Grouse Hunting with the Village Gun

Gun Watch ^ | 28 November, 2016 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

The Village Gun is my name for an old Springfield 84-C.  My father acquired the rifle and a state of the art Weaver 3/4 inch straight tube scope for $7.50 during the Depression. I have written in previous articles that the Village Gun was used by my father and the neighbors for deer hunting.

The Village Gun wasn't primarily used for deer hunting. There are dozens of things a .22 rifle is used for on a farm at the edge of wild country.  The Village gun was probably used for most of them, over the roughly 60 years of its Wisconsin existence.  One of those things was hunting ruffed grouse. It was illegal to hunt ruffed grouse with a rifle in Wisconsin. It is one of those laws that had good intentions. It is a bad idea to fire a rifle randomly into the air. A high powered rifle, shot into the body of a grouse, results in a bloody, inedible mess. But a .22 rimfire rifle, used judiciously, can take grouse regularly and safely, and produce edible results. I know. I did a lot of it, even though it was technically illegal at the time. I never exceeded the set limit for grouse.

Hunting grouse with a .22 takes more skill than hunting them with a shotgun. A good dog helps immensely.  The hard part is seeing the grouse, within rifle range, before they fly away.  People have shot grouse on the fly, with a rifle, but I am not one of them. I do not recommend it.

The grouse pictured above is fairly typical. When they are on the alert, the head is held high, the neck stretched up. This is a picture taken during January, and the feathers are fluffed up. Don't shoot for the neck! Inside those feathers the neck is very thin, and easy to miss. The head is a good target. Head shots are fairly common.  The eye is a good place to aim. Remember to consider your target three dimensionally. When you are dressing out your first couple of grouse, examine them closely to understand their anatomy. It will help in knowing where to aim.

I have missed a fair number.  The nice thing about a .22 in the woods is that it is relatively quiet.  The grouse often fell on the second shot.

Pick a hole between the twigs and branches.  It is surprising how much a twig can deflect a bullet. When you are shooting at a small target, hitting a twig means a probable miss. A scope makes it easier to miss twigs and branches that can be masked by iron sights.

If you are hunting with a rifle, and shooting into the air, you need to know the country and the direction you are shooting.  You do not want to accidentally shoot someone or break a neighbors window. It doesn't apply only to grouse. Squirrels are shot out of trees as well.  I knew where the neighbor houses were, and how far a bullet would travel.  The warnings on .22 LR boxes today say they can travel a mile and a half.  That is under optimum conditions with a lot of safety factor thrown in.

It is very hard to get a .22 LR to travel more than a mile.  A mile was the standard warning for many years. At the end of the mile a .22 LR bullet will be traveling at about 200- 240 feet per second. It could put your eye out, but is unlikely to be fatal.  For common .22 LR ammo, a mile is the max range. At angles higher than 35 degrees, the range decreases.  Fired at higher angles, the terminal velocity will likely be less than 200 fps.

I did not know that when I was 12.  I knew a bit about trajectories from firing countless pebbles from slingshots. The .22 cartridge box said 1 mile, so I was careful to avoid shooting in the air toward neighbors houses. It was easy. There were only three within a mile, all of them on one side of the Namekagon River, and South of where I lived. So all shots aimed toward Northeast or around the compass, toward North, or West, toward South were good. .22 LR bullets fired at above 60 degrees are likely to fall within a half mile, at velocities under 200 fps.  You would not want to get hit by one, but they are unlikely to penetrate a hat or jacket.

I recall the first grouse that I shot. It was fall and grouse season, late afternoon. One of my brothers came running into the house, saying that there was a grouse behind the log cabin (a shed we used for storage, sided with slab wood).

I grabbed the Village Gun, and loaded a couple of cartridges into the magazine. I was out the door in a few seconds. Grouse, once flushed, will not sit in a tree forever. I carefully approached the referenced spot. I used the shed for cover. Then, very stealthily, moving behind it, searched the trees for the bird. There it was! Sitting in birch tree about 20 feet off the ground.  I picked the base of the neck for the shot. The Village Gun was dead on at 15 yards, and the bird fell when the little rifle spat.

The bullet was headed North Northwest, and I knew there were no houses in that direction for miles. Once a .22 bullet hits something, it is almost certainly de-stablized.  The max range is dramatically reduced.

