Riflescope Blog: Expert's reviews, news, notes on rifle scopes, hunting optics, shooting, binoculars, night vision sights, gun accessories, and more

Appleseeding With Polina

Folks that follow her shared blog, "Red Lipstick Optional" may know her as a beautiful and trend setting fashionista, and that is true, but they may not know that Polina is just as sharp slinging up a hot rifle as she is slinging up a Louboutin spike. Polina works in our Vendor Services department, and lately, when she's not offering haute couture advice, you can find her on the firing line.

Polina just aced her first attempt at an Appleseed shoot. She used my 10/22 with a Butler Creek heavy fluted barrel, Hogue stock, and Nikon Prostaff 3-9×40 EFR scope in medium Redfield steel rimfire rings…

Cornell University’s Backyard FeederWatch Survey

I've been a member of Cornell University's Backyard Feeder Watch survey for about 15 years. I've learned a lot.

The Backyard FeederWatch Survey takes place from November to April and is used to help scientists track broadscale movements of winter bird populations and long-term trends in bird distribution and abundance. You choose two consecutive days a week to count and monitor bird populations. You can watch for as little as two hours a day for those days, filling out a form to count how many birds you see at one time in your watch area. Scientists use this data to …

Holsclaw, Radcab, Battlescooter, DOGMOM, and the 90th Birthday Pig Trail Excursion

Holsclaw is a 1975 three railed motorcycle trailer. I first met her on a bastard cold Chicago day in November last year. She was barely able to peek her remaining rusty blue paint over the snow and ice to look at me as My Shirley and I entered our friend Barb's house. Her husband Don was my best friend. We lost him to a heart attack in 2009. We were helping Barb sort and divest some of her considerable accumulated crap, and I thought I would get a better look at this poor decrepit trailer when Spring eventually rolled around. Through those …

Firearms Familiarity Classes and Take the Test!

In the last week I held 7 Firearms Familiarity classes in three different OpticsPlanet locations. Most departments were involved including Procurement, Merchandising, Marketing, LE/Gov't Sales, Sales Force, and even Returns and Warehouse. The class focused on the basic points of firearms, such as safety, action types, how they are used and by whom, how to shoot them, and mostly, since OpticsPlanet is now offering many new items that we haven't sold before, parts. I've gotten the ok through our Compliance and Legal team to approve thousands of new-to-us products such as upper receivers and complete uppers, buffer …

A JP, a SCAR, and an H&K Walk Into OpticsPlanet….

"Friends of the family" were here with some guns and some money. My job was to suggest and set up the rifles for their intended uses. Sometimes these guns get pretty outrageous.

A man I'll call "Z" came in with his full-blown JP custom. He's going with his two friends to shoot prairie dogs next month. They have three identical JP customs. No expense was spared on the guns, but they wanted to take it a bit easier on the optics. My first choice was the benchmark for dogs, a Leupold VX-3 6.5-20×40 Long Range for bolt guns, …