That’s not me, but rather Dave the RNS Staff Photographer, who followed up a fantastic Boomershoot (in which he got bored with shooting boomers and started splitting the inch-and-a-half-wide stakes instead) by shooting his first two prairie dogs the week after, dropping ’em at 323 and 571 yards, respectively. That’s the kind of hits Boomershoot trains ya to make! He emails:
It was very windy and I was solo, with no spotter, so I had to read my own shots and adjust.
I started with the Savage .204, but without success, as the small 26 gr. bullets were blowing all over the place.
I moved up to the Tikka T3 .223 and made two confirmed kills using 68 gr. hollow points. These pics are of the second kill, which was at longest distance. The first was lasered at 323 yds.
Here’s the lair of one of ’em. If you click to embiggen you can see that little blob in the distance is Dave’s Suburban, lasered at 571 yards away. (!!!!)
Here’s the dearly departed:
Nice shootin’ — and all the more impressive with no spotter! I hope to try the same thing on some California ground squirrels someday.
At Boomershoot, I was shooting only on the right side of the 380 yard berm to start with, and since hitting the little boomers there is difficult, I was somewhat dismayed when I hit my third one and it fell off the stake. When it was my turn to spot, I noted a number of boomers that had either had their rubber bands cut or the stakes split, and were lying down.
A boomer lying down will probably not get exploded.
If “bored” Boomershooters are trying to split the stakes and knock the boomers over, that’s less for the rest of us. If Dave was just trying to split stakes which were still upright with no boomer on them, that’s fine.
Since boomers are not assigned to individual shooting points or shooting teams, the sporting thing to do is to either explode them or leave them to be exploded by another shooter.
There were quite a few fairly-struck boomers which did not go off. Let’s not make that issue worse by knocking any over instead of exploding them.
Oh, no; Dave was whacking and splitting stakes without boomers.
He was splitting stakes on a clinic/field fire day; not the day of Boomershoot.