Where grouse have not been hunted hard, a dog is just another four legged predator. My dog and I hunted as a team. A Labrador, he was a natural hunter and retriever. He would range ahead, find a grouse, and tree it. My job was to creep up and shoot it.  It is common for a grouse to fly into a nearby tree and sit there, confident of its invulnerability to the predator on the ground.

My dog quickly taught his boy that he barked differently for grouse or squirrels. His barking would lead me to the spot, even in dense cover.  Grouse had to be approached with more care than squirrels. Knowing what you are looking for makes them easier to spot.

I learned that a .22 does not spoil much meat, even if the grouse is shot through the breast. The point of a folded wing is a good aiming spot, as is a little below the base of the neck from any angle. Head shots make for better bragging rights, but the base of the neck is an easier target. I would not use hypervelocity .22 cartridges for this sort of hunting. Standard velocity is enough, and quieter.

A good dog will quickly retrieve a grouse knocked to the ground, and bring the bird to you.

The bird above is in a crabapple tree.  Crabapples are a favorite food for grouse.  I regularly checked out crabapple locations when grouse hunting.

Much of my grouse hunting was along old logging roads. In many spots, clover had taken root. Clover is another favored grouse food.  The old logging roads had areas of exposed gravel, where grouse would obtain the grit they need to grind up their food. I spent far more time on foot, traveling those old logging roads, than I did on pavement on a bicycle.

Growing up on the edge of semi-wilderness spoiled me for a lot of hunting. Being able to grab your rifle and be hunting once you step out the door, is a wonderful thing.

©2016 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.

Link to Gun Watch

[marktwain]

Ruffed grouse taste more like pheasant than chicken, IMHO.

[Pentagon Leatherneck]

High-risk hunting upland game birds with a .22. Meaning low probability of success, high probability of frustration. I wouldn’t even try it except in a survival situation. But a day in the field with a dog and a gun has it’s own rewards.

TC

[marktwain]

Even harder with a .22 pistol.

Mainly a target of opportunity in that case.

I have harvested a few that way.

[Vaquero]

Shot my first squirrel with a Sears Ranger circa 1938 back in the 60s. Still have it. My friend has an old Springfield.22 that had been kept in a damp barn. I cleaned it up oiled it found a magazine at Numrich Arms and straightened the bent rear sight. It groups nice and takes out squirrels who attemp to move into his hunting camp house trailer

[riverrunner]

Having shot many grouse with a 22 rifle.

As long as they are not flying. Shooting them with a 22 is not that hard.

Why is it am harder then shooting any other small game with a rifle.

Having the hunting skills and the marksmanship skills to do it is a personal thing.

[nonsporting]

I misread the title of this thread. I thought it said:

“House Hunting with the Village Gun”

That’s different.

[Sasparilla]

The .22 that supplemented the family farm with tasty critters of all kinds during the depression was a Winchester Model 60 with a 27 inch barrel and a peep sight. It’s a perfectly balanced rifle designed by John Browning.
This generation of the old Model 60 was only made four years during the 1930’s.
It was passed down to me.

[tom paine 2]

Had the crap scared out of me many times while looking for sheds when one of these birds gets flushed.

[BuffaloJack]

> High-risk hunting upland game birds with a .22. Meaning low probability of success, high probability of frustration. I wouldn’t even try it except in a survival situation. But a day in the field with a dog and a gun has it’s own rewards.

Hunting with a .22LR is a practiced art.
I used to look forward to squirrel hunting in the fall.
For about a month before the season I’d take a .22 pellet rifle to the basement. I had a target on a box suspended by a string and with a second string with which to jerk the box and make it spin and bounce.
I sat at the other end of the basement (about 50 ft). I would jerk the string then give myself one second to bring the pellet gun up, acquire a sight picture and squeeze of the shot. In the beginning, I was lucky to even hit the box, but by the first day of small game season, the pellet was in the black with every shot.
When I went into the field I usually got the bag limit.
If you don’t practice then you will never hit a running squirrel in a tree. If you practice, then anyone can be a good shot.

[Montana_Sam]

Had a few grouse this way myself, back in the day. Great memories.

