How many rounds for 2 day gopher slay in Saskatchewan?

CyaN1de

CyaN1de

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Couldn't find a suitable place for this question so if a mod wants to move it....feel free.

I am heading to Saskatchewan this Sunday and I have 2 days in my Wifes family's meadow.

I have about 700 22-250 rounds loaded and somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 .223 rounds loaded up.

Also taking .17HM2, .22LR, 100 7mm Rem Mag and some .22 Hornet.

I am wondering if this will be enough firepower for a 2 day massacre? I have never been to Saskatchewan but I will be about 1hr South East of Regina near Kipling/Windthorst.
 
Unless you are a very poor shooter, there will likely not be that many gophers for you to shoot. Unless of course neighbours and friends let you "glean" thier pastures. good luck...wished I was going with you. Gophers at 300 makes your heart pound.
 
Just got back from a 3 day Sask gopher shoot. Wind was up the whole time, gophers do not tolerate wind well and will stay down.

Best shooting times are 7am to about 11am, then they go down, come up less active in the afternoon and are all done their days by very early evening. This may not be universally true but was absolutely the case where we were and is anecdotally true of other areas.

We didn't go thru anywhere near the rounds we expected. I took 600 centerfire and fired 15. I took bricks and bricks of .22 and only went thru 1.5 over 3 full days. Hopefully you have better conditions, but I would say what you have listed plus a couple bricks .22 will be plenty.
 
I was out on Sunday from 3:30 pm to dusk. I shot 200 rounds of 223 (don't miss much with that) and 750 of 22lr. I had a 45 miniute delay in the shooting to fix a fence I shot. The conditions were about 40kph winds and 28c cooling to 22c later in the day. Most of the little gophers are up now and move around alot. The smaller gophers do not mind the wind as much. The mature fat ones seem to hide in windy conditions but they came up late in the day.

I do not really know about the gopher population in that area of the province but I am pretty sure if you shoot that many 22-250 and 223 in two days you will feel it in your shoulder. Just take a few bulk boxes of 22lr just in case you run short of the other stuff. The eastern side of the province often has less windy conditions than out west here.
 
I went down to Mankota this past long weekend hoping for a massacre and was quite disapointed. I brought 300rds of .223 and 1000rds of .17hmr and 500 .22lr.
I only shot about 150 .223 and 300.17hmr. The winds were crazy most of the time except for about 2 hours on Sunday morning which is when most of the ammo was shot. Gophers would not stay up in the wind. You would get one come up every 5 minutes or so. A little disappointing.
 
I shoot about 100 rounds per hour, at least in my last two outings. Four hours of shooting and 400 - 500 .22 LR out of the way. That is walking around 1/4 section of pasture.
 
Well I am obviously hoping for a couple of those "can't load the gun fast enough to whack em all" kinda days.

My wife informed me tonight that I will have 2 farms at which I can shoot, so if one is not as productive as I like, I can always mosey on up the road 20 minutes to the other one and see what's shakin'. :D

I know......sucks to be me LOL

Just wish I had a month there....oh well.....2 days should be fun anyhow.

I loaded up another 100 .223 tonight. Like the Boy Scouts motto....always be prepared. I would rather come home with loaded ammo rather than leave a full field because I was left with nothing but 1500 or so empty cases :D
 
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It is sort of the peak season right now. The wind has been brutal here for about a week and there is no real end in sight yet. That is nothing new. The mature gophers hate the wind, the youngsters are too dumb to care. Another thing that has been happening in the last couple of weeks is seeding, that kills alot of gophers. Seagulls are a real pain in the rump as well, the sight of them will often scare down the gophers for quite a while. They do not know the difference between a predator and a scavenger, all they see is a big shadow and instinct clicks in.

I suppose people like myself get pretty used to picking the little critters out in the pastures and field no matter how well they blend in. I can see how somebody that does not shoot them alot could easily get frusterated with their ability to hide in plain sight. I often take a binocular or scope and check around the holes quickly if nothing else is going on. You should be watching for their tails flicking (they are often dark on the tip), their eyes (they often peek up out of the hole just high enough to see you) and any movement. We often whistle or squeak, the stupid gophers often stand up thinking that they are missing out on an orgy or something. They do not seem to care how lousy of a whistle you make, it gets them excited.

The field we have been frequenting this spring was seeded last week and the gopher population is way down there now. It still will not stop them. We have been going in groups of 4-6 a couple times a week and are never getting less than 500 in an afternoon between us. We have got well over 2000 in a day, easily. I am pretty sure we will shoot out that field for at least another month and not run short.

The poisons the RMs gave out this year were short lived, short supplied and a little weak. Last year we worked on one of my friends fathers pastures. We (10 or so of us) killed gophers there for the whole spring and summer and there has only been a couple of hundred left over to kill there this year, the bullets worked better than his poison.

