Thread: First blood and a proper trophy sized Billy

K

Originally Posted by dannyb

@223nut nah I never wished for more than my single shooter even though my hands were freezing it just made me really concentrate on shot placement and wait for good targets rather than just spraying everywhere like a horny dog
Sure you could have a lot of fun and probably blaze twice as many goats in the same amount of time with an ar15 or similar I just don't know that it would've changed much for me other than maybe using twice as much ammo.
Actually next time I go I want to take my 7mm rem mag and try for some 700yd + goats just for fun

Danny, I don't won't to sound like a wet blanket, but please practice on paper/steel out to those distances first. Goats,or any animal ,aren't to be used for target practice. Nothing worse than a wounded animal not being able to be dispatched ethically

Congrats on gaining yourself a great head though. Hard yakka to get it makes it more of a trophy.

Originally Posted by oraki

K
Danny, I don't won't to sound like a wet blanket, but please practice on paper/steel out to those distances first. Goats,or any animal ,aren't to be used for target practice. Nothing worse than a wounded animal not being able to be dispatched ethically

Absolutely mate not out to wound animals and would only try in ideal circumstances

if you can hit a 2ltr milk bottle you can cleanly kill a big game animal at same range..... goats sure are good fun...if you use the 7mm mag find the softest projectiles you can get as the 170ish hard as nails ones will sail on through unless you hit bone...the mighty poohseventy works great using 130grn loads Vs 150s so 7mm SHOULD BE similar....not saying the heavies WONT work,just the lighter/softer numbers will work better/faster/cleaner.

A 162 eld-M will deal to goats at range

I hear you stug....its a softy....a plurry good softy by all accounts too.

Good work mate, you've done well to get a billy that size.

Good thread this, @dannyb, good to see some attention being paid to some of the best sport shooting you can have in NZ, and also of course necessary pest control on the farms.

We’ve put a lot of effort into goats at between 300-700m in the last 3 years. The switch to manuka honey means the scrub is a lot more valuable than it used to be... so now there’s more of a focus on goats. The geography means effective control needs to work well across the deep valleys, with the wind blowing from behind the shooter looking straight across. You pick the valley on the day based on the wind. Shooting in an arc of 60° you want to set yourself up to pick off the big nannies first, they are the #1 targets, get them first and then the billies, the rest of the mob will go round in circles.

Two guns spaced 20m apart, a spotter each doing the ranging, very effective... Dialing up and down for elevation, holding left and right slightly for wind.

So after using a .308 Win, 7mm Rem Mag and a 1:8” twist, 26” barrelled .243 Win, shooting Hornady A-Max and Nosler BTs, I’ve finally settled on the 6.5 Creedmoor with a 24” varmint contour barrel and 143gr ELD-X.

Bugger all recoil, cool barrel after a 5 shot string, and deadly accurate, it just slays the goaty pestilence. The 1:8” .243 would be my next pick with the 105gr A-Max, also wickedly accurate out to 450m -ish but a little prone to wandering in the breeze after that. The other two were no contest terminals wise, but they were just that little bit too hard kicking to keep up a fast rate of fire, to stay on the mob as they move across you. An afternoon of 7mm RM is hard work on the shoulder, shooting prone, in rough country. The low recoil of the heavy (13lbs) Creedmoor rig just works.

Past ~600m then the wind calls start to get real tricky, little errors make for clean misses or worse crying goats which is not nice. Your spotter must know their stuff for sure. So we looked at the ballistics of the 6.5mm ELD-X and put a limit of 700m absolute max for goats, assuming the wind is directly behind. In practice, with the geography as it is, we rarely go past 600m on goats, most will be taken between 300 and 500m. But man that ELD-X flies well eh, and nothing ever gets up once they’ve been whacked.

This is a typical face on a neighboring property, the top of the ridgeline is 550m, the bottom of the gully is 400m. Fifteen goats died on that face in less than 6 minutes, the DPT was mighty warm but the heavy barrel stayed true. It earns a lot of cred points with the neighbours, knocking over goats, when it comes round to discussing that beaut 14 pointer red stag you’ve been watching go backwards and forwards over the boundary fence!

Some good shooting there.