[LibWhacker]

At angles higher than 35 degrees, the range decreases.

That should be 45 degrees. That's what physics says. Of course, in physics calculations often neglect air resistance. So I'm not 100% certain that air resistance could bring that 45 degrees down to 35 degrees. It's conceivable, I guess. But I don't see how. The calculation is easy and every physics student understands it. So that's my story and I'm sticking to it: At angles higher than 45 degrees, the range decreases.

[eartick]

Great story. Brings back memories of my Gpa and I hunting doves in the winter out of bare trees in S Texas with a 22 shooting shorts.

On cold days (rare in S Texas) doves would just huddle up. We would sit back in his old Willys jeep, windshield down, with that old bolt action and pull down enough for a dove stew. No scope, just iron sites.

They would not fly until you would go pick up the meat.

[arthurus]

This has been up before. It is another vignette of how it was in more rational times. I enjoyed it the first time and read it again this time around. When I was a teenager, it was not a social transgression, much less a crime, to carry around a rifle, even in town, well, in a small town anyway. As a commercial fisherman in the 60s I often had my shark pistol, a .38, in my belt when I was on the hill. An old man who shipped as first mate on one of the bigger boats carried around a sawed off twelve for the same purpose on his back when he was on the docks. No one even thought to call the feds.

[arthurus]

If you practice, then anyone can be a good shot.

I wish that were still true for me. My eyes don't focus together anymore and there is a lot of astigmatism, I think. I can't hit anything with a long gun, no matter how much I practice, without a scope. Handguns are a little better but I am only truly accurate with my Hungarian FEG for some reason. I do have a G license(security guard) in Florida for which I have to qualify annually with a .38 Special. I do okay because I don't do it the way I am instructed to. I just point and pull the trigger. If I try to aim over the sights I might hit a target but it might not be the one directly in front of me.

[marktwain]

If you go to the highlighted link with the velocity figures, you will see that air resistance does indeed reduce the optimum angle to 30 degrees. There is little difference at 35 degrees, but above that the range is clearly reduced.

Without air resistance, you are correct.

[bt-99]

It depends on the Ballistic coefficient of the projectile, but 35 degrees sounds about right for a .22. For a 12 gauge slug the Army did extensive testing years ago and found 28 degrees allowed for maximum range in their tests. It is the effect of air resistance and gravity than makes the angle go lower.45 Degrees is correct in a vacuum.

There are all sorts of internet Physics sites that state 45 degrees is the angle for maximum range,they are all wrong.Go with actual ballistics tests.

[marktwain]

I do not think this one has been posted before.

This is the third in the “Village Gun” series, so you may be thinking of one of the other two:

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-village-gun.html

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2016/11/a-tale-of-village-gun.html

[Pollster1]

Unrelated gun question (not intending to hijack the thread, so I waited a week):

On optics, you implicitly endorsed the Trijicon Acog at $1200-$1700 as just about the best thing available short of spending $5k or $10k - in a review written five or so years ago and reposted several times. If you were going to get just one Trijicon and put it on the perfect rifle for that aiming system, what rifle would you put it on? [The goal of the rifle is to do what a Trijicon does best].

For caliber, would you go with .223 or a .308 (I list only those two because many of their optics are designed for either one or the other, and I already have good rifles in both calibers)? Is that a close call, or is one the obvious right answer if you already have good rifles in both calibers?

Would you go with bolt or semi-auto, and is that a close call or is one the obvious right answer for the Trijicon?

Which model/manufacturer would you personally go with for the rifle? What else would you put on a hypothetical one-and-only Trijicon rifle in your possession (sling . . . bipod . . . muzzle brake . . . whatever), and from which manufacturer?

I’m trying to build a good rifle over the next four years, not an insanely expensive computerized monstrosity with Gen 4 night vision, but top of the line among those short of that level. Any help/hints would be very much appreciated; something from your list could be my Christmas present to myself, although perhaps on an after Christmas sale.

[B4Ranch]

I used to practice shooting a .22 box that was swinging erratically due to the fan beside it.

[B4Ranch]

If you continue to save your cash you will be able to get everything cheaper all at once, instead of buying one part at a time.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJUaiRIEduNXoal2_PkBZi0vDCIcEPxUn