Anybody real serious about making a trip down here might want to consider putting a radio classified ad on the AM country radio station here. Every bored farmer for a hundred miles in every direction listens to that channel. They have a daily half hour classified ad program right before lunch. You can email ads in or call in when they are live. There are often farmers offering ammo, food and sometimes money to get people to come and shoot gophers on their land. The station is CKSW and a search will bring it up easily.
 
CyaN1de said:
Couldn't find a suitable place for this question so if a mod wants to move it....feel free.

I am heading to Saskatchewan this Sunday and I have 2 days in my Wifes family's meadow.

I have about 700 22-250 rounds loaded and somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 .223 rounds loaded up.

Also taking .17HM2, .22LR, 100 7mm Rem Mag and some .22 Hornet.

I am wondering if this will be enough firepower for a 2 day massacre? I have never been to Saskatchewan but I will be about 1hr South East of Regina near Kipling/Windthorst.
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Have a safe trip, and maybe take a few pics for us. KD
 
sorry about luck you hit the only rainy weekend this spring. I wish it was nice I would have been shooting gophers to I am 20 min from Kipling If nice you would have had a slauter.
 
disker said:
sorry about luck you hit the only rainy weekend this spring. I wish it was nice I would have been shooting gophers to I am 20 min from Kipling If nice you would have had a slauter.
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I checked weather and it is supposed to be nice on Wednesday and Thursday while I am there :) I am in Okotok's Walmart parking lot for the night as all the campgrounds are closed :(

I am hoping for a slaughter. :D

Pics will follow when I get home.
 
How many rounds for a gopher shoot? Depends on - how many gophers, what type of rifle, weather, how many people in the group, etc. I use a Ruger 10/22, an old Savage 6AB semi, a single shot Winchester, a Savage .22/20ga, or a Beretta semi 12 ga. With the .22's, I fire a lot of "warning shots", so my count might be a bit high. My buddy and I were out at Mankota on Sunday and Monday of May long, in the wind, so we both were firing a high percentage of "warning shots". Monday morning we used 12 ga, so it was at least 100%, sometimes more, per shot. It's good for the soul to blast off enough ammo to get your rifle/shotgun good and dirty. Nothing better to leave a gopher field littered with gopher guts!!!
 
nox said:
other then that radio add mentioned, how else would a person go about finding a place to shoot some gophers???
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#1 -> Drive around and find them. They really are everywhere out here, especially South of the #1 highway. Some of the landowners do not want you on the land, if that is the case they usually have it posted. If there is no signs it is still a good idea to ask permission, especially if there is a fence or crop. I recently got permission for 5 quarters of fully farmed and seeded land, the owner has no problems with me squashing crop as long as I am shooting gophers. I guess his theory is the gophers will do more damage than I can anyway. You will often find that the owners of posted land will often let you onto the property to shoot gophers even though they try and turn the game hunters away.

#2 -> Contact RM offices. Chances are pretty good that they have lists of all the people that applied for poison to kill them. They will likely point you in the right direction for the heaviest infested areas.

It might sound silly but the small cafes in small towns are often full of farmers and ranchers around coffee time. You could ask a waitress in there to point you to the guys that are complaining about gophers, I am sure the waitress would have heard the complaints more than once.

In another recent thread here there was a few guys that only made it part way to Swift Current and started asking at gas stations on the way. They were invited to camp and shoot on a nearby farmers land. I think they were also given ammo, quads and a pickup and they did not know the people at all. It probably would not be worth asking questions like that right here in the city but you never know until you try.

It really is too much fun. I was hitting some critters out to 300 yards yesterday in the wind, one shot. We were lying down on a creekbank looking over a very green field on the opposite side of the creek. If I head back out there later in the week I will try and remember the camera. I may also take my 308 and try some 500yd shots for a laugh.
 
Well I am back :)

900 rounds of 22-250 and 700 rounds of .223 were enough for the 4 days I got to shoot :D

I came back with less than 100 22-250 rounds and a bunch of .223 rounds because my wife didn't feel like shooting at all. Her sister had a good time though, as it was her first time shooting a gun at all and she got a few gophers as well out to around the 150-200yd mark. She started out with the .22 Lakefield 64b but I moved her up to the .223 LRPV with the NF scope shortly after that.

Carnage will follow once I get the pics off my cards. :evil:
 
My brother went out last week to the area around Aneroid and Kincaid. He shot one afternoon and the next morning, using a bolt action .22, and fired 1100 rounds. He had fun!
 
Oh boy, I sure would like some of that action. I may have to return to Regina for a visit. After moving away in 2000, I never thought that I would have an urge to return. I do now, thanks to bloodlust.
 
Another method of finding foelds is put an add in the local paper.

"Gophers Eliminated Free of Charge...phone ### ### ###x" works well. Even the ones who dont call often remeber the add when you drive around and ask.

I even went so far as to put an add in the local yellow pages (which often covers a large area).
 
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