One problem I faced this year in practicing for Boomershoot was the dearth of 200-yard-plus shooting ranges in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Next year, if I’m going to be at all confident about shooting Boomershoot with a handgun, I’ll need lots of practice at 300-400 yards and more.
What to do? I think I’ve found the solution: Squirrels.
That is, Spermophilus beecheyi, the California Ground Squirrel.*
Everywhere else, people seem to shoot ‘chucks. Woodchucks, rockchucks, etc. Well, out here the closest thing is marmots, but I ain’t about to drive three hours to the Sierras just to shoot some specialized rat.
However, the East Bay Area has what seems like a hundred small ranches within thirty minutes of my house, and the ranches have a real problem with ground squirrels. They’re not as small as Analog Kid’s pool cues, but they’re about the size of a small boomer, and California classes ’em as varmints, so there’s no limit. Here’s a story about hunting Belding’s ground squirrels near Mt. Shasta.
I’ve already got a line on a couple local ranches where I should be able to get permission to hunt, and leads on a couple more…. If I can do well by the time of the Surprise Valley Squirrel Roundup in March, I should be well-prepared to whack some boomers!
If you think shooting cute little squirrels is just unbelievably cruel, you sound like one of these misguided Californians!
* The photo and story above are from Varmint Al’s website. Al is a retired nuclear weapons engineer, a precision reloader and varmint shooter, and has lots of other hobbies. I stumbled across his site almost ten years ago and decided that how Al spends his retirement is pretty much my ideal. I figure I have a couple of decades to convince my wife that it’s her ideal too.
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