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Berger Bul Berger Bul A New Slant on Hunting PerformanceA New Slant on Hunting Performance

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femoral arteries in the rear legs and the jugular veinand carotid artery of the neck. In general themore damage to any of these organs, the quickerthe animal dies, because blood pressure dropsmore rapidly.

Three major factors affect how much vascular tis-sue is effectively destroyed: the width of the bullet’sexpansion and (for lack of a better word), the “vio-lence” of the expansion, plus penetration. Manyhunters say violently expanding bullets “explode.”No. Dynamite explodes; bullets disintegrate. Howmuch they disintegrate has a direct effect on tissuedestruction. This is denied by some hunters, espe-cially those who firmly believe in high weight reten-tion being one of the secrets of killing power, butit’s easily demonstrated.

At one extreme in hunting bullet performance wehave very thin-skinned, soft-cored “varmint” bul-lets, designed to totally disintegrate on impact. Atthe other extreme, we have “solids” designed not toexpand at all. Let’s take some 6mm bullets of thesame diameter and weight, one a varmint bullet andthe other a solid, and shoot them at a couple of dif-ferent animals.

First we’ll shoot a woodchuck. The varmint bulletdisintegrates so violently that the woodchuck’schest turns inside out and the chuck dies instantly.The solid punches a 6mm hole through the lungs,and the woodchuck runs into its hole. It may even-tually die, but if hit around the fringes of the lungsit might survive. This is why varmint shooters usebullets that disintegrate violently.

Next, let’s shoot an elephant with both bullets,trying for a side-on brain shot in the ear. Thevarmint bullet disintegrates on the thick hide ofthe elephant’s ear, resulting in an annoying but

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John Barsness

Many hunters have firmbeliefs about how ex-panding bullets shouldact. Some believe they

should remain inside the animal,“expending all their foot-pounds” or“dumping all their energy.” Othersbelieve the bullet should exit the an-imal, mostly to leave a blood trail.Some think that the more of its orig-inal weight the bullet retains, thebetter it performed.

Bullets kill big game animals in one way, bytearing apart vital tissue. How quickly they kill de-pends on two things: the vital tissue they hit andthe extent of the damage done.

If a bullet hits the brain or spine in front of theshoulders, death is pretty much instantaneous, andit doesn’t really matter much how the bullet ex-panded. Hunters who specialize in head shots don’tcare about much except extreme accuracy. Mosthunters, however, take the less iffy chest shot, tear-ing up the vascular tissue of the lungs and/or heart.Shots here kill through a drop in blood pressure:The brain dies from lack of oxygen.

Some other organs have a lot of blood runningthrough them, mainly the kidneys and liver. Chop-ping some major blood vessels outside the chestcan also cause a rapid drop in blood pressure.These include the vena cava under the spine, the

lets onBig Gamelets onBig Game

not fatal wound. Thesolid goes on into thebrain and kills theelephant instantly.This is why elephanthunters use solids. (Ifyou don’t believe this,read John Kingsley-Heath’s Hunting the

Dangerous Game of

Africa, where he dis-cusses killing two ele-phants with a .243Winchester, using 100-grain pointed solids.)

Most hunting bulletsare designed some-where between thoseextremes, and the“big game” animalsmost of us hunt are bigger than woodchucks andsmaller than elephants. We can use one expandingbullet on all of them, but in general the smaller theanimal the quicker a bullet that partially disinte-grates kills. This is why many deer hunters preferbullets like the Hornady InterLock, Nosler BallisticTip and Sierra GameKing. These lose around halftheir weight, so often do not exit.

Their energy is indeed expended inside the deer –but not in the way many hunters think, as a sort ofhard blow that “shocks” the deer. Instead, the en-ergy is used to tear apart the front half of the bullet,and this violent fragmentation tears up lots of tis-sue inside the deer’s chest. Consequently the deerusually drops quickly, on average far more oftenthan when shot with a bullet that loses little weightand zips out the other side.

