My first memories of chasing squirrels were with my dad. I can actually remember that nice sunny afternoon in northwest Indiana, when we started down the gravel trail through the towering hardwood forest on both sides. Of course, everything was bigger to me back then. At four years old, fallen tree trunks across the trail were major obstacles. They slowed my forward progress as my father stealthily pushed on ahead. I’m sure he was trying to put some distance between himself and his leaf-crunching-machine of a child, but after I was left to navigate the fourth or fifth log jam on my own, I grew bored of being told to be quiet.

In true four-year-old fashion, I thought it was time for a game. I picked up a rock from the path, and as my dad crept ahead, I threw it as hard as I could into the woods. The rock hit the dry, noisy leaves and rolled down hill. My father instantly snapped to attention in that direction! Eagerly searching with eyes and ears to find the source of the sound. I giggled as I watched the seriousness in his stance — legs slightly bent, shotgun half raised. After a few minutes, not detecting any sign of game, he again pressed on. I found a suitable stick and threw it into the woods next. Again, my father halted to attention staring into the forest for a clue. I did this half dozen more times that afternoon, spacing out the intervals as to not let on to my ruse, giggling harder each time. I know it might be hard to believe, but we didn’t get any squirrels that afternoon, but I did have fun.

Like most things in life, family and work took up the majority of my father’s time and it would be seven years later and 650 miles south before we went squirrel hunting again. We moved south of Birmingham, Alabama, and unlike the small woodlots and treelines of the Midwest, the immense forests of the South were calling my father’s small-game spirit like never before. I was 11 and carried a .410 shotgun. From that first cold dawn in the hills of Oakmulgee Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in west-central Alabama to where I stand today, squirrel hunting sparked the hunting spirit inside of me, the likes of which I would have never imagined.

Fast forward 26 years, I have a family of my own, I’ve been on the receiving end of carrying my small son through the forest, constantly shushing him in hopes of seeing something, anything. Somewhere in those 26 years I’ve swapped the simple times of mostly squirrel hunting to chasing deer, turkey, hogs and an assortment of other big game. However, this past February I was invited, along with a co-worker, Derrick Nawrocki, to participate in the 5^th Annual Squirrel Master Classic, just west of Montgomery, Alabama.

The Squirrel Master Classic

The squirrel Master Classic is a fun-filled squirrel hunting competition between some of the top outdoor T.V. hunting personalities, such as, Michael Waddell, Buck Masters’ Jackie Bushman, competitive shooting legend Doug Koenig and many more. Nawrocki and I were invited as outdoor media professionals.

As I mentioned, it is a competition. Each gray squirrel is worth one point and each fox squirrel is worth two points. However, you could only count two fox squirrels towards your total.

Not only is this a fun event that shows a different side of hunting other than chasing monster whitetails and elk or thundering gobblers in the spring. It gets back to the roots of my hunting life and many others by chasing bushy-tails through the swamps and hills of south Alabama. It also helps introduce young folks to the dying art of small game hunting. Each team would also have an Alabama 4-H student join their ranks. And to top it all off, every participant would be given an airgun to hunt with. That’s right, no shotguns, no .22LR, just a good-old fashioned airgun. Well, almost.

The weapon

This isn’t your normal airgun. This is a precision GAMO Maxxim Swarm air rifle chambered in .22 caliber and topped with a 3-9x40 air-gun scope. The Swarm launches a .22 caliber pellet at 975 fps, which is deadly on squirrels. We shot the GAMO Red Fire pellets with a diamond-shaped polymer tip. This pellet is designed for consistent accuracy and extreme penetration, while mushrooming to a larger diameter upon impact. Headshot squirrels were dead on impact. Body-shot squirrels in the vitals were also quick kills. Body shots outside of the vitals typically required a finishing shot, which was extremely easy to accomplish because the swarm is the only 10-shot break-barrel airgun on the market. It comes equipped with a detachable 10-round magazine, which loads into the top of the back end of the barrel. The Swarm only require one cock of the barrel to load the next pellet and pressurize it for the next shot. Without the quick follow-up reloads, we wouldn’t have been able to harvest as many squirrels as we did.

