Rimfire Readiness With Savage's New B22 Timberlight 22 LR

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It has been said that getting ready for a big-game hunting trip is almost as much fun as the actual hunt. That very well could be, and I, myself, thoroughly enjoy prepping for my big-game hunts. I also relish gearing up for squirrel and rabbit hunting. For me, everything has to be just right. Squirrel season is a ways off while I write this article, but it’s never too early to start getting ready. And besides, gearing up for hunting with a favorite rimfire rifle is pure joy no matter what time of year. I came to enjoy squirrel hunting quite naturally. My dad’s dad was an inveterate squirrel hunter, who hunted with a Winchester Model 42 .410 Bore pump shotgun with a 28-inch, Full-choke barrel, and I often tagged along with him, watching and learning.

As Jack O’Connor pointed out in his book on sheep hunting, the first requirement to be met is to hunt where there are sheep. The same goes for any other game. My corner of the world is western Missouri, an area known as the Osage Plains. The physiognomy of this unglaciated region has rolling hills; small, meandering streams; tallgrass prairies; and lots of oak trees. Acorns from the red and white oak families provide a bounty of mast crops for a multitude of critters, both large and small. Deer and turkeys love them, and so do squirrels.

“Small game” in Missouri consists of the fox squirrel (Sciurus niger), gray squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), and cottontail rabbits (Sylvilagus floridanus). In my area, the fox squirrel is dominant. Some might think that not much forethought is needed for the pursuit of such small game, but whatever the quarry, a good plan tends to produce better results. The habitat of the Osage Plains fills the first part of the plan, and my acreage is squirrel-laden with mixed hardwood trees.

Guns & Gear

The next part of the plan includes guns, scopes, and ammo. It is rather obvious that for squirrels, it’s a .22 rimfire rifle or a shotgun. My duck-hunting buddy Walt Hanna, who lives in Georgia, hunts the plentiful gray squirrels on his place with his Beretta 12-gauge BL-2. I don’t know what load he prefers, but I think scatterguns are a bit of overkill for squirrels and can destroy some fine vittles. Besides, they kick and make a lot of noise. I rely on a .22 rimfire rifle for such pursuits.

The main .22 LR in my battery dates from 1967, when I purchased a Marlin Model 989 from college classmate Roger Streeter for the grand sum of $20. That was a long time ago. This promotional model semiauto was made from 1962 to 1965. As a hungry college student back then, I cruised the Kansas backroads and farm fields and used the Model 989 to collect many rabbit dinners. Later, in Colorado, mountain cottontails, the occasional snowshoe hare, blue grouse, and white-tailed ptarmigan were taken. The last three species mentioned are real delicacies, and the .22 LR was all that I needed for gathering them.

Most serious gun cranks have one or more .22 rimfire rifles on hand, so a squirrel hunt gives us yet another reason to shoot them. I had recently acquired a neat, new, snazzy .22 bolt-action rifle from Savage called the B22 Timberlite Thumbhole, so I focused on it for this report. You want a handy, accurate rifle for a rimfire safari, and the B22 is just that.

The Timberlite Thumbhole is made by Savage’s subsidiary in Lakefield, Ontario, Canada, and it sports a nifty stock that has light gray finish. At first glance it looks for all the world like a synthetic stock, but Savage says it’s actually made of a hardwood. I’m usually not partial to thumbhole stocks, but this one just fits my hand like it was made for it.  The sleek little rifle also has a nifty carbon-fiber-wrapped barrel that’s 18 inches long. The muzzle is threaded and comes with a thread protector. And of course the rifle features Savage’s excellent AccuTrigger with built-in safety lever. The entire rifle weighs a mere 6 pounds, 2 ounces.

The B22 Timberlite Thumbhole does not come with iron sights, but that’s just fine with me because I am a strong advocate for using a riflescope for hunting squirrels anyway, and the Timberlite Thumbhole rifle comes with a Picatinny rail on the receiver that makes mounting an optic a simple, 10-minute job. I tried two scopes on the rifle. The first was a new Sightron S-TAC 1-6X 24IRAR1. This alphabet soup describes a 1-6X variable scope with a 30mm tube and an illuminated reticle. I’m guessing that the “AR” in its nomenclature refers to an AR-15-platform rifle. This scope has what Sightron calls capped “hunting turrets,” with 0.25-MOA click adjustments.

The IRAR1 reticle has a red circle over a central black dot and some horizontal hash marks for holdover correction. That, I think, is the AR connection. It worked well, but the reticle is a bit large and covered too much of the target for small game. It’s a fine scope, but it’s almost too much of a good thing for a .22 LR rifle in my opinion.

The second scope I tried was the one I settled on for serious testing and field use. It is a Leupold VX-1 3-9X 40mm. In addition to dazzling optics, the reticle has a really fine Duplex crosshair reticle that doesn’t blot out a bushy-tail’s head. The scope’s 1-inch tube was secured to the Timberlite in 1-inch Burris Z-Rings. If you think this one is a little “over-scoped” for the B22, let me just say it worked really well, and the reticle was great for target work when the magnification level was cranked down to about 4X. I think it’s about perfect for squirrel hunting.

