Why shoot rabbits?
They're a scourge where we live, and there's even this thing called the Modified McLean Scale to describe their level of infestation. We're somewhere around a 3-and-a-half, and I've definitely seen places nearby that are obvious 8s.
Gear
I chose .17HMR for a variety of reasons, but most notably, I was attracted to its trajectory, accuracy, and tendency to shatter instead of ricochet. Ammo is expensive here: the best deal on .17HMR is about 3x the price of .22LR, so my focus is on making the best use of this arguably ideal round.
Notes on Data
There was a stretch near the beginning where I wasn't logging each shot, but was keeping daily totals instead, so the data is a little noisy at the beginning of the graphs as I had to recreate the order of hits and misses to the best of my recollection. This applies to 64 shots, which becomes but a blip with time.
Also, these guns have a reputation of taking a couple hundred shots to "calm down," so trends may become less subject to noise as time goes on. I do note that the gun and I seem to have gotten into a groove at about the 100-shot mark, so we'll see if that holds true over time.
For each shot, I'm tracking date, hit/miss, and which ammo was used (and thus associated cost). I'm not tracking target distance, nor method of support, nor weather conditions. Over time, I've become more and more deliberate about finding support, especially for 100m+ shots.
How this all works
This is as much of a coding lesson for me as it is a shooting log; I found a Javascript library called Tabletop that allows me to feed this page with data from a Google Sheets spreadsheet, so it's pretty easy to maintain, and then the charts are auto-generated with Plotly. In 2021, Tabletop broke, so I migrated to Papaparse. I'm hunt'n'pecking my way through JS and CSS, and my HTML is pretty rusty, too.