There must be hundreds of different cartridges being used by varmint hunters today. And every year there are more being designed and pronounced the best ever, better than the factory standards, the .17 Remington, .204 Ruger, .223 Remington, .22-250 Remington, etc. Recently we have seen new cartridges, the .17 Remington Fireball, .223 WSSM, .243 WSSM and .25 WSSM breaking into the varminting field. When we look at all the Improved and Wildcat rounds being used, there is no limit. It seems that every advanced rifleman wants his own personal cartridge design, one with a change from perhaps a 23º shoulder angle to one of 23 1/2º. He believes that little change will convert his cartridge from being a sure hit, quarter-mile varmint killer to a sure hit half-mile killer…. Some have convinced themselves that a bullet diameter of .19 is much more effective on varmints than one of .20. Different neck length on brass is often looked upon as being the magic change to make 3/4" groups drop to 1/4". Others think they can improve accuracy and/or range much better by designing a rim on their rimless cases…. And of course there are those that always think more case capacity will cure all problems.

And so, we have a myriad of cartridges out there. But when all is said and done, existing cartridges will handle the same shots as will those ultra designs. A couple of examples would be the .17 Remington compared to the old-time .17 Javelina that requires special case forming but gives similar performance, and the .222 Remington that gives results much like the .22 Sabre made from the .357 Magnum case. Back in the early wildcat days there were no practical chronographs and designers could get away with very wild velocity claims. Chronographs have now corrected the mythical designer claims of those older days. And even factory ammo did not chronograph to listed velocities, generally due to the use of longer barrels than those being sold to shooters. Today, factory velocities are corrected and usually show barrel lengths. But we still get wildcat cartridges with unobtainable velocities, at least without special conditions. Recently we had the opportunity to make a varmint hunt and compare a number of different cartridges, standard factory rounds against several Ackley Improved rounds and one wildcat, .22 BR. My rifles included the excellent Savage M12 BVSS in .22-250, Savage M12 Low Profile in .204 Ruger with a new Hart barrel, and my old-time, fire-truck red, .22 BR on a Remington M700 left-hand short action blocked to single-shot. The .22 BR had not been shot for a couple of years and I wanted to go back to see if it truly was as good as I remembered. Five of us, plus my favorite spotter, Maryline, headed out to Wyoming. Our arsenal would have caused much consternation if we happened to be checked by any law enforcement officer. Not only did we have the usual suspect calibers for prairie rodent shooting, .204s, .223s, 22.250 Remingtons, but also the .22 BR, a .221 Fireball, .222 Remington, .22-250 Ackley Improved, .243 Winchester, .250 Ackley Improved, all standard rifles, plus one XP-100 handgun in .22-250 and one common .22 rimfire. And of course, a boat load of ammunition.

For all our varmint hunts our basic equipment always includes several BJ Enterprise revolving shooting tables (PS advertiser), rifle cleaning tables, all the cleaning paraphernalia, rifle rests, binoculars, range finders, cameras, ice chests, plenty of water and other liquids, sun screen, umbrellas, tarps, and on and on and on. We have learned that a big pickup truck will only provide for two hunters, and no more. We commonly leave camp, be it an RV park or motel, just after breakfast and arrive in the hills before mid-morning. Then we set up and stay the day. We do see hunters driving out every morning, shooting a couple of hours, returning to town for lunch, then back to the rodent towns for another couple of hours. Then back to town for the evening meal and to the motels. We fully agree with their style, for them, but we consider them very casual shooters, tourist-type, generally shooting from vehicles. We, however, go out to experiment with various rifles and test our accuracy from normal to ridiculous distances. For this, we require a lot of equipment and time.

The ranches we had shot on for a number of years had been hit by sylvatic plague and the largest rodent towns were completely wiped out. In some cases, several square miles of rodent towns were now gone. This forced us to search for new towns and we located a good one only about three miles away and shot two days there. Then we were told about much larger towns available on the adjoining ranch and moved over there. We found we could set up on ridges and see down on rodent towns that extended as far as we could see. Shots could be taken at any range, but we normally do most of our shooting from 200 to 400 yards. For fun and diversion, we do try those shots we read about, those out to half-mile or farther…without making any kills.

Our crowd tends to shoot 100 to perhaps 250 shots per day, averaging about 150 shots. Commonly, we start out with our smaller cartridges and as the day wears on and the wind comes up, we move to heavier ones. On a real windy day it becomes much more difficult to judge bullet drift with calibers like the .17, .20 and .22, and we move into the 6mm, .25, or heavier. We have been guilty of doing a bit of shooting with such things as the 6.5mm, .270, .308, .30-06 and even a belted magnum or two! These begin to take a lot of fun out of shooting due to excessive recoil, but we have shot perhaps 50 rounds through the 6.5s, and never more than 15 to 25 rounds with those others. At the longer ranges when the wind exceeds about 20 mph we can see the better wind drift abilities of the heavier calibers. If we don’t begin flinching too badly we can make a few long range hits with these heavy calibers.

