I took my younger brother out last weekend for his first varmint hunt on the ranch of a friend of mine for ground squirrels. He's a big game hunter with rifle, bow and handgun but never had time to "bother" with shooting squirrels before.

We sighted in his 25.06 with the 87 grain Remington factory loads 2" high at 100 yards and then set up on one of the hills. We had a blast spotting for each other and delivering death via long distance. After about 20 shots we started trying to find the farthest squirrels that we could in the 25x spotting scope and bombing them.

I listened to him complain about the limits of his 3x9 scope and let him shoot my 223 and 243 with the 4x16 glass on them. He fell in love with the 1/8th minute dot on the 4x16 Weaver and I think that I've got him hooked on varmint hunting now. He's says that he's going to buy a 4x12 for his 25.06 and his next gun purchase will be a 22.250 with at least a 8x20 scope on top. We shot all 4 boxes of his factory loads, 60 rounds of 223 and another 60 rounds of 243 and sent over 150 squirrels to the happy pastures in the sky.

He also wants me to teach him to reload as he says that he can't buy all of the factory ammunition for this. Wait until he finds out that reloading will actually wind up costing him more money because he'll be shooting so much more.

Interesting you fired 200 rounds in three different rifles and did not notice any accuracy decrease. Most rifles will begin to show a decrease in accuracy after 20 plus rounds fired. You must have had your bore cleaning supplies with you. I don't think my 25-06 will hold peak accuracy with 80 rounds down the bore.
Good shooting with over 150 kills out of 200 rounds expended.

I did wipe the barrels a couple of times when they were cooling down but I didn't see much difference in accuracy. My 243 seems to have an unusually smooth barrel and doesn't foul much until I get near 100 rounds.