Originally Posted By: J.R.B.
Well Mr. Brown let's just say your ideas are vastly different from mine. In my hormone charged youth my favorite pheasant gun was a ten pound 1889 Remington 10 bore. One barrel loaded with #2's and the other with #4's. The long shots were mine in our hunting party. 40 yards I would start to think about pulling a trigger. I sure would have had fun cleaning the air on your client's misses and making your dogs go the extra mile. Now I'm on a downhill pull to 60 years old and the guns are now seven pound 12 bores. The chokes remain the same Full/Mod, still #4's and I still like the long shots.


Unfortunately, the vast majority of pheasant hunters can't hit 40+ yard shots at pheasants--or when they do, they're more likely to only cripple the birds, then lose them, rather than kill them cleanly. Tom Roster's steel shot lethality tests on pheasants--preserve birds rather than wild ones, which are easier to bag--showed that of those birds hit inside 30 yards, all but 2 out of 68 were recovered. A wounding loss rate of 3%. That compares to a wounding loss rate of 15% for birds at 40 yards or beyond. Of the 1300-odd wild roosters shot between 1987-2006 over my dogs--4 shorthairs, a pointer, a Gordon setter, an English setter, and a Brittany--we had a wounding loss rate of 6%. Looking at birds lost, the longer it takes a dog to get to the bird in question, the greater the chances of losing the bird. That's true whether it's due to a bird hit at longer range, or one hit with some other factor that gives a crippled bird more of a head start (woven wire fence, road, waterway with steep banks etc). A more open choke means a greater chance for the average hunter to bag birds at closer range. At 30 yards, 1 1/8 oz 6's through a cyl choke should kill pheasants; 1 1/4 oz 6's through IC should be good at close to 40 yards. Beyond that, where most people will either miss or only cripple, you do need to be a much better than average shot, and use a tighter choke and larger shot to put birds down for the count.

Last edited by L. Brown; 04/02/14 08:29 AM.