But I will shoot them when they piss me off. In fact I’ll go to destructive lengths to do so, if I must.
There’s a big male squirrel who’s been helping himself to my chicken feed. The chickens won’t compete with him. I could watch as he did it, but he was smart and alert and any time I came outside to try and get a shot he was gone. Fifteen minutes ago I saw him in the chicken yard, and he stayed until I rounded the house and then he was gone like a shot.
I even knew where he went. I watched through the window as he hid in his pallet under the junk pile behind the cabin for ten minutes or so, then ventured back out. I could see him; I don’t think he could see me.
This has been going on for days, you understand. At first I thought, “I’m never going to get a shot, I need a bigger trap.”
And then I thought, “That’s my screen and I can put a hole in it if I want to.”
Yeah, I gave him a finisher.
But it turned out he didn’t need it.
My tolerance can be stretched to the point of lethality, as many rodents have learned. But this is a first.
Love it. Call ’em “freedom holes” or somesuch.
It reminds me of one of my favorite Jeff Cooper-isms, wherein he is describing his personal boltgun practice, dry-snapping on printed letter “o”s on the television during the month before taking the hunting fields. He notes that some might object that he is violating Rule Two with this activity, to which he says, “I don’t need my television, but I do need my rifle skill.”
And besides, nothing a little duct tape can’t fix, right? 🙂
The squirrels here are starting to ramp up as well, and with a newborn baby in the house again, we’re not outside as much as we usually are…which means this year’s garden is a bit of a shoestring…which means that our sense of humor with marauding pest birds and squirrels is…reduced. And so both the Air Venturi Bronco (which I’d never specifically intended for animals) and the AirForce carbine (which I’d figured for use on hares, not that we’ve seen any lately) have now drawn first blood for the year (oddly, protecting the exact same garden starts), respectively, on jay and squirrel. I’m finding it nice to have the airguns around, not just because they are relatively quiet and cheap to feed, but in a case like this I’m a lot more confident of the backstops we have here. (And I’m figuring that spending a lot of time with the carbine, at least as I have it set up now, should get me some good experience with managing a non-trivial sight offset at close range.)
Congratulations!!! Hope it isn’t the last.
Between rabbits and squirrels, crank up your pressure canner and you’ll be set for winter.