On bigger animals, a bullet that retains a majorityof its weight kills more consistently. A bullet thatloses half its weight may only poke a hole in onelung – or perhaps a shoulder, not vital tissue. Here abullet that opens a less dramatic but longer channelin both lungs is more consistently effective.

Bullet expansion can be modified in several ways.A bullet that always partially disintegrates yet re-tains, say, two-thirds its weight tends to kill deer-sized animals more quickly than an expandingbullet that retains almost all its weight, yet the rearend penetrates deeply on larger game. This is theNosler Partition, in smaller sizes the ultimate com-promise bullet. (In larger sizes it loses far lessweight, in order to deeply penetrate really big game.)

We can make a bullet that expands very widely yet

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Three major factors affecthow much vascular tissueis effectively destroyed.

Three major factors affecthow much vascular tissueis effectively destroyed.

Wildlife was abundant at Wanganui Safaris, including many large red stags.

Handloader 248

And many bullets tumble afterexpanding (far more often thanhunters suspect) destroyingmore tissue. But we cannot con-trol this as we can expansion orvelocity.

Recently many hunters havestarted judging big game bulletsnot by how well they kill animals,but on secondary characteristicssuch as exit holes and retainedweight. Somehow it doesn’t mat-

retains most of its weight. This iseasily done by bonding the leadcore to a relatively thin jacket ofcopper or gilding metal. This bul-let will usually retain somewherebetween 75 and 90 percent of itsweight and expand to over twiceits original diameter. This alsotends to kill quickly, but pene-tration is limited by the wide“mushroom.” This is the NormaOryx, Remington Ultra Core-Lokt, Woodleigh, etc.

We can make a bullet that retains90 to 100 percent of its weightand expands to less than twice itsoriginal diameter. This bullet willcreate a narrower wound chan-

nel but penetrate deeply. This isthe late Combined TechnologyFail Safe and all the varieties ofthe Barnes X-Bullet.

We can also combine variousaspects of these designs, in bul-lets such as the Swift A-Frame,North Fork, Winchester MP3 andTrophy Bonded Bear Claw. Butno matter the design, all huntingbullets operate somewhere alongthe continuum between total dis-integration and solid.

Higher impact velocities tend todestroy more tissue, no matterhow the bullet expands. Manyhunters have noticed, for in-stance, how much quicker BarnesX-Bullets kill when cranked up towell over 3,000 fps at the muzzle.

ter if the animal ran quite a waysmore before falling, as long as arecovered bullet retains at least90 percent of its weight, or thebullet exited the animal and a bigoak on the other side.

A few months ago, I was invitedto go on a trip to New Zealandto test a bullet that behavesvery differently than any huntingbullet on the market today, theBerger VLD. The initials stand for

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BergerBullets

BergerBullets

This is where a Berger VLDstarts, with a very consistent

jacket. This cup has just beenpunched from a strip of metal.

Above, on left is the wound chan-nel from a 125-grain Nosler Par-tition impacting at 3,200 fps, thebullet entering the Test Tube onthe bottom. This channel is typi-cal of most expanding bullets,the wound cavity starting almoston impact. On the right are twoTest Tubes showing typical BergerVLD wound channels from a140-grain 6.5mm at 2,950 fpsand a 168-grain 7mm at 2,750fps. Note that the bullet does notstart expanding immediately.

Below, this is a typical BergerVLD wound channel from a TestTube with a 168-grain, .30-caliberbullet at 2,800 fps.

August-September 2007

rifle caliber (though that mightchange with the introduction ofthe Bergers).

Why don’t the VLDs start to ex-pand until inside an average biggame animal? The best guess is

the extremely long ogive, com-bined with the tiny hollowpoint.When shot into The Bullet TestTube, they retained an average ofabout 40 percent of their initialweights, but the Test Tube is anextremely consistent medium. Inanimals the recovered bulletsshowed a much greater range ofexpansion; sometimes only thetwisted jacket was found, alongwith a few lead fragments.

