor of the Winchester FailSafe bullet.

I fired, All said, "The bullet is looping over and .... [bleep], it just f..king centerpunched the dog ... wait, he'd falling over and bleeding as he rolls down the mound ... he's dead. dead. dead."

We hugged and screamed and yelled like a couple of idiots. And knew the shot was impossible. Perhaps that prarie dawg was doomed that morning, when he crawled out of the hole.

Hey, and so it was that I won a nice pair of Swarovski 7X30 binoculars. I've used the binos a lot and they are super-excellent.

God Bless,

Steve

PS. A couple of hours later, we drove down and found the prairie dog and I put a little blue prairie flower in the .224" hole in the center of his chest.

And I looked back at the bluff that I fired from. Kinda reminds me of that Texan fella that nailed the Commanche chief at Buffalo Wells or whatever.

Sometimes you get lucky and you have to accept it. Other times, I am a fracking idiot and miss [bleep] I shouldn't. Accept it and be happy.

Oh a little gun writer secret. Johnny Barsness went up to that cliff the next day. He found where Al and I were laying and he set up a bench and fired his Browning Low-Wall .243 from TWO YORDS FURTHER BACK. There were prairie dogs running and standing all over the mound that now lasered at 688 yards.

Remember the Johnny Horton song about "They fired their cannons 'til their barrels melted down ... then they loaded up a 'gator and fired another round" Johnny's .243 was like that. The dogs got shot at LOTS and they all lived.

Hey, luck is good.

ST

Yep, I shot all around a dog on the same hole for half-a-dozen rounds. Came very close every time, but never nailed it.

But there weren't a bunch of dogs running around on the mound. I only saw one at a time. They might have been different dogs, but all looked exactly the same. Eventually it (or they) decided it might not be a healthy place to be, no doubt because Steve had proven otherwise!

I do remember that I placed in the top 3 in every category of the shoot (.22 Long Rifle, .22 Magnum, centerfire) but didn't get a first place in any, due to LUCKY shots from Haviland or Timm.

A few years later I took part in another prairie dog shooting contest with a similar theme, where each shooter who made the longest shot with one of cartridges (.223, .22-250, .243, .25 WSSM) won a rifle. I killed a dog at 820 yards with my second shot with a .22-250, and though I had it locked up. Turned out that was the second longest shot of the contest--but the longest shot had been made by John Haviland, who killed one at 1300 yards after firing around 50 shots, also with a .22-250.
(The winning shots with the other rounds were all around 500 yards.)

I got revenge on Haviland a couple years later when I won an outoodr writer sporting clays shoot. John came in third and was really pissed....

All in GREAT fun.

We all realize that there is soooo much luck involved in shots like those described.

Amazingly, I started shooting from that bluff and the dogs that were at a 45� down angle were literally impossible to hit. The wind came dead into the bluff and u-swirled. I swear, if I placed a sheet of plywood down there with a prairie dog spray painted on it, I would simply shoot a ragged line all around the silhouette.

I prolly shot fifty shots at the dogs and hit maybe twenty ... at 200 yards. The prairie dogs at 400 and 450 were very much easier to hit. Go figger.

Blessings,

Steve

I have had a lot of fun using this little semi-custom Kidd-barrelled Charger as a walking prairie dogger outfitted up with a Harris bipod and Accu-Shot monopod. The 3-9x PFI scope is unbeatable for field use IMO. Actually killed a dog on the 1st shot with this rig last year at 290 using Fed. Auto-Match. Held at the 200-yd. mark [21 MOA] and added another 20 more via turret--





Problem is that i've found the higher velocity HP's do kill better than std. round nose at normal ranges of +/- 100. Heck even the Wal-Mart Fed. Bulk stuff does a better job than any of the RN's i've shot so far.

Nice shooting and a sweet set-up. Do you do any long range 22 mag?

