TO KILL A PHEASANT
Let's switch gears and discuss what it takes to make a clean kill on a pheasant. Any hunter who has much experience has seen the time when a long shot on a long tail brought the bird down dead. A later examination during the cleaning process revealed a bird with only one pellet strike -- usually in the head or neck. That's not good shooting; that's blind luck.

Shotguns don't kill pheasants by randomly putting a pellet or two into a vital area. That's how rifles work. Shoot a deer in the heart or lungs and follow the blood trail 50, 100 yards or more to where the deer went down.

Shoot a pheasant in the heart or lungs with one pellet and watch it sail to the end of the field before it expires, making for a difficult retrieve, at best. There's a different mechanism involved whenever a shotgun causes that instant, dead-in-the-air kill we are after. It's called blunt-force-trauma. The massive shock to the body causes an instant death.

In the case of a bird the size of a pheasant, that amount of shock comes when it's struck with six or seven shot pellets in the body. Pellets through the feathers don't count. Hits that strike the wings or feet or just graze the skin don't add much. Hit a bird solidly on the body with seven pellets having enough velocity to penetrate halfway through the bird and it's a dead pheasant.

SHOT SIZE
Probably more pheasants are taken with No. 6 shot than all the other sizes combined. A few guys will switch to No. 5s or even 4s or 2s later in the season and probably an equal number rely on No. 7 1/2 shot early in the year. The fact is, the above statement that it takes six or seven solid pellet strikes to instantly kill a pheasant is true almost as much with No. 2 shot as it is with No. 7 1/2 shot. Without getting overly technical about the weight of individual pellets, velocity and foot pounds of energy produced by various shot sizes, suffice it to say, you can stone a pheasant reliably with five or six hits of No. 2 shot just as reliably as with seven or eight hits with No. 7 1/2s.

BACK TO THE PATTERNING BOARD
While it may be interesting to step off 40 yards and blast an oversized piece of paper to learn if your improved or modified choke really shoots improved or modified patterns, knowing that does little toward showing you if your pattern has what it takes to make a clean kill.

Few pheasants are actually killed at 40 yards and fewer still at 50 or 60 yards. Pick a load to test and fire it at the patterning paper at the ranges you normally would touch the trigger on a hard-flying ringneck.

A silhouette of the solid part of a pheasant (discounting the wings, lower legs, feet and feathers) contains about 30 square inches. So, take a 30-square-inch piece of cardboard to the patterning target. (Thirty square inches is a square piece of paper about 5 1/2 inches on a side, a circle about 6 inches in diameter or roughly one-third of this magazine page.)

Now, randomly use the piece of cardboard to trace 30-square-inch areas in various places on the patterning paper. Count the number of pellet hits inside each area and consider any of them with seven or more pellet holes as a dead bird and any of them with five or fewer hits as a probable crippled bird.

The results will amaze you. You'll be surprised at ranges out to 30 yards how often your pattern density, even with open chokes, are ample or even more than adequate. You may discover those cheaper boxes of shells are perfectly adequate. You'll probably discover switching to No. 2 or No. 4 shot for long-range, late-season shooting won't fill the bill unless you switch to magnum loads with heavier shot charges.

The one thing you'll definitely learn is how futile it is to pawn off a missed shot on poor ammunition or improper choke selection. Chances are you should have finished off your patterning session with a practice session busting clay birds.