Discussion Forums

Ryan Nafe

Fellas,

Been a while since I’ve posted much here, things have been quite busy for me on many fronts, I hope everyone is doing well enough considering all the weird stuff going on lately.

In recent weeks I’ve been getting a setup going (clothing, calls, making a list of farmers and land owners to call) for coyote hunting in my local area. There’s plenty of them around, but I think they’re fairly difficult to hunt here because of human habituation and some moderate hunting pressure. It’ll be a challenge, something interesting to do during the winter months.

The idea I’ve been knocking around in my head is a rifle/cartridge combination to use for this, nothing I have right now is optimized for it.

I’d like to keep things in the range of a +- 2 inch MPBR of about 250 yards. 2 inches instead of 3 because of the smaller animals. That should be sufficient for most of the areas I’d be hunting in, much of it is woodlots interspersed with farm fields and small clearings, so shots could be anywhere from 25 to 250 yards or a bit more.

Because the animals can come in quickly and turn tail just as quickly, I think it would be best to have a rifle/cartridge/bullet combination that can be held on the middle of the front shoulder or middle of the chest straight-on (barring high crosswinds) and hit hard enough (75 grains or more in bullet weight) to reliably put down the animal with some room for error in shot placement.

As much as a .22-250 would seem ideal, I don’t think the 45 to 55 grain .22 pills have the oomph to do it consistently. The coyotes around here in Wisconsin can get pretty hefty, quite a bit bigger than the desert dogs down south in Texas or Arizona, for example. 35 pounds or more isn’t uncommon up here, and that’s not counting the ones that have hybridized with gray wolves.

I don’t want to spend an ungodly amount of money on the rifle, given it’s rather limited role, preferably under $1,000 including the optics. It also can’t be overly long and heavy, 10 pounds and a 24 inch barrel would be the upper limit.

As far as the cartridge goes, I’m currently leaning towards a .243 Winchester. With the 75 grain V-Max at 3,300 to 3,400 FPS, if sighted 2 inches high at 150 yards it would be 2 inches low at 275. At least according to the Hornady calculator. With mindfulness of the wind, this should be adequate.

A Tikka T3X stainless or Savage 110 Storm in .243 looks to me like it would be pretty close to ideal for this work. The accuracy is likely to be there, I won’t need to mess with aftermarket stocks and triggers, they’re of an average size and weight for a bolt gun, and both of them are reasonably priced. I’d need stainless steel due to the wintertime hunting, snow and condensation isn’t friendly to plain ole 4140.

What do you guys think? Does it sound like a reasonable plan and analysis to you? Would you go with a different cartridge, a different rifle, etc.?

Thanks,
Ryan