My goal is to minimize collateral damage.
This bobwhite season my shooting student Joe Wood and I have on four occasions taken two birds with one shot and once taken three with one shot.
As we hunt the same grounds year after year and birds are scarcer than we would like this is undesirable. We don't even try to take two birds with two shots out of a covey rise. One bird per point is our practice. We take turns shooting. One watches or takes pictures, the other flushes and shoots.
Yesterday I went by myself (Joe said it was too cold - girlyman). I carried a Parker Reproduction 28 gauge choked 20thou and 40thou. I shot RSTs, #9s, 5/8oz. My thought was that with that choke the pattern would be much smaller than my open choked sixteen bird guns. The #9s would lose energy faster than larger shot (my sixteen load is an ounce of #8s). Using that combination I still inadvertently brought down two birds with one shot.
I generally pick a bird on the left or right trailing edge of the covey. Wood argues that I am shooting at birds in the middle of the covey but he is wrong.
Am I on the wrong track?