The first slightly unusual cartridge we wanted to try was the old-time .22 BR, a cartridge that started as a wildcat and was quickly taken up by Remington as a standard factory load. It was an outstanding benchrest cartridge, but was not pushed as a varminter by Remington and sales never materialized. The cartridge was dropped after only a few short years and it now falls back in the wildcat category. I still have a few of those Remington .22 BR head stamped factory cases, but commonly have to make brass from 6mm BR from Remington, Lapua or Norma. This is not too difficult, since the 6mm cases can be run directly through a .22 caliber sizing die without any case loss. If 7mm BR brass is used the cases must be down-sized in a 6mm BR sizing die and then finished off in the .22 BR die. The resulting .22 BR cases can be trimmed to proper length and loaded. Many .22 BR chambers have been cut with a tight neck for best accuracy, so in those cases the brass must be neck turned to proper diameter. The history of the .22 BR is interesting. It was designed back in the early 1970s by Jim Stekl of Remington Arms. He was a benchrest shooter, along with Mike Walker, both working in the custom shop at the time. Together they were trying to come up with a new benchrest cartridge that would beat the winning .222 Remington and the wildcat, 6x47mm. They used the .308 straight case as parent brass, cut it back to a length of about 1.52", formed a shoulder angle to 30º and necked it to either .22 or 6mm. This .308 case was actually a special piece of brass, straight wall with a small rifle primer pocket. Jim did a lot of winning with his new cartridge, but two things happened about the time the BR was getting started. First came the new PPC cartridge, and then Norma discontinued the only powder that had made the BR a winner. Jim and others tried to find another winning powder, but the PPC quickly became the benchrest champion due to ease of handling and outstanding accuracy. Today there is almost no experimenting among benchrest shooters with almost all using the very same cartridge and load, the PPC with V-133 powder.

My first benchrest rifle happened to be a Remington 40X in .22 BR caliber. It was a much used rifle, as I finally discovered. Then I did try a 6mm PPC, and found it very easy to shoot small groups with. I even managed to win a match or two with it, but enjoyed trying different things and moved over to the 6mm Short BR, the standard BR case shortened by .120". That cartridge won many matches when in the hands of outstanding shooters, but most gave it up due to having to make their own brass. They could use the PPC without any additional work. When my own Short BR was used up, I installed a new Hart barrel chambered for the regular length 6mm BR. By experimenting with several new powders of the time, I settled on V-135. With that rifle I won more small group trophies than with all my others combined. But just as I was finding that it would shoot fully equal to any PPC, my eyesight dropped off with cataracts and I could not see well enough to compete with the big boys in benchrest. But that did not stop my varmint hunting….

Our second unusual but very interesting caliber on this expedition was the .221 Remington Fireball brought along by Joe Serafin, a brand new rodent shooter. The cartridge was originally designed for use in the Remington XP-100 handgun with a 10" barrel back in 1963 and is based on a shortened .222 case. To achieve good velocity the cartridge is loaded to a higher pressure than is the longer .222 Remington. This XP-100 moved handgun varminting into the 200 yard category and most of those bolt action pistols had scopes mounted for long range shooting. Factory ammo is loaded with 50 grain bullets at about 2650 fps from short barrels, but when the cartridge is used in a 24" rifle barrel the velocity moves to 2995 fps. Many custom rifles have been made for this mild, effective little cartridge, and in 2002 Remington brought it out in their M700 Classic rifle.

Joe has been loading his .221 Fireball for a couple of years and found that it would send off 40 grain bullets at a bit over 3550 fps without any pressure problems. This is from his custom Savage rifle with a 24" barrel and a 6x24 BSA scope. Usually this little .221 is compared to the .222 Remington, and if only factory loads are considered, the .222 is about 150 fps faster. The .221 case is three to five grains smaller and of course gives less velocity, lower recoil and reduced muzzle blast with factory loads. With Joe’s hot hand loads, the little .221 is a different story….

