Home Forums Birds & Dogs Upland Game How many of you guys use a 20 gauge?

I live to hunt Ruffed Grouse. I usually hunt WI and the UP, but have gone to MN. Also hunted SD many times for pheasant, ND and MT many times for pheasant and earlier in the year for sharpies and huns, and CO for blues and ptarmigan.

For grouse I usually use a light weight 12ga O/U with 3 1/4 dram, 1 1/4 oz, high antimony #6 shot. This load patterns very well out of my guns and is in all scenarios a better killer on grouse sized game than smaller shot sizes and/or sub gauges, and I have both taken and witnessed a lot of game being taken with about every combination available.

Sometimes I carry a 16 ga O/U in which I shoot 1 1/8 oz #6, which is also a great load and gun combination for grouse size game. For pheasants I load 1 1/4oz #5 shot in a 12 ga and use heavier dram eq loads later in the season. The only times I carry a 20ga is for smaller game birds, and early in the ruffed grouse season when there's a lot of wood cock around and the leaves are still on, meaning shots are close. In the 20 I use 1oz #7.5 shot; it's an ok to marginal load on grouse sized game up to 25 yds.

In my experience, it's more about shot size than guage, and if you can get adequately sized shot for the game at hand to pattern in your gun/choke, you can kill larger birds efficiently with sub gauges and maybe a slightly tighter choke up to a point.

From what I see in a lot of areas I hunt, many hunters are using shot that's too small to kill humanely in a lot of scenarios for the game being hunted. In my home coverts we get a lot of out of state hunters, and many seem to favor sub gauges with #7.5-8 shot, which are very poor loads for grouse and bigger sized game, and it's not too uncommon for my dogs to retrieve wounded birds I didn't shoot at, or for me to clean birds I did shoot that have smaller shot embedded in them. Further, I've often helped out of staters who are down on their luck and are having a tough time finding game, by hunting with them for a few hours, showing them the type of cover that's most productive. Through the course of this I often encounter hunters who are actually hitting game they shoot at with small gauges/small shot but not killing it quickly, leaving them to conclude that they missed outright while the game is left to suffer. Same thing happens in the pheasant fields, where I often run into hunters using light loads of #7.5 and #6's in 12's and sub gauges, which are not enough to consistently take large roosters humanely at common distances. I hate to think of the wound fest going on every fall with all of these hunters not being adequately equipped.

An added benefit of larger shot is that there's less of it in the same sized payload; by extension, the birds you get will have less shot in them to be found at the table.

The main reason I'm not more fond of the 20 more often is that I personally haven't found many #6 and #5 loads that pattern too well at all in my 20's, whereas I have a lot of options that do in the larger bores. Still, when I take young hunters, I set them up with a 20 ga gas auto that mitigates recoil well and load it with appropriately sized shot and just hope they're able to connect in spite of the inconsistent patterns. If I was more recoil conscious with the 12ga, I'd do the same for myself.