The next thing on our rimfire readiness list is ammo. Load selection for that old Marlin Model 989 was really simple back in my college days. I always went with the cheapest .22 LR ammo I could find, brand mattered not. Today’s ammo prices would have put a real dent in my small-game harvests back then, but the wealth of .22 LR loadings today is a real boon for small-game hunters. I inventoried my supply of .22 LR ammo and found that I had 27 different loads. No way was I going to bench test all of them for the upcoming squirrel season, so I arbitrarily placed ammo into two groups to test-fire in the new Savage B22. I tested seven match loads and 10 “everyday” hunting loads. I fired three, five-shot groups with each load at 50 yards from a Caldwell Lead Sled DFT rifle rest from my shooting building. Velocities were measured with an Oehler Model 35P chronograph, and the results are shown in the accompanying chart.

Interestingly, the everyday hunting loads I tested produced a smaller overall group average than the match loads. The match loads averaged 1.24 inches, while the hunting ammo averaged 1.04 inches. Two of the match loads, the SK 40-grain Long Range Match and the Lapua 40-grain Baithalon Xtreme, averaged under an inch, whereas four of the hunting loads shot under an inch, and the rest were very close to that.

The winner in terms of accuracy was Remington’s Ranch Hand ammo with the 38-grain hollowpoint bullet. It produced a 0.85-inch group average, and it registered an average velocity of 1,220 fps. Any of the top five or six everyday hunting loads would be suitable for squirrels in this rifle. The muzzle energies of all of these loads were 112 ft-lbs or higher, which, as expected, was considerably higher than those of the match loads.

One metric I list in the chart is the coefficient of variation (COV). This is the standard deviation expressed as a percent of the average velocity. Anything under 1 percent is really good, and 2 percent is also good. But as the COV creeps up over 3 or 4 percent, it becomes problematic. The COVs of three of the match loads and one of the everyday loads were 3 percent or higher. In my experience, high COVs are not unusual in .22 rimfire ammo, but to put this in perspective, a .300 Magnum elk load with a velocity of 3,000 fps would have to have an S.D. of 90 fps to show a COV of 3 percent. This, of course, would be unacceptable.

Overall, I was impressed with the accuracy of the B22. As noted, the Ranch Hand load from Remington with the 38-grain hollowpoint bullet clocked 1,220 fps and grouped into 0.85 inch. The RN Ranch Hand registered 1,178 fps and had a group average of 1.34 inches. The Browning Performance Rimfire with the 37-grain Fragmenting bullet averaged 1.14 inches and clocked 1,382 fps. It produced 157 ft-lbs at the muzzle. The CCI High Velocity Clean-22 load had a 40-grain bullet, and it averaged 0.90 inch with a velocity of 1,300, which produced a muzzle energy of 150 ft-lbs. These two loads were the fastest loads tested.

The heaviest bullet tested was with the Winchester Super Suppressed load. Its 45-grain bullet had a velocity of 1,074 fps and a group average of 1.32 inches. I should note that one fired case of this ammo could not be ejected from the chamber and had to be pushed out with a cleaning rod. That was the only hiccup during my shooting session. For hunting squirrels, I anticipated the ranges would be relatively short, so I sighted-in the B22 at 50 yards and then checked the point of impact at intermediate ranges. Everything looked good. A squirrel within that range would be in big trouble.

Practice Makes Perfect

Shooting from an indoor benchrest is one thing, but woods roaming is quite another. So, to get into the practice of utilizing impromptu rests, I took the B22 Timberlite Thumbhole and a box of ammo to the hardwoods west of my house and fired at targets of opportunity, with whatever improvised rest I could find and also offhand. “Stand on your hind legs and fight like a man,” Granddad used to say. After a little practice, no hedge apple or persimmon fruit was safe on these endeavors. I was ready for squirrel hunting season.

The squirrel season in Missouri opens on the fourth Saturday in May and runs to February 15 each year. In other words, the season closes on February 16, 2025, and reopens in May. While the season was technically open as I write this, in my opinion, it conflicts with squirrel biology and, in my opinion, ethical hunting.

Most squirrel litters are born in mid-March. The newborn young are altricial (blind and hairless), dependent on the female for several weeks, develop slowly, and cannot fend for themselves. Females harvested during this critical period may leave a litter in the nest. Thus, I restrict my squirrel hunting to later in the season, when the little furballs are out and about, and on their own.

Squirrel hunting is a fun way to spend an afternoon in the woods, and I am confident that the little B22 and the selected load will do a fine job. The preparation was productive, and it gave me an opportunity to test a lot of ammo and practice shooting from field conditions. The wary squirrels in my neck of the woods are small and challenging targets, and they make prize table fare. With the plethora of nice rimfire rifles and a cornucopia of great ammo available these days, hunting them is a highly satisfying endeavor. 

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