cart SHOPPING CART You have 0 items
SELECT CURRENCY

Discussion Forums

1
Search forums

Deer/Moose/Deer

25 Aug 2021
@ 02:26 am (GMT)

Andrew Turner

Hello everybody:

Here's a question for the hive.

This season I have three deer tags and one moose. On a given day, these could all be shot in the same trip.

By November the hair on a moose is 5 inches thick and the shoulder skin .5 inch. On the deer the hair is 3 inches thick. The combination of hair and skin makes me leery of using highly fragile bullets. The animals have also usually been in peas or barley and have inches of fat on them.

Typically a shot is in the 100-400 yd range and I am using a 30-06. Previously, I have used a .280 on a few deer.

What I am wondering is, what is the best balance of strength and range in a bullet that would ensure effective shooting? Our whitetail are 200 lb, 250+, moose 650 or so lb. Typically I go light and accurate but in this case don't want to buy another rifle for the season and would like to just tune the loads.

I have 200 gr psp, 168 eld-m, 150 hotcor, and 130 gr hollow point. I am leaning towards using eld-m and carrying 200 gr psp for moose, but am wanting a do-all bullet, pr perhaps to up it to a .300 Win Mag.

Replies

1
25 Aug 2021
@ 07:40 am (GMT)

Nathan Foster

Re: Deer/Moose/Deer
Hi Andrew, at the moment, it is not so much a case of what suits best but instead, a case of what is available.

In any case, have a look at these links, see if they help at all -

https://vimeo.com/channels/nathanfoster

More specifically - https://vimeo.com/492248242

And (loads for Moose) - https://vimeo.com/486593461
05 Apr 2022
@ 04:38 am (GMT)

Andrew Turner

Re: Deer/Moose/Deer
Sitting around with a certain highly transmissible variant and figured I'd follow up on this.

I ended up using the 168 Eld-M and 30-06 because it was accurate. I figured I would't do any long shots on moose. Extra tags were handed out so I got four deer and then the cow moose.

Three of the deer were head/neck shots. Not as gory as you'd think. Quite emphatic though. The one deer was a chest shot and by the time I was done trimming the carcass the shot removed a leg and about 6 inches of ribs.

The moose was in a valley looking up at me and I shot it between the eyes and then again 'just in case' through the neck at a raking angle. Approx 80 yards. The first shot traveled about two feet down the neck before expanding explosively. The second shot did the same. It seems that the bullets penetrate and then shed pieces to a certain point before basically blowing up -- on the moose, there were two roughly six inch cavities where the bullets exploded, similar to the one deer. If they hit hard bone right off, they blow up, which is fine on a deer. All shots were bang-flop.

Most kills were within 100 yards with one being about 300. All in all, this is quite an effective bullet but I would not use it on bull moose, bull elk, or bears.

1
 

ABOUT US

We are a small, family run business, based out of Taranaki, New Zealand, who specialize in cartridge research and testing, and rifle accurizing.

store