I left my ArmaLite Rifle-15 at home last week. It’s a good squirrel gun, but I was testing a couple of other rifles and a variety of optics and there wasn’t room for it.

Instead, I brought a bolt-action wood-stocked 22 Nosler Model 48 I’d hunted with in New Zealand at the beginning of April, a Savage A22 and a Savage A17. In addition, I brought a lever-action Marlin made in 1946, topped with a Weaver 2.5-power scope — just for old time’s sake.

We were hunting those denizens of the High Desert, the Belding’s ground squirrel, commonly referred to in these parts as sage rats.

It was my annual outing with some friends from the Central Oregon Shooting Sports Association club. We met up with Justin and Nikki Aamodt, owners of Diamond A Guides, at Crystal Crane Hot Springs, then headed to a nearby ranch beset with the alfalfa-munching, disease-carrying rodents.

Alfalfa and orchard grasses are two of the primary income-producers for farm families from Enterprise to Lakeview and from Redmond east to the Snake River. In a good year, a farm can yield three cuttings.

Sage rats do not grow out of balance unless the living is easy. And an alfalfa field is like an all-expenses-paid trip to Club Fed.

Most damage occurs before the first harvest, which can happen toward the end of May. According to the OSU Extension Service, 45 percent of the first harvest may be lost to ground squirrels. That’s a lot of green that doesn’t make it to market.

After the safety briefing, the first order of business is to put in earplugs. I was using GunSport Pro electronic earplugs from Etymotic. They allow high definition hearing with a noise reduction of 25 decibels to protect the ear from the sound of gunshots. By my numbers, our group fired well over 2,000 rounds between breakfast and dinner and I calculate we saved over two tons of livestock feed.

On the Savage rifles, I mounted new Bushnell optics from their Engage line, while the Nosler rifle was topped with a Sig Sauer Whiskey5. Optics have come a long way. One of our shooters was using a scope that would have been state-of-the-art in 1985, but its glass was well below the standards of today’s offerings. The circa-1946 glass atop my Marlin was woefully inadequate for shots past 80 yards.

For the last year, I’ve been trying some of the new non-lead options available for the rimfire shooter. If you can find the nonlead ammunition, it is expensive, and it may not shoot well in your rifle unless the barrel is very clean. My barrels were dirty and the solid copper rounds made it quite sporting for the sage rats.

I found the Savage A17 accurate and reliable and the more I shot it, the better it performed, using the recommended A17 ammunition. It’s a great entry-level gun for the shooter who wants the option of a quick follow-up shot with the small rimfire round.

Toward the end of the afternoon, when I had expended my supply of ammunition, I looked at the rifles my friends brought with them. Most of the rifles on our trailer were semi-automatics of the type that are fed with box magazines. The technology, more than 100 years old, is in danger of being banned by an initiative drive started by interfaith clergy in Portland and passed through the signature process on its way to the November ballot. Initiative 43 defines many of the guns we used that April day in Eastern Oregon as assault weapons, when to hunters they are simply squirrel rifles.

— Gary Lewis is the host of “Frontier Unlimited TV” and author of “Fishing Central Oregon,” “Fishing Mount Hood Country,” “Hunting Oregon” and other titles. Contact Lewis at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.