I use and own ONLY full and modified chokes and use them anywhere, any target, I adjust the ammo for the topography and target as J.R.B. mentioned above. To each his own though.
BUT, Here's something perfect for the North Eastern, North Central brush/lot/grouse hunters and folks who just can't keep it on target and love more "spread" or have poor eyesight........
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It's not so much about more spread to kill the birds, PA24. Rather, it's about the condition of the birds AFTER you kill them.
Remembering what we know about typical first shots at woodcock and grouse . . . most folks don't pattern their guns at 15-20 yards. If they did, I expect they'd never go grouse hunting with anything as tight as M or F. (Data from the Loyal Order of Dedicated Grouse Hunters indicates that almost none of them have anything as tight as M, except maybe in the 2nd barrel of a double.) Nick Sisley shot close range patterns--from 10, 15, 20, and 25 yards--a few years back. The results are educational, to say the least. He used 5 different loads through 2 different gauges. Pattern diameter of M at 10 yards: 8". Skeet: 15.6". So, would one rather put George Evans' favorite grouse load (an ounce of 8's) into that 53 square inch mod pattern, or into the 193 square inch skeet pattern? (Cylinder, which Sisley didn't test, would be even better.) Moving out to 20 yards, we have a mod pattern covering 301 square inches; skeet covers 711.
I'm thinking that if I hunt grouse and woodcock with PA24, I'm going to be very careful to keep my cyl/skeet shot birds separate from his mod shot birds. Come to think of it, probably wouldn't be that hard. You center a woodcock at Steve Smith's average first shot range of 13 yards with a mod choke, no problem separating it from the rest of the bag. The shot will have separated it from itself. Blood, guts, feathers. Some of us would rather recover birds still fit for the table.
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Last edited by L. Brown; 03/26/14 07:51 PM.
