Battue,
[quote] Almost every Dove opportunity can be duplicated on a clays course, and you can stand in one place and shoot the same target over and over, until you think you have it down. Which in fact is how many of the top clays shooters practice. The average sporting clays shooter goes and shoots all the stations. While most of the top guns take a flat and shoot the same target for all 250 or until that accomplish their standard. Which may be 10 to 20 in a row. Yes, there will be slightly different variation with Doves..One may be higher one lower...but a quartering outgoing, incoming or crosser is much the same...Dove or clay." [quote]
I have shot more than enough Sporting Clays to know "most of the top guns take a flat and shoot the same target for all 250 or until that accomplish their standard." In fact, back when I was writing my shotgun book I shot numerous "flats" of various gauges at the local SC range, testing different shotguns.
But since you've never shot birds in Argentina (or apparently other places then locally) you obviously don't understand what I'm talking about. Even in Argentina the birds vary from the common eared dove (very much like mourning doves in size and flight pattern) to two kinds of wild pigeons, and parakeets and parrots. They're all different sizes and fly in different ways, and will be encountered when shooting the same area. South Africa not only has rock pigeons but several kinds of doves of various sizes, which can all appear, randomly, while shooting the same field. It's NOT the same as shooting clays.
Then there are ducks and geese in both Argentina and Africa--which can often be encountered while shooting upland birds. The ducks alone in Argentina vary from teal to "mallard-sized" ducks--but they're not only both puddle ducks and divers but "tree ducks," all of which fly in varied ways.
There's also a wide variety of upland birds, hunted not just by walking up (with dogs or not) anywhere from open country to cover much like typical ruffed grouse cover. Have hunted various species of francolin in Africa from thick riverbottoms (where during the bird hunting I've jumped animals from bushbuck to kudu to leopard) to cropland where the flushed birds range from smaller francolin to wild guinea fowl as wild as pheasants but almost as big as sage grouse.
It's all FAR more varied than anything I've seen in North America--where I have not only bird-hunted from Old Mexico to Alaska and the Northwest Territories, but live in a state where (even if we don't count doves and turkeys) there are eight species of upland birds, from Huns to sage grouse.
As Bob Brister pointed out many years ago, when I first started shooting with him, clays are far more predictable (and hence easy to hit) than wild birds. And he shot plenty of both.
