The average duck flies between 40 and 50 mph while a shot string is moving in the neighborhood of 800 fps at 40 yards. The ratio of the duck's velocity to that of the shot prove that even the longest of real-world shots strings don't make a practical difference in the field.

I'm greatly troubled when gun writers don't do their homework and repeat misinformation that intuitively seems correct, but that has been proven incorrect time and again. Gravity being the bugaboo when shooting uphill or downhill, and slow but determined so-called "brush-buster" bullets are among the subjects most often gotten wrong in print. Another is the importance of shot string length.

When a load of shot is fired from a shotgun, the pellets disburse radially to form what we see two dimensionally as the shot pattern on a sheet of patterning paper. What isn't as easy to perceive, is the front to back distribution of the pellets that results in the cigar-shaped "cloud" of pellets called the shot string. Intuitively, you can envision how a short shot string seems beneficial because more of the pellets would appear to arrive on a moving target at the same time. Conversely, a long shot string strung out across the sky would appear to allow a bird or clay pigeon to pass through just a small section of the string.

I was fortunate enough a few years ago to be involved in an experiment conducted at H.P. White Laboratories in Street, MD, dealing with the external ballistic properties of a typical Hevi-Shot "duck load." One part of that experiment required determining the length of a Hevi-Shot shot string at 40 yards, and then comparing it to the shot strings of steel and lead loads also typical of what would be used for ducks.

Target shooters must contend with targets that fly much faster than live birds. But even on the target field, shot string length is of little importance when you look at the numbers.

When Burrard did his shot string experiments in the 1920s, he attached a steel plate to the side of a truck that an assistant drove past him at about 40 miles per hour. Burrard shot the truck as it drove past and using the velocity of the truck and the downrange velocity of the shot accurately calculated the length of the shot string from the elliptical pattern it made on the steel plate.

Burrard's method was simple and it worked, but to determine the length of the various shot strings at H.P. White, two high-speed digital cameras and a Remington Model 11-87 shotgun were used in conjunction with an Oehler Model 55 Skyscreen and a tape measure. The experiment was set up by mounting the Remington in a rigid fixture to ensure a constant impact point. One of the cameras and the Oehler screen were set up downrange at 40 yards with the camera's shutter set so that it was tripped when the first pellet crossed the Skyscreen.

The second camera was set to photograph simultaneously, but was positioned a few feet up range, closer to the shotgun. As we fired each load, the up range camera was moved closer to the shooter until shot pellets were no longer consistently visible in its photos at which point the camera was moved back down range until pellets were again visible. Such arrangement made it possible to photograph both the front and back ends of the shot string at the same instant, and then to simply view the tape measure through the cameras' viewfinders to measure the distance between the two images to come up with the shot string length. Several boxes of each type of ammunition were fired to determine an average shot string length.