Thread: Scope for 22LR

No mystery - team of 6 shooting from 6pm until about 1am. Numbers not unusual for Central Otago or North Canterbury in heyday. Gadgetman on this site part of unit. 1030 in one shoot, then 1004 two weeks later. If we had chosen to shoot all night it would have been nearer 2000. Rabbit heaven..

What does it take? Well prepared, accurate rifles and good gear. Also well setup trucks/lighting after the evening walk/shoot completed.

Originally Posted by johnd

i always find these quotes very interesting, can you elaborate? how many shooters and over what amount of hours?
Just curious what it takes to gun down 1000 bunnies in an "evening"

Ah, those were the days. Rabbits a bit of a problem at the time. Lots of sore thumbs and fingers from reloading mags. At one point I was shooting a small area, a triangle about 30m each side, and knocked over 109 in 45 minutes as I sat eating my sandwiches. Turn my lights off and have a feed while refilling mags. I'm eating and hear this "rip, rip, rip" around me as they were having a snack all around me as well. Take a note of where the sounds was coming from, flick on the lights and "pop, pop, pop" till the mags were empty. Rinse, repeat. Alas we have to work a lot harder for a lot less nowadays.

I was using a 4-16x40 mildot scope in the $300 range. Flash optics are not that necessary. With the torches and headlamps we can turn night into day well beyond any rimfire range. I liked the higher magnification for the range and would dial back to 4x for rabbit shooting out to 110m. Hit rate was above 95% to that range because we were so familiar with the terrain and targets and the rifles with their preferred ammo.

Unbelievable shooting for many years on that site. Legend. Competitions for the fastest 100. I think my best was 108 in 95 minutes but there were several better..

At that point I used a little 15" polished JW15 with I think a Bushnell Banner 3-9x on it. Precision shooter grouping sub 0.5" at 50m and deadly out to 100. It did not miss much... My 16 year old son got his licence on the day of one of the 1000 bunny evenings. Dropped him off in his zone alone with rifle and bag of ammo, chocolate and other necessities. Picked him up hours later - I'm sure I could see his smile half way across the station at night - he shot 172 on his first shoot alone!!! Epic...

Thanks for that.

I have a Nikon P300 aka PR31 aka Super Sub, 2-7x32 with a BDC reticle on my .22 . At 7x zoom it is not fuzzy @ 20m.