16 
Forest and Stream 
SHORT RANGE SHOTGUN PATTERNS 
AN ANALYSIS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF SHOT AT RANGES VARY¬ 
ING FROM FIVE TO TWENTY YARDS SHOWS INTERESTING RESULTS 
By C. S LANDIS 
F OR many years one of the favorite 
amusements of shotgun shooters 
has been the shooting of long- 
range patterns. Some do it to 
determine the closest and most even 
shooting loads to use for duck, trap, or 
block shooting; others, merely to see 
how close their guns will pattern in 24 
or 30-inch circles at 40 yards. A few 
move back to 50, 60, or 70 yards, or 
even greater distances, to determine 
whether their guns would be at all likely 
to hit a duck or a goose, if they held 
properly, at these ranges. 
There is still another class who sim¬ 
ply cannot resist the impulse to put a 
pattern on a dead tree, an old barn¬ 
door, or a cake of ice, just to see some¬ 
thing happen, and to break the deadly 
monotony of tramping around without 
any immediate hope of shooting at 
game. The shotgun shooter simply must 
see the dirt fly occasionally; if he finds 
no game he provides artificial targets 
and gets busy. 
To a good many people this seems like 
nothing whatever but a waste of am¬ 
munition, but it isn’t. The shooter 
gradually acquires 
a mind picture be¬ 
fore he shoots, of 
just what is going 
to happen. Instead 
of thinking of a 
shotgun pattern as 
a number of neat 
little black dots in 
a 30-inch circle 
carefully drawn on 
a nice white piece 
of paper, he thinks 
of it as something 
that registers the 
passage of a shot 
charge that is two 
or three feet wide 
and ten or fifteen 
feet long and 
which makes 
things fly when the 
gun cracks. He’s 
got the right idea. 
There is just as 
much difference 
between the shape 
of a real shotgun 
charge and the 
vertical imprint of 
it secured at 40 
yards, as there is 
between a side view of a dachshund 
dog and the “pattern” he would make if 
he sat .down on a newly painted floor. 
If “patterns” could be readily obtained 
that would show the form and motion 
of the long, irregularly shaped flying 
mass of shot that looks like a flying 
swarm of bees—strung out at most 
ranges so that the length of the mass is 
three to five times its height or width, 
EW rabbits, quail or grouse are 
killed at the standard range of 
forty yards in proportion to those that 
are shot at—and very often missed—at 
five to fifteen yards. This article tells 
why a knowledge of short range pat¬ 
terns is so important to everyone who 
goes field shooting. 
instead of merely showing it as the 
holes in a sieve, it would be so very 
much more interesting and instructive. 
Our old friend, Noah Webster, who 
has had a few things to say about Eng¬ 
lish “as she should be writ’ ” defines a 
shotgun pattern as “the distribution of 
shot on a target at which a shotgun is 
fired.” 
This definition of a shotgun pattern 
allows us a lot of latitude, and conse¬ 
quently we can call practically any im¬ 
print left by a charge of shot, a shot 
pattern. 
Notice that a pattern may be taken at 
any angle to the line of fire, at any dis¬ 
tance from the gun, and that the sheet 
of paper, block of wood, or whatever it 
is that records the imprint of the shot 
charge, need not be placed at right 
angles to the line of fire. 
I N securing information about shot pat- 
terns and ballistic information about 
the behavior of shot charges, let us for 
once forget all about our old standard 
range of 40 yards and its nicely drawn 
30-inch circle. We will adopt the In¬ 
dians’ method of sneaking up a bit 
closer on the game and see what hap¬ 
pens in the way of shot patterns at 5 to 
20 yards. 
No doubt each of you has a somewhat 
hazy memory of an old abandoned barn 
or a covered bridge or an old dead tree 
that used to serve as the “standard” 
testing range for the neighborhood. 
I recall an old red covered bridge that 
did duty across a creek about a mile 
from my boyhood home. Apparently, 
every gunner that ever crossed that 
bridge, helped to ventilate its battle- 
scarred sides; for an irregular line of 
two to three inch holes, and perforated 
spots dotted the whole length of it—- 
just head high. There wasn’t a shooter 
in that neighborhood who didn’t know 
exactly what any shotgun, from the 
wildest-shooting, bored-out musket, to 
the closest-shooting, extra-full-choke 
single gun used for shooting at wooden 
blocks at turkey matches, would do at 
five yards. He couldn’t help but observe 
the results if he 
ever went hunting 
in Armstrong Val¬ 
ley-—and he could 
not do that unless 
he lived there, 
without crossing 
the bridge. 
After a couple 
of generations of 
Fords had bounced 
the dust out of the 
old red bridge, the 
county commis¬ 
sioners decided 
that they might as 
well make sure 
that they would be 
remembered by fu¬ 
ture generations of 
Republicans, s o 
they replaced the 
ballistic range with 
a more modern 
concrete structure 
the most notable 
feature of which 
is a Keystone 
shield containing 
their names. 
One of the de¬ 
fects of a concrete 
wall is that it often returns with com¬ 
pound interest, whatever is shot against 
it, so now the boys in that neighborhood 
write to the ammunition factories for 
their ballistic information, and, as much 
of this is obtained at the standard 
ranges of 100 feet, or at 40 yards, our 
coming generations in the old home 
town will have much to learn about 
short-range shotgun shooting. 
Short range patterns with a duck load 
Left: Five yards, improved cylinder bore. Center: Ten yards, improved cylinder. Right: Five yards, 
strong modified. Load: 28 grains Infallible, 1*4 oz. No. S Chilled. 