With my .243 I limited myself to under 400 metres. I've just moved to 7mm08 and look forward to getting that set up over coming weeks then slowing taking it out further as I get comfortable with it. Goats can be really hard to put down sometimes and like any animal deserve respect - there is nothing worse than having to climb through gorse, broom, rosehip, lawyer, matagori, nettle then finally some blackberry to finish off a wounded animal. They say Donkey's are the toughest animal to put down but I've seen some amazingly resilient goats over the years.

Like you Flyblown, the old matriarchal nanny goes down first. Once you have her pegged the following shot is for the next goat that steps up and takes the lead. You'll often see the billies run the opposite way to the rest of the mob so you need to kept an eye out for them making the break. In heavy cover I usually try calling them back after a short period of silence. Nothing brings out the sneaky ol ladies like the sound of a lost kid looking for mum.

I note the 6.5 Creedmoor has become popular and I hear it's something to do with being the calibre of choice with the US snipers. It's that correct? It seems so similar to the .243 or 7mm08 to hardly warrant the change. What does it have over the others?

Originally Posted by planenutz

I note the 6.5 Creedmoor has become popular and I hear it's something to do with being the calibre of choice with the US snipers. It's that correct? It seems so similar to the .243 or 7mm08 to hardly warrant the change. What does it have over the others?

Low recoil
2750fps+
140gr+ hunting projectiles with BCs between 0.6 - 0.7
1:8” twist barrels are standard and built for long for calibre high BC bullets
Significantly better windage performance than “regular” 0.3 - 0.5 BC hunting bullets
More retained energy past ~450m than .308 Win
Low recoil... did I say that already

American snipers? Some of the special forces are looking at Creedmoor for certain applications I believe but I can assure you my application has nothing remotely to do with sniping Taliban fantasies! I save that for the odd roumd of Call of Duty Its just a damn good cartridge designed from the bottom up to maximise the advances in high BC projectiles. And man does it work.

@planenutz went out to @stug today and measured up my Billy he came in at a respectable 96 DS score so not one for the official record books but still a great specimen I will be proud to hang on my wall once mounting is complete.
Funny side note I have the boy convinced we are having goat head soup for dinner, he's currently up in his room sulking cause he doesn't want it

Nice. So close! One more year and he'd have made it past the 100DS mark. At the end of the day @dannyb the head is a trophy for you regardless of whether it makes the DS record books. It's all about the memories, the blood, sweat and tears, the people you shared the day with.

Was there any thoughts as to age? Looking at the head it seems he was probably past his prime as a breeding male and more like 16 -18 years old. Getting them that old down south is pretty lucky.

Love the soup idea. That's funny. Nothing like winding up the kids for some cheap entertainment.

@planenutz not too sure, his teeth are actually in really good nic so not 100% sure but best guess is between 10 and 16 years neither me or @stug were up to skill with ageing goats

His upper molars were still really sharp. How long do goats live?

Originally Posted by stug

How long do goats live?

Only until they get shot

Originally Posted by planenutz

Only until they get shot.

Which out in the Whanganui means forever... immortal goats! Man there’s a lot of them out in those valleys.

We have domestic goats here that were born in 2006, and 2008. They live next door as pets, they are all wethers that I bred from Boer x Toggenburg. Good solid meat goats that do a good job, there’s a goat dairy round the corner that experimented with different crosses in the noughties to try and find a good mix of meat and milk production. The Boer genes never did deal with the footrot we get here with the soft volcanic soil and lack of rocks but the hybrids did much better. So these goats are 12 and 10yrs now and in fine fettle and will likely go another 6-7 years or so, like the ones they replaced, who were in their late teens by the time they made their trip to the offal pit. (They are used as boundary fence hedge trimmers, and a bloody good job they do too.)

Google says ‘15-18 years’ life expectancy, so that tallies well.

A stable supply of a variety of quality feed, mid-range temperatures, resistance to parasit es and good steep bluffy country bode well for a healthy feral goat in the bush. Good genes (milk, no footrot, thick hair) means they can survive in very tough places. They need thick bush available for shelter though as they hate the rain. The importance of rocky bluffs to goats can get overlooked, its a big part of the natural instinct, to have a rock wall behind them for protection and shelter, and also because without rocks goats hooves will get overgrown and cause them problems. When we go hunt for them in a new area, I’ll look for bluffs on Google Earth, never fails, they won’t be far away.