Ammo for hunting moose continues to evolve

Hunters have always debated the merits of various firearms for efficiently taking down big game.

And they always will.

A hunter who gets what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hunt a moose should give careful consideration to the caliber to be used for the hunt. Or should he?

Interviews with hunters who shot big moose and chose to send their pictures to the newspaper indicate there’s a wide range of guns that will bring down a big-game animal that stands 7-feet high at the shoulder.

Field & Stream gun writer David Petzal recently wrote a column encouraging hunters to drop the size of their hunting ammunition.

Thanks to recent improvements to range-finding tools and bullet quality, ammo doesn’t have to be as big as it used to be to kill effectively, Petzal wrote.

Previous generations of hunters preferred heavier bullets because lower-quality bullets exploded on impact and didn’t penetrate game animals. Hunters preferred faster ammunition because lacking today’s range-finding lasers, they needed a flatter trajectory.

Petzal predicted more ammo downsizing is in the future thanks to the popularity of the AR-15 and its imitators.

“It may be a bit down the road yet, but I think one of the results of the AR boom will be a generation of shooters that regards cartridges of .223 length and size as standard—and anything bigger as freakish,” he said in the January Field & Stream.

But Petzal was writing for an audience of Lower 48 hunters who go after smaller game. I was interested to learn whether there’s been any evidence of people picking smaller ammunition for a 1,500-pound bull moose.

The official Alaska Department of Fish and Game website (online at bit.ly/2eyMNva) offers advice similar to Petzal’s. Some hunters use heavier ammunition than they need and aren’t able to shoot accurately because of heavy recoil, it warns. “Only consider using a .300, .338 or larger magnum if you can shoot it as well as you can the .30-06,” it states.

But the members of this year’s 60-Inch Club – bagging moose with antler spreads exceeding that range – certainly don’t show any preference for lighter rounds. If anything, this year’s sample skewed toward the larger rounds. Four hunters used the .338 Winchester Magnum, making it the most popular.

Only two hunters used the famous and versatile .30-06.

I went by the gun counter at Frontier Outfitters in Fairbanks to take a photo of some of the most popular moose rounds. The workers were nice enough to open a half dozen ammo boxes for me, but they were rightly skeptical of my ambitions to learn something about moose hunting trends from the 60-Inch Club.

Manager Kurt O’Leary said there haven’t been any obvious patterns in the types of ammunition moose hunters use.

In general, hunters buy ammo that works with the rifle they already have, which can last for decades if taken care of, he said.