Doc,
I truly respect all you do and the casual friendship we have shared these last ten or twelve years, but I have to say that with that photo, you are fudging now like some of the spin doctors in D.C.
I have been in on so may hundred bird flushes in SD over the last 30 years, both hunting for myself and while guiding for others. Never was there a flush where the dogs didn't find birds sneaking around in the bull rushes, cattails and Kosha weed that did not flush with the flock. Especially later in the season when the veterans go to the wing only as a last resort.
And if I took such a photo with the wide angle (which is where it opens when turned on) of my pocket camera, the little lens would make all those twenty yard flushes look like they happened at 40 yards. Now I am not saying that your photo is of a twenty yard flush, just photos can be deceiving and rarely alone tell the whole story.
Or maybe those creepers and sneakers are truly a lab's forte. Regardless, the truth is I hunt through out the High Plains from Sept to January and always with a light 12 or a 16 because good dogs put birds up inside of twenty five yards all season long and ten or twelve pellets more or less in the pattern of an ounce of chilled lead at that range is mox nix.
