For most of my hunting life, I was a vocal critic of long shots on turkeys -- a long shot in my book being anything past 40 yards. I didn't care what claims the makers of hot-shot chokes or hot-shot loads or hot-shot sights were making; my experience and observations told me that clean kills at 40-plus yards on turkeys were mostly luck, and that even the best-matched loads, chokes and guns simply left too many holes in their patterns out there at that distance, and couldn't deliver the energy, to be counted on every time.

My thinking today is different. The reason is tungsten. The present generation of tungsten-shot turkey loads, combined with the best of modern wad design, has finally, truly, given us that long-sought 50-yard reliability on turkeys. Of course, you still need to work with your gun. You still need to be familiar with its pattern, and you need to pattern it enough at all distances to know that what you're seeing is reliable and not just occasional. But the simple fact is that whatever your most comfortable and preferred killing range was for turkeys before, today's best heavy tungsten loads add 10 yards to it. And the best of today's lead-shot loads, with new-technology wad design, are almost as good.

What's new about today's tungsten loads is that they pattern well. Tungsten is more dense and heavier than lead, but it is also much, much harder. It has to be mixed with something softer -- iron, tin, nickel, polymer -- to be used in a shotshell.

Initial tungsten-based loads didn't pattern particularly well and had smaller payloads than lead-shot shells because the wads had to be so thick to protect barrels from the extra-hard shot. They did have the lead-plus weight desired, but also the hardness problem of steel. The tradeoff was that the heavy and dense tungsten-alloy pellets carried their energy much farther than steel or lead, so a smaller shot size could be as effective as a larger lead pellet. All other things being equal, a tungsten-alloy pellet is heavier than a comparably sized lead pellet by 25 to nearly 35 percent, which in terms of energy means that a tungsten-alloy No. 6 shot edges a No. 4 lead pellet.

The patterning problem was finally solved with the unique tungsten-nickel alloy developed by Hevi-Shot in the late 1990s, which Remington started loading in 2002. Its success prompted Winchester and Federal to kick their own developmental programs into higher gear.