Teams

I was embedded with Team Koenig. Doug Koenig was our team leader and is also one heck of a nice guy. You wouldn’t know it talking with Doug, but he’s won more than 70 national and world championship shooting competitions. Other team members included Patrick Meitin, an outdoor writer from Idaho; Frank Melloni, a firearms instructor in New York and Pennsylvania; Ken Byers of Byers Media; Silas Frick, an Alabama 4-H student from Opelika, Alabama; Kyle Harrell (our local guide) and his 5-year-old son Kyle Jr. who we called Brother; and Victor Bridges and Dallas Middleton of Missouri, the team’s dog handlers. Bridges is the owner of Gunther a treeing feist who would come in very handy in the second half of our hunt.

We competed against teams Realtree, Bone Collector, Buck Commander, Buckmasters and Archer’s Choice. Each team had a land owner or guide hunting with them to navigate the properties we’d be hunting and a dog handler with a trained squirrel dog. All teams would leave base camp, which was located at the wonderful Southern Sportsman Hunting Lodge in Hayneville, Alabama, at dawn and be required back at 11 a.m. After a shooting competition and lunch, teams would head back out and hunt until dark and then be back at the lodge at 6 p.m. That’s when the squirrels would be tallied, and a winner declared.

 

The hunt

I rolled out with Team Koenig to a nearby property with steep rolling hills and hardwood creek bottoms. We entered the woods before sunrise on a beautiful spring morning with temperatures in the upper 60s at daylight. The only problem, we weren’t seeing any squirrels and apparently none had hit the ground yet because Gunther wasn’t having any luck treeing either. We spread out on both sides of the creek and began to move through the hardwoods. An hour in and we still hadn’t seen a squirrel. That’s when Dallas Middleton of Missouri began shaking vines that lead up to squirrels’ nests. His early attempts didn’t produce, but it got the rest of our group in on the vine-shaking action. As we entered the edge of a food plot, I saw a series of vines reaching way up into a white oak with a large squirrel nest in it. I grabbed the main vine and began shaking — immediately a gray squirrel rocketed out of the nest and scampered to the top of the tree. I yelled, “Squirrel!” Everyone surrounded the tree with pellet rifles raised. Then the air guns started singing! The quiet shots continued until a solid thud resonated from the tops of the tree. Soon after, a gray squirrel came tumbling out and Gunther was more than happy to grab his chew toy!

Now that we had a plan in place, we moved throughout the entire drainage shaking vines until a squirrel would hop out of a nest. Our team would surround the tree and typically drop the squirrel after several shots. What started as a slow morning, ended up yielding 11 squirrels by the time we had to leave to get back to the Sportsman’s Lodge for lunch.

Shooting competitions

While we had 11 points on the board from the morning hunt, there was opportunity to add to the points via two shooting competitions. The first shoot would pit the 4-H students against one another using the GAMO Swarm rifles we were using for the hunt. Targets consisted of balloons, clay targets and pressurized water bottles. Silas competed hard for our team and earned us one additional point during the competition.

Next up, were the team captains and another team member. Doug chose me for our shoot in which we would be using a Red Ryder BB guns! Doug and I talked over our course of fire beforehand — he is a world champion shooter after all. There were several types of targets arranged in front of us: balloons, clay targets, and can poppers — all of which were worth one point each. With the balloons being the largest targets, Doug and I chose to work those over first and then move on to the smaller clays. At the shout of “start,” we began working over the first rack of balloons. Did I mention we had 30 seconds? We started in on the second rack of balloons and got down to three balloons left. At that point, I moved on to the clays and let Doug finish the balloons. I took out one clay before time expired. We felt pretty good about our shooting and as it turned out our team won the Red Ryder shootout. That added four more points to our total, so with Silas’ one point and our four, we now had a total of 16 points in the squirrel hunt. Feeling good with those numbers we quickly checked our airguns for zero and set out to a new location for the afternoon hunt.

