well the little chucks are out and about for a week or so now,and it looks like its gonna be a good year got 3 adult chucks last week,1 at 40 yards,1 at 103 yards,and the longest one at 225 yards.all shot with 55gr hornandy v max in 22-250 out of my encore pistol,I cant wait for morning and hope the rain holds off my trigger finger is itchey

I have wacked quite a few this year with me XP100-R in 22-250. The longest shot was 388 paces! (That is a new record for me with a handgun!) Most have been in the 100-200 yard range. I havent been able to get out nearly as much as i would like but continue to try!

Good Luck!

the chucks are plentiful this year but the area I have been hunting needs to be cut,its tough to see them in the high grass,and its also been a banner year for snakes as of 8/5/03 I have seen 12 rattlers 4 copper heads and I lost count on the black snakes

So far this year in about 25 hunts I have yet to shoot at a woodchuck! I hunt in CT and Vermont. I have shot coyotes and other stuff but have not had a shot at a chuck. They are pretty well gone from the meadows here and we blame the coyotes.

I have been hunting them since the mid 1950's and in the past a typical day would yield maybe nine to over twenty chucks on the best days. Now maybe you think I can't see them or don't know how to hunt them but trust me, I have shot thousands of the critters over the decades and besides that it's not that hard if they are there!

I did just take a vacation out West and drove thru PA on I 80 both ways and I saw chucks there in the meadows. I cannot account for the lack of chucks where I hunt except to blame the afformentioned coyotes. On a farm in CT there are a few chucks around the barn and house but there was only one in the meadows. This farm is about 600 acres and has some of the prettiest well drained fields on this earth. You could see some depressions in the best part of the meadows where there were dens for centuries but they are just sunken in now. The farmers are not poisoning the chucks. I talk to these guys and they blame the coyote also. There was one chuck out in a meadow last March and I let it go until the pups were weaned and the farmer told me that "somebody shot the chuck last Saturday" which was about early April.

This is a great loss to me as the woodchuck was just be best real rifle sport around these parts.

I had an old timer tell me that once the woodchucks showed up here in central NC, the 'yotes would be three or four years behind them.

He was dead on.

I dont know if the coyotes can be accountable for the lack of chucks,mainly because there are quite a few in the area that I hunt and the chuck population seems to be staying strong,but I have found quite a few turkey remains(feathers)so maybe the coyotes in my area prefer turkey over chucks.

I am sure that coyotes will eat the young chucks if they come across one, or anything else, whatever is available and easiest to catch. I have to wonder what the deer population looks like around where Savage 99 hunts.

mike elmer,

I was just on that farm today and there are a lot of deer there. In the spring when they come out of the forest to eat the first shoots of green in the fields the farmer and I watched a dozen of them while we chatted. I see about four there every time.

I have seen a couple of chucks around the barnyard but I was too proud to hunt them there but today I took the .22 and hunted that area and did not see one. I did see about a hundred crows and a flock of turkeys and geese. Would you know it while I had the .22 I would spot a varmint in a tree and I lasered it at 118 yds. It was an offhand shot and I did not have the data with me for that range or the strong NW wind. So I missed! Tonight when I got home I made up some ".22 Mag" loads for the Swift. Off to the range tomorrow to test them.

I just don't want to let a loud shot go off near the farmhouse or cow barn.