I hunt birds with muzzleloaders, doubles, some original, some reproductions. My experience is right in line with Flintfan's post, point for point. Real black powder is important enough to bring it up a third time!
Once you get it through your head that your effective range is 25 yards, everything starts to work quite well. (At 25 yards, 1100 fps works great, 7 1/2 shot drops pheasant although I use 6's if I'm going for pheasant, an ounce of shot works fine and you don't develop a flinch.) Of course, there are days when everything goes up out of range, but I've been through that with modern guns.