Berger also makes some ex-tremely accurate varmint bulletsin .172, .204 and .224 diameters.For more information contactBerger Bullets, 4275 N. PalmStreet, Fullerton CA 92835; e-mail:[email protected]; web-site: www.bergerbullets.com.

bers of the North American Hunt-ing Club who handload. TheNAHC members hunted deer withthem, reporting very quick killsand no failures.

The Berger company also hireda public relations firm, Ellis Com-munications of West Virginia, runby Chris Ellis. Another of hisclients happened to be BallisticTechnology, Inc., the firm thatmakes The Bullet Test Tube, awax-based media that I’ve re-ported on before in Handloader.

The obvious thing was to shootBerger VLDs into Test Tubes. Theresults were interesting. Any ex-panding bullet tested before hadstarted to expand almost immedi-ately on impact. This helps ex-

rest shooting. Walt started mak-ing his own bullets in the 1950s,in order to win more matches.Enough target shooters startedusing his bullets that eventuallybullet-making became his career.Walt is what might be called

on deer but also on larger game,and reported incredibly fastkills – and no problems with sur-face wounds. The Berger peoplestarted to investigate.

These people included WaltBerger himself, a legend in bench-

semi-retired now, living in Ari-zona, and the bullet plant inFullerton, California, is run byhis grandson-in-law Eric Stecker.

After hearing the hunting re-ports, Eric sent boxes of 7mmand .30-caliber VLDs to 160 mem-

Very Low Drag, an extremelyhigh ballistic coefficient createdby a long secant ogive, a tiny hol-lowpoint and a boat-tail. TheVLD was designed for punchingholes in paper targets, especiallyat longer ranges. The jacket’svery thin, about .02 inch on aver-age, and the lead core only con-tains .5 percent antimony. Mostlead-core hunting bullets usecores with around 2.0 percentantimony.

In theory this would be a finevarmint bullet and a lousy biggame bullet, prone to expandingon the surface of anything largerthan a coyote. But some big gamehunters had tried them, mostly

BERGER BULLETS

At the moment Berger VLDsare made in .224, 6mm, .25,

6.5mm, 7mm and .30 calibers.Some are so long that the stan-dard rifling twist of hunting rifleswon’t stabilize them. For instance,the 105-grain 6mm is recom-mended for one-in-8-inch twists,though there’s also a 95-grainmodel that will stabilize in 9-inchtwists, standard in 6mm Reming-tons and also found in some .243Winchesters. Berger is planningto introduce .270-caliber bulletsin traditional 130-, 140- and 150-grain weights. Obviously, thesewill mostly be for hunting, as .270has never been a popular target


Berger VLDs recovered from theTest Tube retain about 40 percentof their original weight.

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BERGER BULLETS

The New Zealand countryside ismostly steep and green.

On bigger animals, a bullet that retains a majority ofits weight kills more consistently.

Handloader 248

Sometimes acouple of dif-ferent kindsof test media(boards andwet newspa-per, for in-stance) arecombined totry to simulate this conglomera-tion, but nothing really simulatesanimal tissue exactly.

Consequently, some hunters re-main skeptical of any test media,claiming the only real test is ani-mals. This is obviously correct,but any industry uses some sortof simulation when developingproducts. It would be foolish, forinstance, to send somebody up ina brand-new airplane withoutsome wind-tunnel testing before-hand. This does not mean thatwind-tunnels (or computer simu-

lations or bullet test media) willabsolutely predict what will hap-pen when a new airplane flies.But such tests are useful inproduct development, both be-cause they can prevent disasters(whether crashed airplanes orbullets that bounce off deer), andbecause “test” and “real” resultscan be correlated, and the prod-uct can be tweaked using infor-mation from both sources.

