One the one hand, I don’t give an assfull of ashes for the idea that shooting lead-free bullets will do the planet one iota of good. We get lead from the ground and we return it to the ground, albeit at very high speeds, so BFD. On the other hand, mandated lead-free zones have given us some dandy new homogeneous bullets by Hornady, Nosler, and Barnes, so it’s not a total waste.

The most recent of this genre is from Nosler—a lead-free Ballistic Tip for varmint hunters. The batch I tested is .224-inch and 35 grains, but there will be lighter and heavier slugs out shortly. These new Ballistic Tips are made with a disintegrating copper core, an alloy jacket, an extra-large expansion cavity in the nose, and an attractive polycarbonate tip.

To test them, I fired ...... a batch in my supernaturally accurate .223 Savage Model 12 Long Range Precision Varminter Dual Port (try saying that in one breath). I found that, with the same powder charges I used for 50-grain Ballistic Tips, I could get 3,600 fps as opposed to 3,400 fps. Accuracy was not as good as with the conventional Ballistic Tips, although the average was a half-inch, and I got some groups quite a bit smaller. The Model 12 Etcetera has a 1-9 twist, and I suspect that is a bit fast for these short, light, bullets; I think I might have done much better with 1-12 or 1-14.

Are the Lead-Frees frangible? Rest easy. They frange just fine. Small rodents being in short supply, I shot apples, and they disintegrated in a cloud of apple juice. You can read more about the new BTs at nosler.com. Buy lots and save the environment.

A couple of months back, the Savages took me on a prairie dog hunt and the evening before the shooting started I was handed a new version of the Model 12 Series Varmint in .223 to sight in. I did so, and what I saw 100 yards away in the fading light caught my interest—all five shots went in one ragged hole. Could this, I wondered, be the long-sought factory rifle that would break the ½-moa mark?

So when the hunt was over, I asked Savage for a loaner so I could beat on it at length with a variety of ammo and, after a suitable delay they gave me one with 600 rounds through it, also in .223. Now, before I tell you how I did, I should describe the rifle.

The Model 12 SLRPVDP is a lineal descendent of the Model 12, which won our Best of the Best award in 2006. It’s a single-shot with an oversized bolt knob, an H-S Precision Varmint stock with an aluminum bedding block (and three bedding screws), a special Accu-Trigger that can be set from 6 ounces* to 2.5 pounds, a 26-inch, deeply-fluted, extra-heavy 26-inch stainless barrel** and a ball-breaking weight of 12 pounds. “Dual Port” refers to the slots cut on both sides of the action, enabling a right-handed shooter to load from the left and eject the empties from the right. This was developed for benchrest shooters who want to get their five shots downrange as fast as possible, and is also good for prairie dog hunters whose blood is up.

This rifle is exactly what you’d get if you went to a cutting-edge builder of varmint gunss, gave him $5,000, and asked for his best effort, except that the Model 12, etc., costs $1,273.

The one I was loaned has a Picatinny rail on it, and I strongly recommend this. The scope I mounted is one of the new Bushnell Elite 6500s in 4.5X-30X with mil dots. A better varmint scope I have not seen, and neither have you.

And so to shooting***. I first fired five varieties of reasonably low-rent factory ammo through the Model 12 and so forth, and it responded by doing its own version of projectile vomiting. However, with the very first handload, it announced that it was the rifle I had been looking for all these years. I was shooting 50-grain Nosler Ballistic Tips, W 748 powder, Remington brass, and CCI 450 primers, and the groups averaged .293, with the smallest group .251.

So now the question was whether it was a one-load rifle. It is not. Using various combinations of W 748, RelodeR 7, Berger bullets, Winchester brass, CCI BR4 primers, and some match bullets that gunmaker Mickey Coleman gave me and whose maker I have forgotten, I was able to get comparable groups with ease. The overall average for everything is .306-inch, and is just about what I get from my varmint rifles that cost a hell of a lot more than $1,273. If I had used prepped cases, the groups would have been smaller.

The Model 12 etcetera also comes in .22/250, which will probably not shoot quite as well (it being axiomatic that the more powder you burn the bigger the groups), .204 Ruger (your guess is as good as mine; I am not a fan) and 6mm Norma BR (which may actually shoot a little better). In any event, this particular rifle is the most accurate one I have ever shot that you could buy over the counter, and after 40-plus years of writing about these things, that is saying quite a lot.

*You can set it at that weight, but it will malfunction. The trigger will release but the sear won’t. Twelve to 18 ounces will do you fine.
**Savage, which still button-rifles and hand-straightens its barrels, takes some extra pains with these.
***Temperature in the 70s, and no wind at all.

We don’t usually address conservation in this space but the way I look at it, shotguns aren’t good for much if you don’t have birds to hunt with them.

Back in the early 80s, when fencerow to fencerow farming was devastating pheasant populations, I can remember going hunting with my cousin one day. It was right at the beginning of the whitetail population boom, and all we saw that were a couple of hen pheasants and dozens of deer. “The limit ought to be three deer a day and one pheasant a year instead of the other way around,” Shaun said.

A few years later, the USDA’s Conservation Reserve Program came along, turning millions of acres of cropland into grass. Pheasant populations rebounded. When the prairie droughts of the late 80s and early 90s ended and rains came to the Midwest, wetland basins in idled grass fields made excellent waterfowl nesting habitat and duck populations came back as well. The strong fall flights of the last 15 years have been due to rainy weather and CRP.  We are actually “exporting” ducks to Canada as explained in this Delta Waterfowl Press release.

CRP is not perfect – it has not met its potential to improve bobwhite habitat, for instance – but it has been great for farmland wildlife and much better than intensive row-crop agriculture, which is where we seem to be headed once again. In the last five years, 4.2 million acres have gone out of the program, and there is a potential for another 21 million acres to go back into production over the next five years.

With the future of the program in doubt, the USDA is holding a public comment period through the rest of this month and into October as detailed in the this Pheasants Forever release.

Take a minute to voice your support.

Now is the time of year when a lot of hunters shoot their annual round of skeet to tune up. When they get to station 8, the last shots on the field, they encounter birds thrown seemingly right at them at a million miles an hour. They miss, then grumble that station 8 replicates no shot you would ever take in the field.  I used to say the same thing until I learned how to make the shot. Now I love station 8. The video below is of me shooting from it.

Station 8 is nowhere near as fast and scary as it appears. There are two keys to breaking it: first, hold your gun on the lower outside corner of the square opening in the house. That puts your barrels ahead of the bird, giving you a little head start. By holding on the lower corner, you keep the gun below the line of the target where it doesn’t block your view of bird coming out of the house.

Then, move your eyes to look into the house. Focus underneath the stack of the targets on the spot where you will first see the bird emerge. If you can pick the target up as it comes off the trap, and your gun is already ahead of it, the bird won’t seem to be going so fast. You just swing and shoot right at it. You have more time than you think to shoot station 8. Notice in the clip (courtesy of my brother-in-law Roger and his new camera) my gun isn’t moving all that quickly and the target still blows up into a ball of white dust.