McIntosh got paid by the word.
Not likely. But then there's a fair amount of ignorance going around when it comes to outdoor writers.
McIntosh was writing for a broad audience, not a collection of George Digweeds--although I don't believe I've seen George raise his hand in this particular group. Hey George . . . are you out there?
What most guys who shoot well fail to recognize is that hunters AS A GROUP are pretty poor shots. Tom Roster has run thousands of them through his CONSEP program, and what he's found is that two thirds of them can't hit half the crossing clays thrown at 20 yards. Those guys obviously need all the help they can get to hit CLOSE targets, let alone long ones. Cylinder will almost certainly kill birds farther away than shooters with capabilities at that level can hit them regularly. To harken back to my military days, the maximum effective range of the gun and load often exceeds that of the shooter.
Grouse and woodcock hunters frequently take close shots. Steve Smith has written that his average first shot at woodcock comes at slightly over 13 yards; at grouse, about 22 yards. Nick Sisley likewise touts cylinder for both woodcock and grouse. He writes about a season during which he shot 78% on grouse (33 birds bagged) with a Franchi 20 gauge autoloader with the barrel cut back: no choke. Average shot distance: 23 yards. All of that sounds about right from my own experience with grouse and woodcock. And when you're talking shots inside 15 yards--note Smith's average range on woodcock--it's not so much about an open choke helping you to hit the birds as it is about putting them in the bag in condition fit for the table.
Cylinder isn't the only answer, but it's a very good answer for a lot of upland hunting, and a lot of upland hunters. I'm convinced more upland hunters are overchoked than underchoked.
And for the original poster, since I know he's a pheasant hunter: I've never gone quite as open as cyl in a pheasant gun, but I find that .005 in the right barrel of a 12 works just fine over good dogs. If you're doing the big group thing in South Dakota, you probably need more. But a hunter or two and a good dog or two, in good pheasant country . . . you don't need much choke for most first shots at roosters. And I've observed that that's true in my home state of Iowa, even with very depressed bird numbers. Last hunt of the season this year, two of us moved 6 roosters. Two were at maybe Stinger missile range. The other 4: All easily inside 25 yards. That was in early January, temperature around 20, strong wind--when you might expect surviving roosters to be pretty jumpy. Not what we found. Nor what I've found on other hunts after Iowa's now much scarcer birds the last few seasons. Fewer shots, but not necessarily longer ones.
As for Dr. Jones, his theory on the number of single pellet breaks we get at skeet leads me to believe he needs to spend less time at the computer and more time on a skeet field, picking up unbroken targets with a hole or two in them. Straights at skeet would be pretty rare if they involved many single pellet breaks, since we know that it's not at all unusual for a single pellet hit to result in a miss.
Last edited by L. Brown; 03/25/14 08:10 AM.
