Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Small Game Any shame in squirrel hunting with a shotgun???

No shame in shooting squirrels with a shotgun. Shotgun or air rifle is the only responsible thing to do in more populated area's.

On the WMA's I hunt most require the use of a shotgun. Glad you like to "piss off" the bowhunters who have made several trips from home to set up in a good spot to bow hunt for deer then on opening weekend a group of first timers come out and shoot up the trees. Real cool. I feel the WMA's should be closed to small game hunters during the first two weeks of bow season.

[bleep] the bowhunters. I pay as much for my license as they do and have just as much right to be out there. Small game seasons also existed long before bow seasons so it's bow hunters who are encroaching on small gamers, not the other way around. That being said, if I know there is a bowhunter in the area I will go somewhere else so as not to disturb his hunt. It's the ones you don't know are there and give you schit for ruining their hunt that get my dander up.

This ^^^^^^^

I bow hunt and yet totally agree with you. Nobody is entitled to special privilege on public ground. As a group I don't know any other single one group that are bigger whiners overall than bow hunters.

Gotta agree about the whining....this coming from a former bow hunter. I actually [out of courtesy] knock off squirrel hunting some of my woods, when the tree stands go up for bow season, here in Indiana.


maddog

Back to the OP. Nope...

I am overun with Squirrel's, so I shoot a lot of them on my property every year during the season. I use a little Rossi convertible barrel rifle. It has two barrels. A .410 and a .22 LR. The whole package weighs about 5 lbs. I can switch barrels in a minute, and for the tree rats that climb to the top I use the .22 barrel If they just stay low or try the old hide-behind the tree trick, I use the .410. If I shoot 30 or 40 in a season, next year there are another 30-40. Can't figure out how they can reproduce so fast. I give them away to friends who enjoy them. They are great to eat. I see no shame in using any weapon that will do them in without massacreing them so the meat is wasted.

Can't figure out how they can reproduce so fast.


Its called reproduction.....

I've still got my first gun, Ithica super single. That .410 is a squirrel killer. With #4's I can hit 'em in the head.

Since I usually do most of my hunting in the early season, I end up using a 16 or 20 ga with #5s. Too many people around anymore to use a 22.

Well yes. If you miss.

I agree Blackheart. One weekend a year out of an already too long 5 week archery season is not much to ask. And before you fall off your soap box Palidun, I am and have been a bowhunter for a long time and have had squirrel hunters, wood cutters, campers, dogs, hikers, bikers, and anything else you can imagine come by me while in a treestand. More important than worrying about the chance of upsetting a person or two on "public land" that I pay almost $150 a year to use through license fees is the teaching of a group of young kids to be careful and hunt clean and use what they take.

The whole piss off the bowhunters comment is tongue in cheek because without fail, some high and mighty elitist string puller gives me crap about a .410 or 22LR shot he heard and how it affected his carefully placed stand 100yds from the road when I am half mile away making a single shot. We avoid areas with vehicles parked for safety reasons, but the elitist will have you believe they deserve a 5 sq. mile radius to maintain the integrity of their stand . Hell one year I came out of my bowstand after seeing more deer than I ever have on a single sit to find a marathon checkpoint and refreshment station at my vehicle. I kept hearing them all morning and didn't know what was going on. They probably drove the deer to me . Last year a bowhunter we walked up on later thanked me for taking the kids hunting and teaching them right when we saw him leaving for the day. We apologized, but it was no big deal to him. Shame everybody doesn't get it.

I have to agree with the complaints about bowhunters' attitudes toward small game hunters. I have been inquiring around about squirrel hunting locally on private land. What I have been hearing from a number of local landowners is something like "Well, I let 'Joe' bowhunt for deer back in there, and he doesn't want anyone else walking around in there". Meaning for a couple of months before bow season.

The first time I heard this, I assumed that the landowner just didn't want to give me permission to hunt squirrels on his land, and was shifting the blame onto Bowhunter Joe, but after I had heard it a couple more times from different landowners who had different bowhunters hunting on their land, I realized just how possessive bowhunters get about the areas they have permission to hunt.
As bowhunting has increased in popularity here in Illinois, it has gotten harder to find places to hunt small game.

I mostly use a 20 gauge for all of my small game hunting. 5's or 6's and a modified choke.

Dan

Deer season lasts from mid-September to January in Missouri, when you add up the bow, firearms, and black powder seasons. Small game season lasts even longer, but I'm not giving up the entire autumn.

On the other hand, those long seasons mean we coexist with much less friction than the stuff you are describing.

And that is exactly why you are seeing a drop off in hunter recruitment.

No one has anywhere to small game hunt as an entry level to hunting anymore because of the entitled bowhunters.

It amazes me to see the measures these guys take to have the woods all to themselves and then the audacity to tell me how much better of a hunter they are than I am.

Hell, I could probably kill a deer with a rock if no one else was ever in the woods that I hunted.

I always thought the old 410 single shot was the best squirrel huntin rig out there...

Depends on how tall your trees are. Around here, a .410 won't dependably take limb chickens out of the top of a tall hickory if you're shooting straight up from the base of it.

As to the OP:

I sure hope not. I have a young 'un to introduce to harvesting limbrats this June season, and I think a shotgun might be easier for him to reliably hit with. Also, a box of .22 ammo here is rarer than an honest politician, which is to say I haven't seen any for a very very long time.