No sir--i've considered getting one of the Excel Arms pistols in 22 Mag, but haven't gone that route yet. I always sort of considered the 22 Mag a bit too expensive to shoot much. But i'll probably do it some day. I just bought a new 2x Nikon and 2.5-8x EER Leupold that i have to put a turret on now--and that's 1 expensive outfit [but it does have 100 MOA of adjustment in it--the most available in a handgun of that magnification], so i've basically blown my wad.

Here's an unsual handgun setup that oughtta' net me 600-650 yds. screwin' around. Put 30 MOA into the base with a couple credit card shims and 40 in the rings with Burris Pos-Align inserts to maximize the turrets. I now have something like 160 MOA useable in the Nikon 2x's turret, then another 20 in the reticle [20 MOA plex]. At 600 yds. there is 24 MOA correction needed in a consistent 1 mph x-wind. I should be able to interpolate that using the 20 MOA plex post tips in the reticle for some semblance of "accuracy"...i think. We'll see about that though.--



Isn't it amazing to think that when you're shooting at 600 yds. with a 22 the bullet drops 80 ft. below line of sight? Not even sure if i'll ever even see the bullet impact out that far, but i'm gonna try. Should be a fun little experiment though.

For me, the best combination of price/accuracy/effectiveness on ground squirrels is the Winchester PowerPoints or Bushman ammo. Bought a box of 555's and they look promising. CCI segmented were nice and accurate but pricey. The Segmented HV are Stinger-length.

I use Power Points on Richardson's Ground Squirrels and they will kill them handily @ 150 yards, although this is a very long poke. Amazingly, I can hear the "plunk" of a solid hit way out there. I got about 1100 this Spring/Summer.

Shootings Prairie Dogs @ anything over 25 yards with a 22 Long Rifle makes me feel bad.

I use Federal solids in my Mossberg 152. I can shoot ground squirrels at 200 no problem.

I thacked on in the head today, I heard the smack after he dropped. "THACK" and the red mist.

It's all about accuracy, I can do this with the same gun mentioned.


No fancy scope for me.

Problem is that barrels become leaded up to various degrees in and around the 250 round mark.

Hyper velocity just adds to the problem.

I got to work with a guy that built the Olympic rifles that stomped the Russains in the 1990 Olympics(?) We tried all kinds of ammo, and they developed a new bullet, lube, case, primer, which ended up similar to the Federal Gold Medal Ammo that is now available.

The same guy always wanted to go and Rim fire p. dogs and ground squirrels. We went on a couple of trips to N. Ca. on ground squirrels shooting std velocity CCI along with CCI Green Tag. With the lack of a sonic crack, we had one heck of a shooting trip to say the least. A lack of a sonic crack kept the squirrels from going down, same thing with p. dogs a few months later as we found a calm day in N. Wyoming up the the rolling hills. We walked the bullets in on the dogs from some really long distances.

If you have a super accurate 22, clean it regularly with top quality bronze bristle brushes intended for Rimfire available from www.sinclairintl.com. As you push a brush through, examine the brush for lead, you will be very surprised. Depending on just how annal you are, you can clean after firing different types of ammo and see a remarkable difference in how much lead and powder fouling you pick up.

In my custom Ruger 10/22 that has a match chamber on a 40x barrel, it will put the CCI Standard Velocity in the same bullet hole at 75 yards. When the barrel gets a little leaded, the group will open up to about an 3/4". Even still, with the Leupold 6.5-20 with the target knobs taped for elevation, I can still adjust the shots in at 125 yards for one shot head shots in calm wind. After 200 yards the trajectory and the slightest wind becomes a Hail Mary on center of body shots.

I shot CCI Mini Mag HP on p. dogs to eliminate crawlers, which does a great job, but placing your shot is still key. In my rifle, the CCI mini mag HP held up the best when shooting 500+ rounds a day. Ammo is very different in the thickness of the copper coating on the bullet and bullet lube.

Search for a super accurate sub sonic round such as federal match or CCI standard velocity, you are a lot better off in the long haul, as 22 rimfires go from super sonic to sub sonic, they loose a lot of velocity.

It is against a lot of folks religion to clean their 22's, you need to re-think this mind set....use good bronze bristle brushes, throw them away after 100 strokes.