Читать книгу Gun Digest 2011 - Dan Shideler - Страница 26

LIGHT CARTRIDGES FOR DEER: A New Shooting Trend — or Impending Disaster?

BY L.P. BREZNY

Author zeroing his .22-250 Savage from a bench rest table. Accuracy is very much required when using .22 centerfires for big game.

It was the third and last deer season in western South Dakota. That meant the air temperature was hovering around eight degrees above zero, and the winds off the Big Horn mountains were gusting to a strong 55 mph, with a constant breeze settling in at about 35 mph. Not the best day for deer hunting, but the only one our group of four hunters had. Tom Hanson, my friend and neighbor on our South Dakota mountain hideout, had been glassing several deer down on a wide flat half-cut winter cornfield about an hour north of home for better than an hour. With the time now approaching 8:00 a.m., Tom knew that very soon those whitetail would bed down about mid-field and at that point it would be time to move down against the stiff wind, walk the corn row edges, then glass between the quarter-mile long rows until a target could be located.

With a pair of hunters blocking the natural exit route downwind on the field, two more took up positions on each side of the field, but at a staggered pattern with a good 150 yards between each of them. This was to establish a safe fire zone and not shoot across that short cornstalk-infested flats and thereby hit the hunter on the opposite side. Now with everyone in position, it was time to glass and comb those rows. Maybe with luck, some winter meat would be brought to the table.

Tom and another friend, Jerome Bressler, had already hunted the corn a week earlier. At that time the same system had netted four plump doe, and on this wind-driven morning, the system would be exactly the same. Now the hunt was about to progress. Jerome and I had drawn long straws, and it was my job to take the position on the back side of the corn field as Jerome walked the two-track roadside a full 200 yard to my rear. Glassing his half of the long clean rows of slightly snowdrifted corn stalks as I did the same on my side, we proceeded down the mile section toward our blocking partners, working as a team.

At about mid-field, a large doe stood up and walked directly across my end of the field. She was at or close to 200 yards and standing in a location that presented a clean, clear shot. I was using a set of Bog Pod shooting sticks, and they were extended to my full shoulder height. Moving back against a fence post so as to steady myself against the gusting wind, I locked down my crosshairs, dropped a half breath from my lungs, and touched off a round, which consisted of a 55-grain Norma ORYX soft nose bullet. At the shot, the .22-250 Remington was sent downrange by the Savage Predator turnbolt rifle. The doe shuddered a bit, then turned away, breaking into a slow trot toward some higher-standing cornstalks.

Knowing the drill that had taken place all to often in my 50-plus years of hunting whitetail, I moved my rifle scope sight immediately to the far side of the thick cornstalk stand and waited for the old girl to emerge. Show up she did. Now the range had been extended another 50 to 75 yards yards, and I was wishing for my tried and true .25-06 pushing a 117-grain Sierra boattail bullet as loaded by Federal Cartridge. This was my go-to load in most cases on the wide-open western South Dakota prairies, but today I was in a test mode, and as such the .22-250 had gotten the call that cold windy morning.

The .223 round is a military lightweight and not a proven big game cartridge at all.

The S&W M&P-15-T performs well as a coyote rifle, and the author also took deer with it.

Pushing the muzzle of the Savage Predator into the slightly angling high wind that was coming from my left, I reset my sights for added windage and touched off round number two. Again the doe seemed to shudder and shift her weight a bit. However, again she turned away and proceeded to move on down the field in the general direction of the blockers waiting at the other end.

With the doe out of sight and nothing going on in the direction of the blockers, Jerome and I both started to converge on the location at which I had made the second hit on the deer. We were lucky that we had fresh snow and short corn to deal with. In effect, if that deer was hit anywhere close to the vitals, we could stay on her track all day if necessary. With about 100 yards of a zig-zagging trail we located the deer. She was down and stone dead, laying directly between two rows of corn stubble. Two bullets had entered her left side vitals, but no exit wound or blood trail was visible. The small .224 bullets had entered the animal, leaving the hide to close over the entry wound, then causing all the blood given off by one bullet to the liver and a second hit to the lung to pool in the lower portion of the chest cavity.

In effect, the 55-grain softnose bullets were not energy-effective against the 155-pound animal. The ratio of bullet mass to body mass just didn’t compute in this very direct and obvious test scenario. Tom had dropped a pair of adult does in the same field by way of his handloaded 55-grain Ballistic Tip .224 bullets that were turning up about 3200 f.p.s. velocity. Shooting his R-15 by Remington topped by Burris 4.5 X14 glass sights, he had elected to take head/neck shots on the two animals and thereby dropped both in their tracks with the light-caliber rifle. Here was the classic example of bullet placement getting the job done.

