doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Minimum Pattern for Doves?

Gough Thomas gave long ago a standard of minimum patterns, in a 30 inch circle, for different species from snipe to goose. Doves were not included. Does anybody know a study on pattern and energy for them?

Burrard gives the following for Birds under 1 lb weight(445 g)
1760/W = Min pattern, where W = weight in ounces (28.34g). Metric would be 49,880/grams weight.For our Eastern Mourning Dove
"Zenaida macroura carolinensis" the average weight is Male 4,6 ounce ,Female 4,3 oz. On this basis minimum patterns would be 383 and 409.I'll leave it to you to figure out how you tell the sex far enough out to give you time to change loads. Eley shot shells advise 1/2 ft lb of energy (0,07kg/m)with two pellets hit to bring down.
I hope this helps, however I should advise I've never actually shot a mourning dove,only collared doves!! Your actual doves may vary etc. etc.
Damn I wish this rain would ease so I can go woodcock hunting,its 45 deg ( 7c) and very wet here, I'm sure you've got nicer weather than I do.

Burrard weighed a lot of birds, then plucked them traced their outlines onto graph paper & checked their volumes. He found their volume to wt being actually a curve with smaller birds have a larger volume per ounce than larger ones. Birds below a lb had a volume of approximately 1 sq/in per ounce as I recall. By doing all the math his formula of 1760/oz gives an average pattern of about 2½ shot per bird.
Many years ago I read an article in the "Rifleman" concerning loads for doves which went into much the same type of reasoning as Burrard, in fact as I recall it used many of his formula. The main thing I recall from it was that the author concluded that #8 shot was in most cases the best size for "Mourning" Dove. I think that I would tend to agree.

Hugh,

the good thing about Gough Thomas is that gives number of pellets required inside the 30" circle and then you do the energy requirement according to the species in study. Our dove, to the best of my knowledge is "Zenaida A. auriculata", Eared Dove, that should be more or less of similar size as yours. All in all, I think I should do the math starting from your input. Here in the Santiago area (weatherwise akin to Los Angeles) we are having a cool Spring, today is overcast with 17º Celcius, with possible showers later.

Next time I go to Madison WI, to see my brother, I´ll try to pay you a visit.

Thanks, EJSXS

Dove hunting is almost all I get to do here in Texas and I've never had a problem killing birds with 7/8oz of 7.5 shot out of Improved Cylinder and Modified chokes. Naturally your pattern will vary because no two chokes are the same, but out of my guns I get a solid 65-70% out of my IC chokes on both my Miroku SxS and my Browning Superposed. My Beretta doesn't do quite that well, averaging around 60%, and my old little Stevens does pretty well with an average of around 65%.

I'm no ballistition so all this business ...

"Eley shot shells advise 1/2 ft lb of energy (0,07kg/m)with two pellets hit to bring down."

I fail to understand, but I can tell you that you've got to hit a mourning dove pretty darn hard to kill them dead-before-they-hit-the-ground kind of dead. A respectable percentage of the birds I take in the field (perhaps 4 out of the daily allowable 15)I have to dispatch manually or I end up jumping them and shoot them at a closer range with a denser pattern. You can knock them down all day but they're hearty hearty birds and they WILL get up and try to escape if you don't really put it on them.

So as always, the question comes down to are you taking the shots that you can legitimately take with your gun/chokes/load combo, and can you put that bird in your pattern. Everything else is extranious until you can answer yes to both of those questions.

White Wing doves are another matter entirely. For some reason those buggers seem to be a little easier to bring down. One or two pellets can do it, but the problem is, when the white wings are migrating, they're 70 yards up and they're wearing little dove sized oxygen masks. Some of mine have burnt up on re-entry. IF, and that's a big if, IF you can hit them, they come down pretty easy. But that just in my experience. I'm not super experienced with white wings, I'll admit. The very vast majority of the doves I've killed in my lifetime have been mourners.