I got 2" between the L and the N on my keyboard. Them's pretty thick fingers. :D
Coyote or other predator got something under the trees near my windows last night. Lotsa screaming then silence. Interesting that it sounded just like my predator call. Gee, ya think?
When I first got that call years ago I went out into my pasture to try it out. Settled myself with my back to a tree and off to my left a little I could see my neighbor and her big dog about a 1/4+ mile away. Started calling and I could see the dog perk up and look my way. Wasn't really in camo, just blending clothes. I called again and that dog took off and headed for me, jumped my rather loose barbed wire fence, and came a-running, slowing down to sniff back and forth, all the time with neighbor screaming for the dog to come back.
I gave a couple more little toots on the call.
Dog got to within 30 feet of me when I jumped up and hollered at it to go home. Dog looked so startled and stopped dead in its tracks, kind of shook its head a little, sort of like a double-take, and then ran back to its own house.
I laughed like heck over that. Stopped by her house the next day and 'splained the situation to her. She said she had never lost control of the dog like that before, could not figure it out, but had heard the call, then had seen me jump up, so she wondered about it.
We got to be pretty good friends, and she'd give us the excess produce from her garden every once in a while or bake a cake for us... things like that. We gave her geese I'd harvested a time or two.
She wanted me to thin out the few prairie dogs on her property and I'd go over there with a relatively quiet .22 Mag Marlin since it would be pretty close-range shooting, but only got a few decent shots. Most of the shots would have been in sort of halfway unsafe directions, considering possible ricochets, so I passed them up with the .22 Mag.
One of the reasons I liked using my .223 with light Hornady SX ("Super Explosive") bullets is that they never ricocheted, even though they were pretty wind-sensitive. You gotta watch the grass out by the prairie dogs, and not pay too much attention to the wind right where you are unless it was a stiff breeze, in which case you rolled up your shooting mat and went home.
I used to use a .243 with lighter bullets, and I couldn't fire a shot with that thing without hearing a "pwaaaang," even if I hit the prairie dog. Expecially bad with Nosler bullets*, where the back half of the bullet was solid jacket metal and held together. Just like it was supposed to.
But those .223 SXers were so fragile, it seemed like they would break up even if they only hit a blade of grass and I guessed the fragments would not travel very far. Never, ever, heard a ricochet from them.
I loaded them a little light, 3000-3100 f/s, with 3031 powder. Twenty-three, 24gr, if I recall.
But boy, they sure unzipped prairie dogs.
Terry, 230RN
*I think they were branded as "Zipedo" bullets.
Edited to add grin after the big fingers wisecrack.