Jerome, with his DPMS AR Hunter in .243 Winchester and the 95-grain Winchester boattail, still elected to shoot neck shots on the cornfield at under 150 yards. As Jerome says, when in doubt take the best shot possible regardless of the rifle being put to work. Good advice in any big game harvesting situation! Was the data returned by my two partners valuable? Of course it was, as any kill can be a learning curve of sorts. With accuracy being a given – all the local Dakota hunters I have spent time with afield can shoot for sure – the next element to success is body area placement. Light bullets and small calibers require placement in areas of the body that will result in immediate neurological takedown, versus a more prolonged death caused by blood loss.

About two days after the cornfield hunt I was at home working in my office when my wife Colleen indicated that a wounded buck was walking through our back forty. Glassing the deer I could see a full left hind quarter was just about shot away, or eaten away. As we have big cats here in the northern foothills of western South Dakota’s Black Hills, I was not at all surprised. Getting a call into my local game warden I was given the green light to take the animal down. My weapon of choice in this case was the S&W M&P-15-T that was standing in the hallway with a loaded five-round magazine in the receiver well. (Out here in the wild west it is common practice to keep a rifle in the kitchen.)

The .223 can take deer humanely, given perfect shot placement, but there are better choices for the task.

Heading outside and reaching a large tree trunk, I steadied myself and then touched off a round with the Gem Tech-suppressed quiet gun, and the 36-grain Black Hills brand Barnes Varmint Grenade did the rest of the job. At 170 yards, and with bullet placement at the base of the head/neck, the hurting old buck never knew what hit him. That VG bullet made of dusted or sintered copper coring and a solid copper jacket just turned to a gas inside his head and upper spine area. With a muzzle exit velocity of almost 3700 f.p.s., this little fast mover did the job with both velocity and accuracy.

This fancy dressed AR is a big part of the reason some have lobbied for light rifles in the field. However, at what price in wounded game?

With my partner’s kills and the example I just related to you, am I saying that the .224 or any light bullet is appropriate for taking big game animals the size of deer or even antelope cleanly? Yes – but only if all the conditions regarding bullet placement location, range, and rifle accuracy have been met. In South Dakota we often hunt rolling, open prairie land, flat grain or crop fields, or other areas that allow a good visual and ideal tracking conditions on an animal that takes a hit. Lacking these conditions, the net effect can be a lost animal.

EASTERN STATES AND .22S FOR DEER

While we can and do get away with shooting very light rifles on deer and antelope out here in the wide-open west – again, due for the most part to being able to locate an animal after the shot – I don’t believe the same can be said for areas of the country that contain whitetail in heavy cover. Based on what I have seen and will elaborate on a bit later, I tend to believe that it is asking for trouble to allow a hunter into the woods in, say, Minnesota with a .223 Remington loaded for deer. How can I make that judgment, being a Dakota hunter? Because I spent about 50 years of my life hunting whitetail not just for trophies, but in old-school meat events in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Believe me, friends, I know what I am talking about here, and slapping a bullet into a big northern Minnesota swamp buck’s vitals and then tracking him through black willow, swamp bottoms, and heavy buck brush ain’t my idea of a good day at the office. The bottom line here is that you’re going to lose game. Woodland states that enact legislation that allows the use of light cartridges such as the .223 for big game seem to be missing the obvious, and according to some I have discussed this issue with, seem to care less about wounding the critters. I think the .22 as a big game cartridge in these conditions, or for the most part in almost all conditions, is nothing but a careless stunt!

Yes, I have observed a professional hunter with hundreds of kills under his belt take down even trophy whitetail with a .220 Swift and a medium Winchester 55-grain pointed softpoint bullet. However, now we’re getting back to range, bullet placement, and just plain know-how, which in turn moves us into the second phase of this discussion: the suitability of heavy-hitting .22s beyond the .223 Remington or even the .22-250 Remington as big game harvesting tools.

INCREASED FIREPOWER, OBVIOUS RESULTS

Staying with the .224 caliber bullets in weights well below 100 grains, I undertook several hunts at one point in my rather detailed study of the newer Winchester Super Short .223 WSSM. Targets were antelope and deer in combination, with an additional goat hunt in western South Dakota.

Moving to the .223 WSSM gave me the opportunity to experiment with several variables. In addition to increased velocity and energy, different bullet designs were employed in the field, such as a Barnes 62-grain TSX and a 53-grain TSX flatbase, thereby increasing accurate range and retained energy. I could have turned to the new Norma 55-grain soft point ORYX pills loaded in the .220 Swift, which moves at about the same velocity as the .223 WSSM, but I didn’t have a Swift on hand, and I did have a .223 WSSM in a Winchester Model 70 Feather Weight. That rifle and those paired cartridges had already chalked up positive history of several goats and whitetail deer.