Along with his .221 Fireball, Joe brought along a pair of .22-250 Ackleys, one with a standard rifling twist of 14", the other with a quick twist of 9". This being his first prairie rodent hunting trip, he did not really have any idea what to expect. He had sighted in the Fireball to be dead-on at about 235 yards, and originally wanted to sight in the quick twist .22-250 Ackley at 600 and dedicate it to very long shots with heavier bullets. But just before we left he changed over to our standard sight-in distance of about 275 yards. This heavy bullet rifle had fire-formed Ackley cartridges, but the other was used with standard .22-250 cartridges for fire forming into Ackleys during the hunt. He thought he would use only the quick twist rifle when trying extremely long shots, but soon found that he could not do the rifle exchange while the rodents waited. And he saw that we were shooting and hitting with standard twist rifles so far out he could not see the targets without binoculars and scopes. He immediately started using any of his three rifles for just about any shots out to perhaps 300 yards, but retired the .221 Fireball when going after prairie rodents near the quarter-mile mark. Out to about 200 yards he was getting nearly 100% hits, and even at the 300 yard mark he had no problem with those prairie rodents, keeping his hits close to 50%. By the end of the trip he had taken several rodents beyond 400 yards and his longest kill was made at an even quarter-mile with his .22-250 Ackley. To us, the exciting thing was seeing just how good the little .221 Fireball shot.

Under good conditions, winds less than 10 – 12 mph, all of us have come to really appreciate the long range shooting of the .22-250 and .204, both loaded with 40 grain bullets. We sight-in dead on at about 275 yards and can take those prairie rodents out to 350 yards without holding over. And since the wind drift of the .204 is less than that of the .22-250, we hit slightly better with it. At 400 yards and just a little crosswind, we make kills with the .204 with a certain hold-off, and with the .22-250 and the same hold-off we miss the rodent due to the extra drift. We have also found 40 grain bullets at higher velocities are easier to hit with at a quarter-mile than heavier bullets that show a higher ballistic coefficient (BC) but a much lower velocity. It seems that BC is not a very useful criteria until shots reach beyond our abilities, or probably about 600 yards. If we were seriously trying to land shots at 600 to 1000 yards, the kind we read about but have never witnessed, we would undoubtedly take BC into consideration.

We know that as long as we use velocities from about 3800 fps to a little over 4000 fps, we hit very nearly the same regardless of bullet weight or cartridge case design, .204, .22-250, .22 BR, etc. I loaded my .22 BR with 50 grain TNT bullets to 3750 fps, my .204 with 40 grain bullets to 3880 fps, and my .22-250 with 40 grainers at 4050 fps. The .22 BR had a new Weaver 6.5x20 Grand Slam scope, the .204 a B & L 6x24, and the .22-250 a Bushnell 4200 Elite 6x24 with mil-dots. Out to the quarter-mile mark I simply held near the same with each rifle. On this particular prairie rodent hunt my longest shot was made with the .22 BR. My spotter called my misses and at about shot number 10, I made the hit shown to be 532 yards by rangefinder. The longest hit by any of our hunters, however, was made by my friend, Dale Macumber, with his standard .243 Winchester loaded with 87 grain bullets to a velocity of about 3250 fps. The rifle was topped off with the excellent Bushnell Elite 4200 scope, 8x32 variable power. Two of us were spotting, and after the seventh shot he had the elevation and drift figured out. Shot number eight exploded the rodent at a rangefinder distance of 573 yards. He is now referred to as Mr. 5-7-3….

My friend Jim Spalding and I have hunted and shot together for many years, shooting benchrest, hunting big game, and varminting. A couple of years ago we both got our best mule deer, both bucks with antlers 32" wide. But the hills are getting taller and steeper, so we enjoy varminting more with each passing year. On this varminting trip he took along four rifles, but found himself shooting more with his .204 than with his .222 and pair of .22-250s. He used Winchester factory ammo with 32 grain bullets in his .204. The advertised velocity is 4025 fps, and his long shot was 450 yards. His scope was the Bushnell Elite 4200, 8x32 variable. The .222 was loaded with 50 grain TNT bullets at only about 3200 fps. Naturally, this little .222 is his favorite fun-gun, very mild recoil and noise, and effective out to about 300 yards or so. He did use his .22-250s some, but the .204 was his number one caliber on this trip.

Our fifth member of this shooting clan was Harold Rudisell, a shooter who enjoys all the paraphernalia of those who live and breath military sniper ideas. He has read every book on the subject and can fully describe to us just how to set up rifles to duplicate sniper activities. Normally when using these techniques one would have a spotter do all the calculations and tell the shooter what changes to make. But prairie rodent shooters don’t have spotters schooled in these tactics, so it is left up to the shooter to do it all. We thoroughly enjoyed watching him set up and go through the sniper paces. Using binoculars to spot the varmint, he then had to switch to rangefinders to read the distance. Then lay the rangefinder aside and calculate the scope adjustments required for the distance. Next, twist the elevation dial being careful to count the clicks. And finally get the rifle in position on the front rest and try to find the rodent through the scope…if the rodent cared to wait that long to get shot at. If the shot was taken or passed up, the last step was to not forget to return the scope adjustments back to zero in preparation for the next calculated change. Harold pointed out to us that by doing all those maneuvers he kept his rifles sighted in at 200 yards and changed the crosshair for every shot farther out. Thus, he could always shoot with the crosshair dead on target.

