___________________ The Woodchuck Loft ______________________
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Back when I was a young pup, I used to shoot woodchucks in Connecticut with a good friend who was addicted to woodchuck shooting.
The addiction was contagious, and I caught a chronic case of it, which has yet to be cured.
I tried several doctors, and they said, "Take two 22-250's and call me after the weekend." But I never called, cuz I was too embarrassed to admit that I had fallen off the wagon (again), and succumbed to "the Fever".
I would rather go woodchuck shooting on New England farms, than do anything else.
We hunted all over central Connecticut, and some in New York. In New York, we shot the farms up along the Taconic Parkway.
In those days, Connecticut was a totally different kind of state. It was very rural and "countrified".
One spring, we were scouting Connecticut for some new farms to shoot, and we found this ratty old run down farm that nobody lived on, but the fields were huge and freshly cut. The place where the farmhouse use to be was now just a large stone foundation.
The whole property was heavily posted, "No Hunting or Trespassing Without Written Permission".
We looked over the fields with our bins, and the place was rotten lousy with woodchucks - they were like fleas on a stray dog.
So we went to the Office of Land Records and tracked down the owner. He was retired and lived in town. He said that he didn't want city hunters running all over the place. He and his family and friends hunted it in the fall, and they had no interest in shooting the woodchucks.
He leased the fields to a neighboring dairy farmer, and the farmer complained about all of the woodchuck holes in the fields.
We got written permission to shoot all the chucks and crows we wanted to, anytime we wanted to.
We found a ratty old abandoned barn at the end of a huge field. It was all broke and half falling down. We took it over, and spent two weekends cleaning out the hay loft.
When we sat up in the loft, we had a full view of the whole field from the loft door. The far end was well over 1,100 yards.
Back then, it was long before anyone ever even dreamed of laser rangefinders, and surplus military optical rangefinders like the Wild 80 cm, the Barr & Stroud and the Swedish Periscope, were financially out of the question, or not available at all.
So we marked out the field ranges by walking off the distance to various trees, landmarks, and fence posts, with a 50 yard long piece of rope. We wrote them down on a big home made map that we kept tacked on the wall of the loft so we could dial in the ranges with the scope micrometers.
On overcast days, during or after a light drizzle, anything within 700-800 yards was in big trouble. On sunny days in August, 500 yards was about it.
We both shot heavy 40-XB rifles with big-assed, 2 foot long Unertl scopes. Mikey shot a 6mm Walker International, and I shot a 22-250. I still have that rifle and scope. After 5 barrels as a 22-250, it is now a 6mm / .244 Remington.
We shot that field in the spring for woodchucks and crows, and then after each cutting of the crops, and on into the fall until the first snow came.
It was hot in July and August, but the breezes blew through the loft, and carried the smell of fresh hay or alfalfa, with a touch of "Eau De' Cow Pie" from the fertilizer, and it was pure heaven.
We would hole up for a whole a day, or a weekend, and bring a cooler of soda pop, sandwiches, a bunch of hand loads and we were in woodchuck shooter's heaven.
We shot it for 7 or 8 years, and one spring, after a really tough winter, we came up to shoot, and our beautiful ol' brokie down barn had completely collapsed into a pile of rubble.
The above picture is not the original barn, but it looks almost exactly like it (this one also collapsed).
Those were some of the best memories of my life.