With antelope being the primary target, and having several doe kid tags to fill, my target weights were at or near 100 pounds. Now I was setting out in northern Harding country South Dakota, with the first in my pair the handloaded Barnes 62-grain bullets. The handload pushed the Barnes TST at 3628 fps behind a burning mass of Varget in a 38.5 grain charge. This load was max for Varget and the Barnes bullet but was able to stay close to the Swift even at its increased grain weight. As an example, the .220 Swift when loaded with a 53-grain Barnes TSX FB bullet leaves the muzzle at a maximum velocity of 3882 if pushed by a 43.5 grain charge of AA 2700. “Yes, a couple of hundred feet faster,” you’re saying – but also a bullet nine grains lighter with less kinetic energy on target after the speed thing begins to dry up a bit down range. In my book it all balances out when comparing very high velocity loads and modest grain weight changes back to back. Speed kills, and with light bullet and small calibers you can’t get them moving fast enough. Even a slight change in grain weight can return major dividends at the target in terms of raw energy, which translates into killing force.

My first goat taken with the .223 WSSM was a young buck within legal kid goat size (horn length). He was angling across a shallow draw and moving directly across me from right to left at a bit under 100 yards. He had just cleared a fence and seemed to be more interested in what was following him than he was in me. Shooting off a set of Bog Pod sticks, I saw my shot hit just behind the shoulder, about mid-body. The antelope reacted much like those whitetail had during the late season doe hunt in that cornfield, and after hunching up a bit, he just trotted over the ridge and out of sight. Moving up the draw quickly so as to get another crack at him, I now observed the animal going up a steep rise right to left. knowing that game in general won’t go uphill when hit hard, I clearly understood that this guy required an additional shot in the vitals. Round two hit him higher, and with the addition of that second bullet he went down hard. Both bullets had exited the back side of the critter, with the first hit taking out a lower section of lung and the second the top of his heart. In this case a shot inside 150 yards maximum (the second shot) had done a good job. Now, however, the question still remained: did the first round make him sick enough to fall to the second hit? I guess we will never know, but a subsequent pair of goats a few weeks later did shed some additional light on the subject.

This whitetail buck can be taken at reasonable range limits, but bullet placement is everything when shooting light rifles.

Glassing a water hole on my friend Randy Routier’s ranch hunting operation at Buffalo, South Dakota, I had been camped out on a ridge top for two days and had been sitting in wait for a good buck to show up with his harem of doe goats. It was well into the first season at this point, and these animals were skittish to say the least. About mid afternoon on the second day of my hunt, 11 goats came walking up a draw and onto the water hole. Seeing no trophy buck in the bunch, I set aside my .25-06, a go-to system for long-range trophy work, and looked down the .223 WSSM at a good-sized (over 100 pounds) goat. The .223 WSSM was loaded with the Barnes 53-grain TSX flatbase at the same velocity as the Swift (3913 f.p.s.) via 40.5 grains of Varget. Aiming again at the point again just behind the left shoulder and a bit high, I caught the doe’s heart and one lung with the Barnes. At the shot my doe just walked off the edge of the stock tank, then proceeded to fall over within about 15 yards. Like the previous .223 WSSM kill, no bullet was recovered. At a range of 125 yards, everything in the bullet department was moving just too fast for the small-frame animal to hold that pill in place.

It should be pointed out at this time that handloading Barnes bullets in a .223 WSSM with a bore twist rate of 1 in 9 inches means keeping the grain weight under that of the tested 62-grain TSX bullet. My rifle, however, while not being known to shoot accurate groups with that heavy bullet, did return game harvesting accuracy. In most cases, it is best to stay with the published game plan for the .223 WSSM in a factory rifle and shoot the 53- to 55-grain or lighter bullets. As a final note, remember: it is always advisable to test on paper extensively before going afield.

Over the course of three hunts I elected to turn to the .223 WSSM, which resulted in two of my own goats, an assist on a third for a friend, and and an additional whitetail. In each case the fast moving .22 caliber got the job done, but not always within easy walking distance from the point at which the animal was first hit by the light bullets.

MORE POWDER AND MORE BULLET

When my partner Mr. Bressler elected to turn to his DPMS .243 on that cornfield hunt and subsequent hunts later in the season, he was eliminating the possible loss of an animal because of underachieving ballistics downrange as applied to lighter bullets and rifles. After spending almost two full years with the .224 caliber bullets in a variety of cartridges that ranged from high velocity to very high speed varmint type separators, I came to the conclusion that when you can use medium calibers that offer state-of-the-art ballistics performance, why even bother with the small stuff? The move to a .25 WSSM, 25-06, and, yes, even the 243 Winchester clearly illustrated a major step forward in performance. In terms of selection, about equal time was split between the .25 WSSM and .25-06 with an industry cull hunt using the 243 Winchester stuck right in the middle. It was a convenient series of hunts, and I managed to get a great deal accomplished in terms of some back-to-back comparisons.

