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.
