Varminting the middle ground
Two crows in the paddock were dancing in the afternoon heat. They were too far away for an offhand shot and too smart to let me come out into the open where I could take a clear shot from a prone position with my .17-222 varmint rifle. So I was waiting in a dilapidated wooden-planked shed with a corrugated iron roof for some crows to land in a gum tree around 130m away. The tree was a favourite of theirs - they had flown away from it several times when I showed myself.
An hour passed before a crow landed on a branch. I slowly nudged the barrel out of a gap between the planks of the shed. The trigger on the CZ was pushed forward and the reticle centred on the crow’s chest. For slow, exact shooting I use the set trigger adjusted to 16oz and at other times the normal mode, at just under 1.4kg, is used. The set trigger was touched and the crow dropped.
Walking slowly, looking for rabbits among the blackberries or in a gully with a rimfire and shooting them offhand at perhaps 60 paces, or sometimes just in front of you before they run off, is a lot of fun. Trying to snipe at rabbits or crows beyond 270m with a heavy barrelled .220 Swift or similar flat-shooting cartridge is rewarding when you connect. But when you varmint the middle ground between say,
