The 2007-08 hunting season was going to be something of an experiment for me, as was the season before. In 2006 I bought a .410 to attempt to gore the sacred ox that says it isn't an adequate sporting arm. And gore it I did. The following season I was lured to the mystique of the sixteen gauge. Initially I shopped for a classic American double. For a while I have wanted a Philadelphia Fox gun so that is what I targeted. A couple of months of shopping left me somewhat discouraged. There were guns out there but anything I thought was priced reasonably looked at though it had been used as a boat paddle. I ended up plunking down less money for a 1914 London ejector gun from Cogswell & Harrison with modern stock dimensions. At 6 1/4 pounds over a solid pad it isn't a super lightweight gun but it isn't exactly heavy either. For good shooting most people wouldn't want a gun much lighter than that anyway. It was a good decision.

I like to have a backup gun for the worst of weather. I know many people feel comfortable taking anything they own out in any weather but I am not one of those people. When it rains I take a backup gun. The one I chose for that purpose was a 1929 Ithaca Western Arms Long Range model. As with the English gun this one has 28" barrels but it is choked mod/full instead of 1/4 & 1/2. The extra choking of this gun was an asset as I spent much of the season hunting open mud flats where there was little cover. The birds were often quite wary and there were days when if I was going to shoot at all it would be at birds flushing at forty yards. Those were the close birds. I enjoyed using the gun even though it bests the weight of the Cogswell & Harrison by a full pound.

Next came the task of what to feed the guns. The Coggie has 2 1/2" chambers and the Ithaca 2 9/16". Initially I loaded 2 1/2" cartridges for both guns but early in the season I bought a case of 67mm cartridges to shoot in the Ithaca. They are loaded with 27 grams of shot, which is just under an ounce. All of the Cartridges I loaded contained 7/8 ounces of shot. In those cartridges I found the density of #8 shot to perform better than the larger #7 1/2. At longer ranges there were fewer holes in the pattern of the ones loaded with #8 and they still contained plenty of downrange energy to penetrate, break bones, and kill birds. If I could have picked up a bag of #8 1/2 I believe I would have been very pleased with the performance.

When all was said and done I had a season in which I shot more birds than any prior. However, I also had a lower percentage of hits than in any other season since I have been keeping track of such things. Does that mean I shoot a sixteen worse than a twenty, twenty-eight, or (heaven forbid) a four-ten? No much of that can be chalked up to tougher conditions and switching back and forth from day to day between two gun with drastically different feel and stock dimensions. If I concentrated on one and only one of those guns I could use it just as effectively as a twenty gauge and slightly more than a twenty-eight. But, where would the fun be in just shooting one gun?