Shooting a new Speer test bullet at 100 grains during the cull hunt, I was assigned to a tower stand on a very wide open trail that was boarded by heavy pine forest, and then given a list of what to take and exactly where to place the shots. In all cases the .243 out to 235 ranged yards did a good job of cleanly taking my test subject with single well-placed shots. Shooting involved right angle vital shooting, sharp angle shots from back to front, and head-on shooting for vital penetration testing. Special metal-sensing systems used in detecting land mines (no, I’m not kidding) were employed to locate bullets that had not passed through the targets.

That deer shoot had been the official type event, but then I headed back to South Dakota and a few other states, hunting on my own for some detailed review time with the .25 WSSM and .25-06 Remington. With a buck license on a wide-open prairie unit and a second doe tag as well, I went to work with my Model 70 Winchester chambered in .25 WSSM. The bullet was the 110-grain Accu Bond in a Winchester factory wrapper. Bullet choice was Winchester factory or handloads, due in fact to the cartridge being loaded only by Winchester at the time of that test shooting. Federal was making brass for a period of time, or at least some of it crossed my reloading dies with their headstamp on them, but the WSSM line in all calibers is a exclusive product of the Winchester folks.

My first South Dakota kill involved a nice buck at 225 yards. I had been belly-crawling this guy all mid-morning for a clean, clear shot. He was courting three doe whitetail and was paying very little attention to the green and brown blob that was crawling toward him out on the open prairie. When I got set for my shot, he was clear of the does and now presented a solid left-to-right broadside vital area bullet contact point. At the shot, the deer, which I judged to be about three years old, dropped to his belly, never moving even a foot forward. The Accu Bond 110-grain bullet had done its job, and I was gaining more interest in this short, fat super-cartridge that had been thought up by Winchester. With two additional deer taken with the .25 WSSM, I was seriously wondering why anyone would even start to take up the .224 caliber bullet as a serious deer harvesting system. To me it was much like shooting waterfowl with a 28 gauge. It just didn’t fit the proper profile of a game harvesting gun system.

Author with a full-size deer target when setting up his Savage Predator .22-250 for taking big game with the .224-caliber bullet.

With some additional hunting with my old and well-used .25-06 matched with Federal 117-grain Sierra bullets, it was clear that under almost all conditions – with the exception of some ultra high wind and long range work with a .300 Win Mag– the .25-06 family of cartridges could meet the requirements of a very good deer round each and every time. For the most part I had not even moved into the 7mms or the 30-calibers, for I found enough solid performance from those 6mms and .25s to fit any ballistics requirement for whitetail deer.

Norma supplied many of the bullets used in this review. For a general-purpose round in the .223 Remington, the Norma Oryx 55-grainer is hard to beat.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

In most cases I would be the last guy to ever come down as dictating guns and loads for sport hunting. I don’t like the massive shooting restrictions encountered so often especially in many of the eastern states. However, as illustrated in the main body of this review, the .224 caliber family of cartridges tends to come up short in the delivered performance department even at close range when the smaller .222 Mag and .223 Remington have been used afield. The more you move up the energy and velocity, as with the .22-250, .220 Swift or .223 WSSM, the more happens in the energy contact department. However, often the reaction of the animal to a hit is a “walk off” – not good when it comes to tracking time, as penetration is poor and blood trail faint. Under these circumstances, a day can become very long indeed.

Trying to get a good reason for turning with these light calibers is like pulling teeth. I would suspect that the main popularity of many small-bore “big game guns” centers around the fact that so many hunters own .223 Remington-chambered rifles of the “ black gun” type nowadays. Another factor may be that so many so-called “ladies’ and youth” bolt guns are chambered in light .22 centerfires. Even so, shooting a Model 70 Feather Weight in .25 WSSM, or even a .243 Winchester in a Remington Model Seven, doesn’t increase weight much if at all, and as for recoil, well, if you can’t handle a .243 or .25 you’re better off taking up some other form of outdoor activity.

Currently I have been shooting an outstanding H.S. Precision ultra lightweight turn bolt chambered in .25 WSSM that is nothing less then a one-hole tack-driver off the bench rest. With this rifle there is a big bang, with no follow-up recoil. The complete scoped rifle weighs no more (under seven pounds net weight) than a lightweight .223 Remington as offered by many companies. Will I give up on lightweight cartridges for general use? No way! But I’ll go with something a bit bigger, thank you, when I’m taking out after whitetail, mule deer, or even speed goats.