I've killed a gazillion ducks and geese across the way on Maryland's Eastern Shore during my heyday in the 2000's and teens. 90% of them were brought down with LC Smiths, and all were killed with either Bismuth or Nice Shot handloads. God I miss Nice Shot, but Bismuth is about as good.
While most of my gunning was with an LC Smith Ideal grade Longrange Waterfowl model, a couple field grade guns barked too.
Standard load: 1 1/8oz. #2 bismuth at 1200fps for geese, 1 oz. #6's for ducks, in 12, 16, and 20 gauges. 2 3/4" hulls and target wads. I found that the birds aren't as armor plated as people would have you believe. Good tight chokes to present a dense pattern, and the patience to not sky bust them are key. My waterfowl gunning buddies scoffed at my approach while insisting nothing less than 3" magnums would do. After a few years of me outgunning them they started transitioning to my way of thinking, and everybody's scores went up.
We would get bored with conventional approaches and cooked up a little game: kill at least one Canada goose with every gauge shotgun per season from 10ga. down to .410. I performed that trick five years in a row. The 28's and .410's were a bit dicey but if you kept a cool head and held fire until the bird was around 20 yards or less away down they'd go. Putting out range stakes between the blinds and the dekes helped a lot. For that I employed my 28 gauge O/U skeet gun choked skeet 1 and skeet 2, and a .410 Winchester M42 I borrowed choked full. 10 gauge was another borrowed gun, a pre-1900 Remington double, I forget the model. All done with bismuth handloads.
Good stuff!
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