doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com # 10 shot for Grouse??

I've never shot a rail nor eaten one either, but the old term 'skinney as a rail' does come to mind .. and I have to wonder if some of them might not have flown through those ill placed patterns of larger shot? ;-);-)wink wink

I whole heartedly agree w/Ted, Zutz, Murph & honorary LEG members on the shot size issue .. use a size adequate to kill the game cleanly. I'm NOT a grouse hunter. My first grouse was killed with a rock. It was NOT flying and I was dogless that afternoon and about ten years old, but the grouse was within range and the rock was of adequate size to get the job done.

References to shot size is relative, relative to the screen used to sort it, for starters. A fair amount of shot is not exactly uniform and may or may not resemble what some chart says. There is a measurable amount of small shot that is 'duplex' by default. Larger sizes tend to be a bit more uniform vs. smaller sizes. That has been my personal observation in any case. I have found shot < #9 sized in bagged shot marked '9' and the same for some marked '8'. Today's high quality 'magnum' shot or better stated, 'better sorted' or screened shot does not tend to exhibit this as much as some of the standard'chilled shot' or older and/or imported shot. At very close range lots of fine shot with no choke in old card type wad ammunition may have provided added confidence to knock the birds down and good dogs probably acted as the underwritters to insure their placement in the bag. I don't know if that applied to the grouse in the original question. I do know that you do not have to shoot a dove twice with #6 shot to bring it down, assuming it is hit. I have seen many dove that took two shots with #7.5's to anchor them at honest long ranges w/very tight chokes. Btw, 'honest long range' translates to about a perceived 'Suburban's worth' of lead, sometimes a bit more.

I have a copy of the program Shotshell Ballistics for Windows by Ed Lowry. Haven't used it in a long time. But this topic got me to open it up and run some numbers. It has a module called Pellet Penetration. It does not have #10 shot as an option, so I used #9 instead. I choose the slowest 3-ft velocity, 1040 ft/sec. Skeet choke with a 12ga 2 3/4" shell. (Hey it was never designed for a muzzle loader!) At 20 yards, the average pellet velocity is 699 ft/sec, 0.82 ft/lb with a penetration of 0.99 inches. If we increase the 3-ft velocity to 1250 ft/sec, the penetration is 1.18".

So at the author's 15yd to 25yd stated range with the pattern density of this load, we can expect at least 10 - 15 hits on target.

Pete

Thanks for the information Pete and others.
I think the reason the author used such a small charge of very small shot, with a relatively heavy charge of black powder, in a cylinder bore gun, was to have a pattern that opened very quickly at short range.
It must have worked for him, and from his descriptions of his hunts, he shot more grouse in a year than I'll see in my lifetime.
But, I'll stick with No. 7 1/2s for my grouse shooting.
Pete

Well, I have hunted rail--not in the "low country", but out here in the "Heartland", where you walk them up in marshes, preferably behind a good Lab to help with the flushing and retrieving. Talking mostly soras, occasionally Virginias. I shot them with 9's and skeet choke back when it was still legal to use lead on them. (Don't know if nontox is required everywhere for snipe and rail, but it is in Iowa--and hard to find nontox small enough for those little critters!) Would've been happy to use 10's if I could have found some. Our rail fly low, slow, and you want to let them get out a bit so you don't blow them up--and then the little devils have the disconcerting habit of sitting down while still in range!

I've killed enough grouse with 9's early in the season, but I don't think I'd want to go to 10's. The problem with 9's, on either grouse or woodcock, is more pellets in the meat than I care to pick out.

I can't figure out what points PeteM was making in his last post and I also didn't catch the medium that he was describing in the penetration test. Was it stainless steel or grouse flesh? However, the point I am making is fairly clear. We don't normally pass up shots longer than 20 or 25 yards in the grouse woods if they are presented, and a #9 will not penetrate a grouse enough to be lethal if the range is much longer. I wouldn't want to have to hit a grouse with 15 shot to bring it to ground. Recovering #9 shot from strong flying doves after killing them with #7 1/2 was enough evidence to convince me that #9 is not even a humane killer on these thinly feathered birds. Who among us would turn down a 35 yard shot on a crossing dove?

Points? Not making a point. As stated, I was curious and decided to share the data. As for the penetration data, I have no idea as to the media. The program is very sparse on explanations. It was developed by Ed Lowry formerly the Director of Fundamental Research for Winchester. If you know of a way to contact him...

http://www.precisionreloading.com/computersoftware.htm

I have been told the 22rf has been used to take every animal in the world. Would I use it on game larger than a squirrel? No! Neither would I use #10 shot for grouse. I agree that we should only loads that cleanly and humanely kill.

Pete

In "Handloading for Hunters", Zutz actually debunked both the large and small shot "schools" of thought. He used #6 for grouse because he couldn't obtain #7 in the early 1970s, when this book was written, and he deemed #7.5 too small to kill cleanly. It was his opinion that #7, if it again became available, would become a "modern classic" for grouse, for the open bbl on pheasant in 1.25 oz loads, et. al. He actually seemed a little peeved off at the "small shot school" for pushing #7.5 so hard that #7 was driven off the market.

I don't hunt grouse or rail, so I'm just repeating what I've read.

Absolutely, just so long as you do not plan on eating them!
As a boy growing up in England, I was invited to an English formal pheasant shoot with my Dad, a big deal, a shoot like that. Instead of grabbing my usual flat of Eley Impax 1oz No 7 shot, I grabbed, in my haste, boxes of WW AA Skeet 1 1/8 No 9s.
Well, I was shooting well for me that day, but each solid hit was accompanied with a vast cloud of feathers. At the end of the day as the game was sorted to distribute to the guns, the Head Gamekeeper told my Dad that all the birds shot with the Skeet shells were going home with us as they were riddled with tiny pellets. So consider shot size for edible game birds, I still have some N0 10 shot a friend brought back from Italy, he said the local use them for migratory songbird shooting, they still do, and use trees on pivots coated with sticky bird-lime, pull them up let the exhausted migratory finches, etc, perch, get stuck, lower the tree, pull them off and pickle them in jars and sell them. Yes they still do it's disgusting.
Mike

W. H. Foster liked 9s for pahtridge claiming the results of measuring distance to kill indicated many shots taken at skeet range in close cover. I don't have the faintest idea believing as I do that 1 1/4oz of 6s is better for everything if you can stand it.

jack

I can get by with an oz of 6s, usually. Or, an oz of English 7s.

An oz and 1/4 is a bit intense for grouse, isn't it?
Best,
Ted