70 yard pheasants? Yeow! If I'm shooting at a 70 yard pheasant, I want a feather-seeking missile, not a load of lead shot.
If you're shooting 2 oz of 4's--and you'd better be shooting that heavy a load if you're shooting at 70 yard birds, because that still gives you fewer pellets than in 1 1/4 oz 6's, and at 70 yards you're going to be very lucky to retain anything better than 25-30% pattern density (which might give you 80 pellets in a 30" circle)--you will have enough energy left (barely, at about 2 ft-lbs), but the problem is, with your scanty pattern density and the difficulty of centering a bird at that range, the chances of one of your 4's hitting a vital spot on a pheasant are very poor.
Smaller shot do indeed slow down quicker than larger shot, but because you've got more 6's in 1 1/4 oz of shot than you do 4's in 2 oz, and because it's a lot easier to bump up velocity on a lighter load, you can hustle that reasonable load of 6's down range fast enough that they have greater retained energy at 45 yards than does your 2 oz load of 4's at 70. And 45 yards is a relatively reasonable long shot on a pheasant, compared to 70--which is pretty much ridiculous, due to both increased aiming error and pattern dispersion.
Last edited by L. Brown; 03/19/07 07:51 PM.
