advise, your opinion

[birdshooter]

I think there has been some really scary advice given on this thread, the wounding/ loss ratio skyrockets past 45 yds and at 50 yds it approaches 40%. I would have to ask why would you want to do that, one, at those extreme ranges you have pattern problems, energy problems and the time it takes for the dogs to get there to make the retrieve, that's another problem, just makes me shake my head at these thoughts. I would also question why your hunting practices are so poor that you think you need to do that

cheers

Musti.... We may not agree on everything, but in this case you are spot on. I couldn't have said it better my friend.

Cheers Musi. :cheers:

 

[carptom1]

I do hate to encourage musti but..... I agree. I have hunted with plenty that no range is too far. We seem to spend a lot of time looking for their birds.I have spent enough time shooting that I have a pretty good idea of range and I rarely will shoot over 40, it just isn't that important. Your chances of a wounded bird go up greatly after that. As for PS and the other overpriced crap, it makes you think you are superman when you ain't. When you do connect inside of 25 yards there is nothing left to eat.

 

[CO_Weimar]

After my buddy's experience with the gutted rooster last fall, I did a little digging and sent him an email with the following highlights from an article on Prairie Storm.


Field and Stream "The Gun Nut"

I mentioned in a previous column I had shot up over a box of 3-inch pheasant loads as an experiment on a preserve hunt a couple weeks ago. That ammo was Federal?s 3-inch Pheasants Forever-label ?Prairie Storm? magnums which contain 1-5/8 ounces of lead shot at 1350 fps. After a few shots we renamed them ?Pterodactyls Forever?* loads. They are deadly at both ends of the gun, and, in my experience, way more shell than is necessary to kill a pheasant.**

...

I held my fire with the 3-inch Federals on anything close for fear of blowing it up and focused on the long shots.

...
The downside is recoil. My shoulder and jaw told me this ammo kicks, and a recoil calculator told me how much: in a 7 pound gun a 3-inch 1-5/8 ounce, 1350 fps load generates over 50 foot-pounds of recoil. Unless I am reading tables wrong, that puts its recoil at the level of a .416 Remington magnum, which is, frankly, ridiculous, unless you really are shooting pterodactyls, which, I can only imagine, make very angry, dangerous cripples.

http://www.fieldandstream.com/blogs/gun-nuts/2012/11/pheasants-forever-prairie-storm-ammo

 

[carptom1]

The hotel/ lodge I stayed at had an 8ga with at least 34" barrels hanging over the mantle, I bet you could take a few birds at 60yds with that bad boy.

When I was a younger man I would do a lot of goose hunting in the pits up at Swan Lake in Northern Missouri back when it was the Canadian Goose capital. I had an old 10 gauge that I would break out from time to time. It could really knock them down. You would hear the standard 12's and 10's go off then on occasion you would hear something like rolling thunder. There were some guy's up there that would whack at them with a 4 or an 8 gauge. Illegally of course. The bar up there had a 4 gauge hanging on the wall. The barrel was like 38" long and the shells were about 6. Talk about some recoil. The old man at the bar told us kids he could shoot them at 100 + yards with that thing. You would only need one blocker in the pheasant field and he could cover the whole patch

 

[mustistuff]

There are a ton of variables to think about when taking a long shot. I personally try to keep my shots under 40 yards. However, I usually shoot cheap target loads and a 20 gauge. If you have a good dog it should be no problem recovering wounded birds. That being said shoot if you know your dogs capabilities. If the lead ain't flying nothing is dying!

the nature of the beast is that if you pheasant hunt a great deal, you will lose birds, period. flying lead ain't just killing birds it is also wounding them, a couple of things on dogs retrieving you may not understand, they don't always come back with the bird. if you owned the best retriever that ever had four paws to the ground, one, it can not swim as fast as a slightly wounded duck and two, it also can not scent trail as fast as a pheasant can run and this is, period. the greater the distance the dog has to go to make the retrieve, the greater the chance that a wounded bird will not be found. now comes into play what has not be mentions in quite some time is the air washed bird. on a poor scenting day, and yes we have them, a bird that falls out of the air dead, hits the ground, never bounces, never moves is also a serious challenge for any dog to complete a retrieve as they can't locate it, distance also makes this more likely, so while dogs at least the better of them are a great help, they can't always make up for poor hunter decisions

cheers