Power of a Shire with the speed of a sprinter

Once we all used a classic .22 rifle for pest control but Richard Hardy thinks the .17HMR has now well and truly knocked it off its perch

- Richard Hardy

Sometimes it’s healthy to fall out of love with the most familiar things in life. Sometimes loyalty isn’t a virtue and it’s good to allow the novel and unfamiliar to become an infatuation. Recently, I’ve waved goodbye to more than 25 years of Land Rover ownership, put down my last Blackberry and no longer have a .22 rimfire in my gun cabinet.

My daydreaming is rudely interrupted by the orange blob in the handheld thermal imager, running straight down the tree trunk and into the long grass on the field margin. Now represented as a slightly fuzzy, extended white blob, it bounces out on to the newly rolled pasture, dipping and then sitting upright.

Leaning to my right, I exchange the technicolored world for a crisp sight picture set at 8x, nestle my cheek on to the extended laminate stock and breathe out slowly, letting the cross-hairs alight on the fifth fence post. First 90m, then count out five more for a total of 95m and settle again on the upright grey squirrel. I breathe in, slowly out and take up the imperceptible creep on the tuned trigger. Crack! And another tree munching alien meets its maker.

Frankenstein

The miniature bolt on the Sako throws the spent cartridge case nearly 18in to my right and I go to recover it. The familiarity of this brass is only half the story, to be precise the rear half: it is a Frankenstein assemblage of the familiar .22WMR case, albeit neck down, but the business end is the very different .17 ballistic-tipped thunderbolt.