The 5's are really lethal on pheasants in my 16 gauge guns. I've never recovered a pellet. I took one of the more recent brown-cased loads apart this fall and checked them out. The particular shell had slightly over 29 grams of shot. They measured as true US #5's and even a little bit large. The shot looked very uniform, very round, but what struck me was how hard it was. I have a set of pliers I use for the all my squeeze tests, and I've done it enough to know when shot isn't "hard." With these B&P F2 #5's I had to squeeze pretty much as hard as I could to show a slight flattening where the pliers jaws clamped the shot. It's impressively hard shot.