Harold uses nothing but Remington rifles and on this trip he only carried his .223 and .22-250, preferring to use only his .223 over the course of the week-long hunt. It was set up with a Leupold 6.5x20 scope with mil-dots and side parallax adjustment in a 30mm tube. He did not load our favorite high speed 40 grain bullets because the BC on 50 and 55 grain bullets is higher. He did well out to 300 yards or so, and his longest witnessed and ranged hit was 378 yards, a long way out for any .223. His loads were showing only 3250 fps with 55 grain bullets, but a very hot 3550 with the 50s. This left him shooting several hundred feet per second slower than most other rifles in our group, and of course reduced his distances for hits even when adjusting his scope for every shot, which he enjoyed doing.

When the shooting started, Harold moved away from us so as to concentrate on all his technical adjustment work while we began banging away. As we told him, we were not snipers…just simple prairie rodent shooters who use dumb ideas like holding off for long range or windy conditions. By the end of the day when we compared notes we found that we had all shot hundreds of rounds…except for Harold. He had only fired about 60 rounds while fiddling with his scope changes, etc. Yes, we did carry him quite high, but after we finished off a great Mexican dinner back in town he recovered from our uncouth behavior.

For any varmint hunting we normally sight-in all rifles to be 1.8" high at 100 yards. This provides a dead-on range of about 220 yards for the .223 with 55 grain bullets, and a drop of almost 6" at 300 yards. The 50 grain can be loaded to 3550 fps, giving a dead-on range of 240 yards and a 4" drop at 300. If 40 grain bullets are used, velocity can be moved up to 3800 fps and the dead-on range is extended out to 255 yards. Bullet drop at 300 yards is reduced to less than 3". Since wind drift at the quarter-mile mark only varies about 2" for bullet weights of 40 and 55 grains, we prefer the lightweight bullet to take advantage of several inches improvement in trajectory.

I loaded my .22 BR with 50 grain TNT bullets simply because I ran out of my favored 40 grain V-Max. With the 50s, at 3750 fps, I was dead-on at 255 yards and only about 2 1/2" low at 300 yards. But, oh, how I wished I would have had those 40 grainers! Loads chronograph over 4100 fps and provide a dead-on zero of 275 yards with only a 1" drop at 300. Thus, this relatively small cased .22 BR shoots almost the same as the much larger .22-250 and uses three or four grains less powder giving a little less recoil. Those who are familiar with the .22 BR all wonder why more shooters have not discovered it.

The most used caliber on this hunting trip turned out to be the .204 Ruger. When sighted in as above, the 40 grain bullet is dead-on at 275 yards and 1" low at 300. At 400 yards it is down only 9" and at 500 yards, down just 23". At 500 yards this is almost 5" flatter than the 40 grain .22-250, and wind drift is reduced more than 6". We could see that it was easier to make long range hits with the .204 than with the .22-250, .22 BR, .223 and others. Even though we appreciated the ability of the .221 Fireball and .223, they simply did not compare to the .204, .22 BR or .22-250. Joe loaded his .221 hot enough to allow the 40 grain bullet to be sighted dead-on at 235 yards and in the rodent field we quickly found this little cartridge equal to the longer .223, and it used eight grains less powder. A real delight to shoot.

While in the mountain country we came across some interesting information in local newspapers concerning the booming population of prairie rodents, commonly known as prairie dogs, a much used misnomer. Ranchers wanted the varmints controlled, but it looked like they would have to resort to bringing the government in to poison them. Or, they hoped maybe sylvatic plague would hit their areas and kill off most of the rodents. After a major die-off it takes about four or five years for them to re-populate. These same ranchers often leased out hunting to outfitters who charge fees to hunters and thus limit the number of rodent shooters allowed on the ranches. This, then, results in too many prairie rodents and the ranchers are no longer allowed to invite varminters to come on their land to shoot! It appears that as more ranches close to public shooting, prairie rodents will multiply greatly until the government comes in to poison them. The solution, as we see it, is for more ranchers to open their land to shooters. By contacting local Chambers of Commerce, shooters can still find ranchers who have not yet leased out their land and do want more shooters, either with a minor fee or no fee at all.

We left Wyoming with little or no ammunition to carry back home. But we sure had a lot of wild stories to tell….