https://youtu.be/uVl9Klkij38

Afternoon hunt

Kyle drove us to a cattle and fish farm with beautiful rolling pastures and a huge lowland section of hardwoods in the middle. Kyle said he sees a lot of fox squirrels in this area, so our anticipation was high that we could fill our limit of two in this location. We quickly grabbed our gear and headed into the woods with Gunther refreshed and leading the way.

We spread out into the woods with Byers, Middleton and myself working the inside edge of the woods along the pasture. Middleton signaled to a squirrel nest ahead with a vine growing up to it. I nodded my head that I would cover the tree as he shook the nest. With one shake a huge black fox squirrel sprung into the top of the tree. I shouted,” Squirrel!” But before the rest of the crew could arrive on scene I had a perfect head shot and I squeezed the trigger. At the crack of the shot, the large fox squirrel plummeted from the treetop. Two points!

I’ve killed fox squirrels in the past and even have one mounted on a piece of drift wood. However, I’d never killed a black one like this. It was beautiful, and Kyle asked if he could keep it to have his taxidermist mount it. I happily agreed.

A few minutes later we kicked up another fox squirrel and dropped it. We had reached our limit of fox squirrels in 15 minutes and now we needed more gray squirrels. However, the next two squirrels we scrounged up were fox squirrels.

These squirrels seem to hug the edge of open pastures and wood lines, so we decided to head deeper into the hardwood bottom where we felt the more skittish gray squirrels would be. This proved to be the right tactic and we started kicking up gray squirrels from the vine-encroached nests.

We continued to slowly pick up squirrels throughout the afternoon and as 3:30 rolled around, squirrels were finally coming down out of the trees to scrounge for food. This worked in our favor and our buddy Gunther was finally starting to pick up the scent of squirrels. It wasn’t long, and Gunther was barking at the base of a huge oak. He had two squirrels treed. We knocked those out and moved on to the next tree he was sounding the alarm at. We picked up another squirrel and a few more after that. As we worked our way back toward the truck, Kyle suggested we go and give the section of woods where we got the fox squirrels one last try before having to head back to the lodge for check-in.

As we exited the trucks Kyle informed us we only had 20 minutes until we had to load up and head to the lodge. You would have thought we stepped in a fire-ant bed, all you could see was elbows and…well, you get the idea. We were hauling butt into the woods in search of a few more squirrels. Immediately Gunther barked treed and we ran to his location. What we thought was one squirrel turned out to be three! As this team had done all day long, they made great shots and we collected our prizes. When it was all said and done, Gunther was a treeing machine as light was fading and we walked back to the truck with five more gray squirrels, giving us a total of eight in the last 20 minutes. We ended up with 17 squirrels from our afternoon hunt, two of which were fox squirrels so that added two additional points for an evening total of 19 points. Combine that with our morning total and our five earned points from the shootout, we were sitting tall with 35 points.

The results

Back at check-in, teams were hush, hush on how they did. The competition had gotten to everyone throughout the day and we all wanted to walk home with the squirrel trophy. As the first couple teams checked-in, we had them easily beat and we were feeling good. That is, until Team Buckmasters stepped up to the stage with a whopping 42 squirrels and three points from the shootout for a record-breaking total of 45 points! The saving grace to coming in second place in the 5^th Annual Squirrel Master Classic, was my buddy Nawrocki happened to be on the winning team. So, in the end, the Squirrel Master Trophy made its way back home to the office.

While the competition aspect of this hunt made it a lot of fun, it was getting back to the basics of what got me started hunting in the beginning — squirrels and simply spending time in the woods with good people.

You know what else is good? Squirrel gumbo! Check out this recipe if you’ve never had it.