Since the NAHC results did notinclude any extensive autopsiesof deer, the folks at Berger de-

plain why most tissue destruc-tion is near the entrance hole –and sometimes even starts at theentrance hole.

But the VLDs did not show anyindication of expansion untilthey penetrated at least 1.5inches into a Test Tube. This wasstrange, but it happened over andover. As the bullet expanded, ittore a huge hole.

Now, any test media cannotmatch what goes on inside a biggame animal. Animals are madeof bone, muscle, blood and inter-nal organs of varying density.


Above, John’s stag was bedded on a hillside, 250yards away. After being shot with a 185-grain VLDin the heart, it never got to its feet and in a fewseconds rolled down the mountain a little ways.Above right, Walt Berger and Eric Stecker withWalt’s huge stag, taken with a 115-grain VLD froma .257 Roberts through the liver. Right, the VLDsproved to be about the deadliest bullet on toughferal goats that the Wanganui guides had ever seen.Eileen shot this billy at just over 200 yards with a115-grain bullet from her .257 Roberts, broadsidethrough the lungs. The goat collapsed at the shot.

BergerBullets

BergerBullets

Handloader 248

so the first afternoon we shotChris Ellis’s handloads in a pairof .300 Winchester Magnums be-longing to Paul Bamber, owner ofWanganui Safaris. Primarily wewere after feral goats. Thesehave inhabited New Zealand forcenturies and are a major pest,since the island has no naturalpredators.

Richard and I did the shootingthat afternoon, with mixed re-sults, partly because we weren’tshooting our own rifles. Westarted a couple of hours beforedark and killed three goats.Richard spined one at about 300yards, while I shot another a littlelow in the shoulder at 350. How-ever, even with a low shot, thebilly traveled less than 100 yards,wounded severely enough that Icould walk up within 20 feet andput another bullet in its neck. Afemale I shot a little too far back,

Eileen, and me; and Chris Ellisand Richard Mann. The riflesused were a pair in .257 Roberts(115-grain VLD at 2,900 fps); a.264 Winchester Magnum (140 at3,000); a pair of .30-06s (168 at2,900 and 185 at 2,800) and a .300Winchester Magnum (168 at 3,100and 185 at 3,000 fps).

The field tests started slowly,because the small plane fromAuckland didn’t have room forour rifle cases. Our ammunitionwas in our duffle bags, however,

Altogether seven shootershunted with Wanganui Safaris(PO Box 7227, Wanganui, NewZealand; www.wsafaris.com) onthe upper reaches of the river ofthat name, close to the ridgeof volcanoes that bisects theNorth Island. Our group includedWalt Berger, Eric Stecker andMark Durfee of Berger; my wife,

cided to go to West Virginia andshoot some feral pigs with ChrisEllis and Richard Mann, the in-ventor of The Bullet Test Tubeand a widely published gunwriter. The autopsy resultsmatched the Test Tube’s, but onlya few pigs were shot.

So they decided to do a biggerfield test in New Zealand, wherea bunch of animals could be shotand carefully cut open, both inorder to see how consistently thebullets worked and how their on-game performance correlatedwith results from the Test Tube.On this trip they decided to inviteanother firearms/hunting writer,namely me, just in case thingsdid work out the way they hoped.(Inviting writers to places likeNew Zealand is a good way to getthem to come along.)


shooting VLDs. After measuringthe range with our Cabela’s range-finders, Chris would click in andstart dropping animals. Particu-larly impressive was a string ofthree consecutive kills between312 and 442 yards on one rainyday.

Eileen and I used Cabela’s10x42 Euro binoculars, made byMeopta. We were familiar withthem from a sample sent whenthey were introduced a couple ofyears ago and were just as im-pressed with the latest model.At $800 or so, they are right atthe front of their price-classoptically, and they helped enor-mously in finding any sort ofgame. In fact, the guides fre-quently asked to borrow mine.For more information on thesebinoculars contact Cabela’s on-line at: www.cabelas.com.

