Target of opportunity at the shooting bench

What are the chances, right?! Very cool. Thanks for sharing it.

Geno

brave deer lol

I'd name that deer "Darwin".......just to be cute.

Maybe he was just assessing your marksmanship.

Great photo. Thanks for sharing.

My local public range is in a State Park. The park has a nice herd of Whitetails, several Coyotes, lots of Prairie Puppies and assorted birdlife. If a shooter shoots any of these, the perp will get a $10,000 fine and loss of hunting privileges in the state. I was testing some hunting loads in my .223 Rem 700 when a Coyote wandered onto the range. I called for an immediate ceasefire until he beat it.

Plenty of legal places to hunt in CO...no need to break game laws.

Harry

A guy here once had his platoon on the firing range at Ft Benning.
A deer crossed the range. He yelled "Cease fire." But the relay opened up at the deer, which fled.
They got chewed out twice. Once for shooting at wildlife on the target range. Again for missing.

There have been a few coyotes on the sniper range at Bragg that didn't get the opportunity to regret their choices.

In the way-back-when, my uncle had a 100-yard range in his front yard. A growth of brush began about fifty yards behind the backstop. It was common for a half-dozen does to do their daytime snooze there, and usually weren't upset by rifle shots.

One year at the Camillus Rod & Gun Club a 6-point buck walked across the 300 yard range ... on the club's annual sight in day for non members! Probably the only deer some of those folks saw all season!

At our club, birds will sometimes perch on the target frames while we are shooting and then swoop down for the grubs churned up by the shooting at the cease fires. We've had some feral pigs, but so far they been removed by trapping, not shooting. We're a shooting club, not a hunting club, the critters get pretty immune to gun fire if you aren't shooting at them

Talk about bad jobs:


The photo has got to be a put on, talk about improper backstops!

theres a small creekbed that runs through a local rural range my friends and I occasionally use. There were still some "targets of opprotunity" inthe form of varous junk on the firing line when we got there, so we just started blasting away with various AR-15s, AKs, etc. Probably a couple hundred rounds later, we approach the line to set up more targets and whatnot, and a 10 pt whitetail buck stood up and looked at us as we crossed the creekbed.....keep in mind, this channel was only about maybe 3 foot deep and maybe that wide at its widest point......

Wow....... I just had a similar experience a few weeks ago (June 28th) at the range at my club. I was the only person on the range that morning and had already set a couple targets out. Had fired several rounds at 100 yards to check zero on one rifle and was preparing to fire a second rifle and was getting stuff out of my range bag and happened to look downrange. Luckily I had my pocket digital camera handy because my cheap flip phone would have been useless at that distance. Zoomed in as much as I could but still didn't get as good a picture as I had hoped for. But there's that doe staring my way; that furthest target berm in the picture is 200 yards and the deer is a bit closer. My theory is that the local deer get accustomed to hearing gun fire and it doesn't alarm them. Except for part of deer season when the range is closed and a few club members are allowed to hunt all those woods in the background. Maybe I should see about hunting a day or two back there this fall. Looks like I've already started camera scouting, LOL........ETA..... I had a much better look at that deer through a 3.5-10x Leupold than what can be seen in that photo, but at least I got a pic.

1967, Ft. Ord Monterey CA rifle range with M-14's and a deer walks into the target area. Ceasefire and a major warning from the range NCO about the horrible things that would happen to us if the deer was harmed.

I'm thinking that deer must have been deaf from all the noise it suffered daily.

I'm reminded of a Schwarzkopf briefing during Gulf War 1 in which he identified "the luckiest man in Iraq", a dude in a Nissan Cheery who just managed to cross a bridge before a precision munition took it out.

Maybe those deer are graduates of a "professional" training school.

I have a similar story involving a Tank range at Ft. Hood during a night fire exercise and a heard of cows. There were causalities, payments made to a rancher, suspicions and accusations made, but blame was never assigned.

Beyond that I have no further comment

Nature Boy said:

I have a similar story involving a Tank range at Ft. Hood during a night fire exercise and a heard of cows. There were causalities, payments made to a rancher, suspicions and accusations made, but blame was never assigned.

Beyond that I have no further comment

Click to expand...

That reminds me of the time on the 50 cal range at Graf in Germany. A bunch of wild boar hogs decided to cross the range at around 650-700 meters. The range offficer didn't even get a chance to get "cease fire" out before all 4 Ma Deuces opened up and made sausage out of the hogs. Needless to say the German forest miester wasn't very happy with us. No one actually got into trouble but the battalion did have to pay for the hogs.

Brave hell, the safest place for a critter to stand at my range is behind the target! More like smart!

This is a very interesting thread. I know critters sometimes get into some strange places; like shooting ranges, but usually I'm not around to witness it, although I once shot a woodchuck that actually had a hole dug in our 100 yard target berm. It was early spring and he had apparently just come out of hibernation and the range wasn't that busy yet with the weather still being cold. We had a warm snap that day and it brought him out to meet a .224" 55 gr. Ballistic Tip @ about 3560 fps. I still can't believe he got a hole dug in that berm the previous year without getting shot but that side of the berm had some high weeds that probably shielded him from view and then the weeds got knocked down by snow in the winter and hadn't regrown yet in the early spring. I know I did our club a favor because they hate having 'chucks dig into the berms, although the woodchucks seem to prefer digging into the softer berms on an angle rather than digging straight down into hard, rocky ground.

"...the relay opened up at the deer..." Would've got 'em charged up here. Starting with failing to follow a lawful order. Plus a bunch of hunting reg violations.
Mind you, a buddy of mine was on a BREN gun range long, long ago. All shooters, 12 or 13 of 'em, were Jr. NCO's. when a rabbit hopped onto a shooting position berm down range. 13 LMGs tracked Bugs and opened fire. Left a hole in the berm.

@someguy2800, very nice! We have four whitetail bucks that visit the house most afternoons but they'll disappear once rifle season starts. In the second photo you can see a buck peeking over the long grass between the house and the steel target. He's just to the right of the bigger steel target.