Well, we made a full day out of it yesterday but we saved a farmer a whole lot of barley in the process. Last Saturday went I killed 15 I estimated that I had seen maybe 70-75 before I quit for the day & that tuesday (yesterday) we would make them pay a heavy price for munching all that free barley, and we did! We started at 7am, me, one of my 4 son's & his 14 year old son. The 3 of us shot 36 chucks in the morning before the heat run us off for a lunch break back to town. We also popped quite a few ground squirrels & one field lion but we were mainly focused on chucks.
Again this year there has been a warning in the paper about some ground squirrels carrying the plague, its best not to pick them up bare handed or even handle them at all, so beware if you are a first time squirrel hunter, the plague is some bad stuff! This front page story was in the Idaho State Journal a few weeks ago.
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After a trip back to town we still had some time to kill so we made a quick trip to one of Butch Cassidays favorite towns (he liked to rob it) where we picked up a hog my son had butchered. After putting it in the freezer we headed back out for the afternoon hunt. Grandson Mason was running a little low on 223 ammo so I grabbed some of mine that I had loaded for my AR & we headed back out.
It had started to cloud over a bit & the wind was picking up a little, there were some scattered rain showers going on around us but we didn't get wet, although the wind kept the chucks down in the low spots a bit. Many of these old lava craters are deep & the chucks can get down in there & get out of the wind, making it really tough to approach them. This was going to make it a challenge. This is one I sneaked up on & shot in one of the sunken craters with my 32/20 Blackhawk using a 113 gr. HP, it really "rocked" him.
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We finished the afternoon with another 39 chucks for a total of 75 in one day! A new record but I way under estimated the number of chucks on this guys place, we didn't get half of them & I'll be going back in the next couple of days. Some of these old chucks are huge & they can really eat a lot of barley in a hurry.
This is my son Travis & his 14 year old son Mason, I was really proud of Mason, he has a couple of muleys under his belt, a very good black bear, a B&C antelope but not very many rock chucks until yesterday. He changed that, yesterday he got 47. breaking my old record.
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You can see the barley above this lava reef, not so much below it. I killed a bunch of rock chucks here, they eat it right down to the dirt.
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This bad boy was sneaking down the edge of the field & I bush whacked him with the 30 Carbine shooting 32/20 loads, the 113 gr. HP really punched his ticket. The only thing that moved was his tail, it flipped around for 5-10 seconds & it was lights out at aboout 1350 fps.
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This is one of the sunken craters where the chucks like to get down out of the wind, this is where I shot the sneaky one with the 32/20. There are hundreds of these in the area. The tall reefs can be 20-30 feet tall & many run for several miles, almost always in a north-south direction.
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This was a chuck harvest to help a friend & many were taken with rifles, all of mine were taken with the TC 221 FB or my 8 shot 327 or the 30 Carbine shooting 32/20's since the only rifle I own is an AR. 90 chucks in 2 days & we've taken far less than half, I've got some work to do.
Dick