CABELA’S OPTICS

C abela’s also partially spon-sored the trip to New Zeal-

and, and we used the company’sclothing and optics. The GORE-TEX® outfits worked just as ad-vertised on the rainy days, andthe optics in general were morethan adequate. I had been usingone of Cabela’s 3-9x AlaskanGuide scopes for several years,and put it on my NULA .30-06,while Eileen used a new one onher NULA .257. Hers had to bereadjusted slightly after a coupleof days of hard hunting (and rid-ing around in ATVs) but thatoften happens in new scopes.

We also tested a couple of Ca-bela’s Pine Ridge 3-12x scopeswith adjustable turrets, one onthe Cooper Arms .257 that Waltused on his red stag, and one onChris Ellis’s .300 Winchester Mag-

num, made by Charley Sisk.Since these were made in Chinaand only retail for about $200, Iwas especially interested in howthey worked. Chris made severalshots from 300 to 500+ yards,once we figured out the dif-ference between the “standard”settings for 180-grain .300 Win-chester loads and the flatter-

John and Eileen used Cabela’s10x42 Euro binoculars in NewZealand.

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CABELA’S OPTICS

I was invited to go on a trip to New Zealand totest a bullet that behaves very differently than anyhunting bullet on the market today, the Berger VLD.

BergerBullets

BergerBullets

August-September 2007 47www.handloadermagazine.com

how tough, are relatively smallanimals. Even a big billy is onlyabout the size of a South Texaswhitetail buck, the reason we’dalso arranged to shoot four bigred stags, averaging around 400pounds.

These were taken the next day.Mine was first, found bedded 250yards across a canyon. The stagwas angling slightly away, thevital chest area barely visible.Richard, Chris and I debated forat least 10 minutes whether toshoot the stag in its bed or waituntil it stood. Bedded animalsare tricky targets, but bedded an-imals that leave suddenly can beeven trickier. Eventually I waitedfor a lull in the wind and aimedfor where we guessed the heartlay. This exact spot would not betoo tough to hit, since the 185saveraged .3 to .4 inch for three-shot groups at 100 yards from myNULA Model 24.

The shot essentially paralyzed

yards or more before falling fromsuch a shot. Eileen spotted a big,black billy across a canyon,laser-ranged at 207 yards. At thereport of her NULA Model 20.257 Roberts, the goat droppedand rolled down the hillside,dead on its feet from a broadsidelung shot.

We killed a few others overthere, including another broad-side lung shot from Chris’s .300Winchester. All dropped rightthere. Chris volunteered to dothe autopsy cutting, and everygoat showed the same pattern:an entrance hole so small thatwe had to part the hair to findit, then a very tiny wound chan-nel a couple of inches long –even when the bullet hit shoulderblade – and then massive de-struction inside the chest cavity,two to three times more than I’veseen with any big game bullet.

Most bullets exited, but NewZealand feral goats, no matter

with an angling shot, went about75 yards and died.

When Paul Bamber heard allthis, he took a look at a VLDsticking out of a .300 Winchestercase and told us the bullet wouldnever work, that goats were thetoughest animal in New Zealand,far harder to kill than a 400-pound red stag. What we neededwere some roundnosed bulletswith lots of lead exposed.

Our rifles showed up late thatevening, and Chris, Eileen,Richard and I took a hike along amountainside with Mike Rang-inui, a 20-year-old New Zealandguide. We shot goats, and shotgoats, and shot goats, at rangesfrom 20 to 400 yards, and in theend Mike said the VLD was aboutthe best goat bullet he had everseen.

At first what we wanted mostwas a clean, broadside lung shot.Mike said goats normally go 50

Handloader 248

bullet made it inside the ribs. Wefound the twisted remains of thejacket on the far side.

Both Richard’s and Chris’s stagswere shot at 150 to 200 yards,standing up, with lung shots.Both dropped at the shot, andboth bullets exited.

