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Woodchucks
- Thread starter woodsdog2
- Start date
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2019
- Messages
- 8,075
Roger Rothhaar scouted a lot of nice Ohio bucks woodchuck hunting during the summer. You'd be surprised at what you discover and if you're trying to develop a great relationship with a landowner, this is one way to give back especially in their pasture lands where they have livestock. Chuck holes can be devastating to a horse or cow that steps into one.
Are you guys gonna eat them?
- Joined
- Jun 28, 2019
- Messages
- 8,075
No, but I have. All they eat is grass. I give them to a buddy that makes trapping lures and bait. I also give him beaver castors and their oil sacs. It gives me free trapping lures by helping him collect ingredients. It tastes better than coon.
DooleyVT
Member
- Joined
- May 29, 2022
- Messages
- 77
I've never eaten any but have heard they aren't terrible. This one probably had some decent backstraps on it. The farmers are certainly willing to let you shoot as many as you can and they're fun to hunt. I've got another one about this size that's been giving me the slip lately where I'm to the point of sitting in a ground blind before sun up waiting for it to give me a shot. Another form of off season practice!
There was guy near where I chuck hunted that actually was killed when his tractor hit a woodchuck hole and flipped on him. It was pretty easy to get permission for a couple of years after that...
One of my buddies used to eat the small ones, but he said the adults were too tough to skin lol.
Most of my pics are kinda graphic. I haven't shot one with a rimfire in years...
Alright, you guys got me lol. 2-300 yd. headshots with a .22-250 Remmy and a 52 gr. Berger HPFB Match @ 3450 FPS. My long range load is a 53 gr. Hornady V-MAX @ 3850 FPS. Only handloads!
My neighbor hit a groundhog hole and rolled over his Farmall M.
We heard all the sirens and we looked across the valley and saw the tractor upside down with emergency vehicles all around it. It was a horrifying site. I thought for sure Ray was dead but the tractor had him pinned by his shattered leg and his butt. It took quite a while for them to set airbags and cribbing under the tractor to free him. It was a miracle that he wasn't killed. It was an all out war on groundhogs that year.
It's been a little slow this year. I've only killed about a dozen so far. There just hasn't been as many...so far. I usually have killed a couple dozen by now.
I killed 6 last year with my recurve and judo points. I need to get back on that.
Back on my grandfather's farm, groundhogs caused a sinkhole in the back pasture so big you could bury a VW Bug or mini cooper in. Know he had at least one cow that snapped its leg when it went through a collapsing den.
Not quite as many on the farms these days thanks to coyotes other than around the barns. I get paid decently to catch them in town.
Iron_llama
Well-Known Member
You sound like the guy that got me into handloading... entertained himself by developing loads to make the biggest mess of a jackrabbit he could. I think the most dramatic was a lightweight .44SPL hollowpoint pushed to just shy of overpressure out of a Marlin .44Mag. I've got a den near a retaing wall that's been driving me nuts over the last few years... I pop one or two with an airgun and they leave, then come back a few weeks later.
My buddy has an old 1800s garage with a dirt floor. It has one post in the middle that supports a beam that supports the roof. A miserable, stinkin, lousy groundhog got in there and guess where he dug a hole?? RIGHT UNDER THE POST! Yep, the post had no ground support so it dropped a couple feet which led to a chain reaction of damage to the building.
I hate the rotten things. I'd kill every one of them.
When I used to have time to hunt them a lot, I used to load 100 gr. HP bullets out of my 7mm Rem Mag and my .308 Win (evidently not the same bullets). Talk about impressive ballistic performance lol! I used to load 55 gr. .224 V-MAX bullets in accelerator sabots for a guy who used a .300WSM too, and that was about 4900 FPS with a 20' flame from the muzzle!
there's a good, permanent solution for that. installing a dig barrier can keep any burrowing pests shy of ants depending how how fine a mesh you want to install is.