I shoot my SW 22A for years, last two years I have a Monarch 2x power on top of it and it is one sweet pistol for plinking and general messing around.

I am thinking trying it out on squirrels, just for the kicks of it and some stew meet if possible

What ammo should I use? HP or solid? Also where to zero the scope, dead on @ 25 yards?

Mind, I never hunted squirrels in my life, please advise.

Thank you
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I've killed squirrels with just about every available .22lr bullet available. It doesn't much matter. You hit them in the head, and it'll kill them. I've always zero'd my .22s @ 50 yds. and I'd say that a 25 yd shot would be one of the closer opportunities that you'll get, at least the way that I've always hunted.

Thanks, in our woods 30 is about the maximum distance for clear line of sight.

I like a solid bullet. The hollow points mess up too much meat if you dont hit them in the head. Ive been using a single six 22 mag with a 2-7 power scope attached this year, and with FMJ ammo Ive made shots past 50 yards with it and not ruined any meat on the squirrel. Hand gunning for small game is the neatest thing Ive done in a long time. I plan on having a 44 set up to deer hunt with next year.

quote:

I like a solid bullet.

Me too.....using a HP (even if you do hit them in the head) can destroy so much that it makes them harder to skin.....at least the way I do it....I pull the skin off bu making a small cut over the back and inserting my fingers and then pulling it off.....but often like to grab the head and pull off the rear hide.....a HP makes it hard to hold on to the head.....a solid just kills them....

Try some of the Remington sub-sonic HP ammo. It is very quiet and lower velocity. Go for only head shots, it is not as destructive as the high velocity HP ammo. Is very accurate in some rifles. Have a friend in TN that used it to win at a small bore group match at 50yds. It is reasonably priced. I have tried all types of ammo. The target ammo is the most accurate, but even with head shots, if you don't get a solid hit in the brain pan, the squirrel isn't dead right away. With the Rem sub-sonic HP, a head shot and the animal is dead. I tend to find a good location and I do not move from that spot until I have shot more squirrels. If I got up and went to each squirrel I would spend more time waiting between shots for the timber to settle back down. Using this method I have sat in one spot and had as many as 10 squirrels come to one hickory tree.

I don't really have a use for most any HP 22 bullet. When I was a kid it was my responsibility to kill and butcher sheep, and I found that solids work so much better than hollow points (the worst one was when I tried putting down a sick sheep using CCI Stingers and they didn't have much energy left after they penetrated the skull, was a bad situation)

Anyway, I'm sure ther is an application where hollow point ammo works better but for the small game I shoot I like using solids.

I, too, like the solid bullets better for squirrel hunting. I'm not sure why so many use hollow points for really small game like squirrels and rabbits? I wonder if it's because many of them were told to use hollow points, when they were kids, to reduce ricochets?

As a youngster in southern Minnesota we used solids to shoot gophers....(Minnesota is the only state in the nation that has a bounty on it's state animal....the gopher).

It was rapidly evident that using a long rifle solid on the small striped gophers wasn't adequate to putting them down immediately. Often they crawled into their holes and the bounty (ten cents) was lost!.....bad news!!!

However the hollow points stopped them in their tracks.....it was clear that squirrels should be shot with solids and striped gophers (we called them streakies) should be dispatched with hollow points!