But it was Walt’s stag that reallyastonished me. I got to go along,and the four of us – Walt, Eric,head guide Lee Winterburn andme – ended up on a ridge over-looking a flat where severalbig stags had been feedingeach morning and evening. Waltwanted a really big one, and thethird stag out of the woods hadhuge, palmated antlers withpoints going every which way.Lee said that was the one.

The stag stood just under 200yards away, angling slightly to-ward us. The ideal shot would betight behind the shoulder. At thereport I saw dust puff about 10inches behind the shoulder, andthe stag humped up and startedwalking very slowly toward thetimber, 70 yards away. Walt’s.257 was a single-shot Cooperbolt action, so I started to raisemy .30-06. I never even got thestag in the scope before it felldead, about 15 feet from where ithad been shot.

It turned out the bullet hadturned the liver into liver-burger,then gone on and shredded therear half of the lung beyond. Waltknew it was a “bad” shot and wasticked at himself, but the stagdied within seconds.

We saw similar results fromgoats hit a little too far back. Anyhit from the diaphragm forwardput them down within 25 yards.Double lung hits normally drop-ped them instantly, and no ani-mal shot in the lungs went morethan 15 feet. Altogether we killed30 animals, mostly goats, but alsoone feral sheep and a femalefallow deer Eileen took with ahead shot for the lodge’s table.Ranges ran from 20 to 531 yards(lasered), and the range really

the stag. He extended the leg infront of the bullet’s impact,leaned his head back, and rolleddown the mountain about 15yards, dead. When cut open, the

heart was turned inside out, likea woodchuck hit with a .220Swift, but there was that tiny en-trance hole again, with no evi-dence of expansion until the


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August-September 2007

struction of the far side of theskull.

I’d hoped we’d take more like50 animals during our stay, butthe last two days it rained hardalmost all day long. We did goout, slipping and sliding in thelodge’s ATVs, and shot somegoats but not nearly as many ason nicer days. Between the NAHCdeer hunters, the pigs in WestVirginia and the trip to NewZealand, close to 200 big gameanimals ranging from 40 to 400pounds in weight have beenkilled during field-testing ofVLDs. None failed to penetrate,and in general the bullets killedvery quickly, understandablewhen we opened up the animalsand saw the amount of tissue de-struction. The penetration resultsin the Test Tube matched thoseof many popular deer bullets,about 11 inches, but some hunters

have used VLDs on big bull elkand reported very quick kills.

The VLDs are very flat shooting.With my .30-06 sighted in 2inches high at 100 yards, conven-tional 180-grain spitzers are 2feet low at 400 yards. The 185VLD at the same muzzle velocitywas 2 feet low at 450 yards. Ac-curacy was also very good to ex-cellent in our mix of custom andfactory rifles. None grouped overan inch at 100 yards, and severalessentially shot ragged clover-leaves. I would be comfortableusing VLDs on any North Ameri-can game from pronghorn tocaribou, and probably will, partlybecause when placed correctlythey do not shoot up a bunch ofmeat. The entrance hole is nee-dle thin, and by the time what’sleft of the bullet hits the far sideof the chest, the real damage hasbeen done inside.


didn’t seem to matter. The bul-lets went in a couple of inchesbefore expanding, then really

expanded. The .30 calibers didmore damage at the longer ranges,but that’s to be expected, and the.257s and .264 did very well outto 300 to 400 yards, the longestshots attempted with either.

The bad rap on such “tender”bullets is that they’ll sometimesexpand too quickly, creating asurface wound rather than tear-ing up the vitals inside the chest.This never happened, even onshoulder shots. I propped up onedead lung-shot billy goat andshot it through both shoulders at10 yards with the .30-06. The bul-let went right through bothshoulder joints. Even the head-shot fallow doe showed the ty-pical VLD expansion: a tinyentrance hole through the skulljust beneath the ear, then de-

Close to 200 big game animals have been killed during field-testing.

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