Armory Sponsor
Posted: 1/26/2003 11:07:36 AM EDT
I couldn't locate it with the search, but there was a thread on this board a month or so ago about whether or not .223 had enough legs to be effective on prairie dogs at long distance. I had a PD hunt planned, and all three of us who were going were planning on using .223's, but none of us had ever been before so we really didn't know how well it would work. Well, we just got back from a 3 day hunt in NE New Mexico, and we didn't feel at all handicapped by our .223's. We had been told to expect shots from 200-700 yards, but we didn't get a shot at less than 500 yards until the last day. The PD's were pretty wary if they were close enough to see our movement, and our shots were typically from 500 to 1000+ yards. One of the things we discovered is that it's very difficult to know for certain if you got a hit. Many shots were taken as the PD's stuck their heads up out of the holes. Sometimes, you'd shoot and wouldn't see the dust kicked up by a miss, and the PD would disappear, but you really couldn't know for sure if you'd hit the PD or not. The only way to verify a kill, and know the exact range, was for the shooter to stay on the scope while the spotter walked out to the mound and looked for a blood trail or a dead PD that had slid back down the hole after being hit. If we found a body, then we'd use the laser rangefinder to confirm the exact distance. Absent a recovered body, we had some that we called probables, and we'd estimate the range based on how much elevation we'd had to crank in to the scope. At any rate, we had confirmed kills as far out as 702 yards, and probables at 950. One of the other guys repeatedly sandblasted a PD with near misses at what we think was 1050-1100 yards (our range cards only went to 1000 yards, so after that it was a guesstimate), but he never connected on that particular PD. All three of us were using the Black Hills 77gr BTHP Match in flat topped AR's. The rifles were a Douglas barreled custom built on RR receivers, a Colt Tac Elite, and a Bushmaster Varminter. The Tac Elite was mine, and I was concerned that I'd be at a disadvantage based on the 20" barrel compared to the other guys' 24"ers (they had between 110 and 170 FPS on me), but my rifle seemed to do just fine, although I was having to dial in more elevation than they were for any given range. In the pic below the PD's we're holding were taken at a laser verified 578, 702, and 681 yards, respectively, all with a 20 MPH full value wind. If you haven't ever tried it, it's an absolute blast if you want to try your hand at ultra long range accuracy. 
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