Photo by Ron Sinfelt

The pheasant-hunting experience has much to offer, and there are many characteristics that constitute a good hunt. Foremost of these characteristics are the feathers that go into your game pocket that happen to be attached to Mr. Ringneck. In other words, "scoring" a pheasant or two is what solidifies the experience and pulls you back year after year.

Of course, there is the pageantry and beauty of the great outdoors, the camaraderie between you and your hunting buddies, the artful beauty of good fieldwork by your dog and the way your clothing and equipment worked perfectly. But without some feathers sticking out of your game bag at the end of the day, it's kind of like kissing your sister.

If we stop and examine why your game bag will -- or will not -- have pheasants in it at the end of the day, it boils down to two things: the availability of shots, and how well you shot when you did have the chance.

For the purposes of this article, we're going to believe that you will get shots, and that you want to maximize your chances of taking more birds by optimizing how to use shotgun chokes in various types of scatterguns.

To start out with, we have to think about the physics of the "shot stream" that comes out of the end of your shotgun when you pull the trigger. This shot stream has a three-dimensional shape that resembles a football: pointed on each end and fat in the middle. It is not a two-dimension flat shape.

For a 12-gauge shotgun shooting a shell with 1 1/8 ounce of lead, the shot stream can be as long as 12 feet. The reason I mention this is because when you look at a patterning board, you're only getting a two-dimensional view of what happened.

In effect, patterning boards record the performance of your shotgun's patterning ability, but we have to remember all of the shot didn't arrive at the patterning board at the exact same instance in time. The front of it got there first, and the rest of it arrived shortly thereafter.

This streaming out of the shot is what makes shotguns so well suited for hitting moving objects like pheasants or skeet targets. Your timing can be off a little, but you've got 12 feet of shot to help you make up the difference or to compensate for the error, provided, of course, you do get the shot in front of the target and not behind it.

With this three-dimensional picture of the shot stream in mind, let us work backward from the patterning board to the end of the barrel of your shotgun -- it is here that we can shape the form of the shot stream by "squeezing" it.

Shotgun chokes are inserts that you screw into the end of your barrel to produce varying amounts of restriction. As the restriction increases, the spherical expansion of the shot swarm is reduced, and the downrange effectiveness of the shot stream is increased. This is what we call an inverse relationship.

We need to remember, however, that downrange effectiveness is in terms of pattern tightness or how well the shot stream stays together (spherically) as it travels downrange -- not in energy delivered on the target. Also, the farther the shot stream travels downrange, the less energy and killing power remains. This is why most ballistics charts for shotgun loads top out at 60 yards, and why pellets only sting at greater distances.