July and early August in northern Michigan is a “make of it what you want” time of year. For many, it’s prime time at the beach while others find themselves on the golf course trying to break 90, 80, or sinking a few long ones to finally reach that elusive round of 72. Some (me included) are content to lazily sit on their deck, beverage in hand, and wring every last ounce of heat from a land that was covered in an icy blanket three short months ago, and will be again before we know it.
But waterfowl hunters use this time to practice shooting and take inventory of ammunition, especially in the days of varying requirements, demand, and availability. (For this story, the small “pellets” in each shell aren’t really pellets, rather referred to as “shot,” but that gets confusing when talking about shooting stuff, so I might call them pellets. If you don’t like it, please direct all complaints to fellow columnist Greg Frey, who loves to explain his feelings on the matter.)
Waterfowl hunting requires non-toxic shot, and that world offers a lot to unravel, whether you’re a beginner or seasoned pro. (Concerning upland hunting in the great state of Michigan, non-toxic shot isn’t required unless you’re on a shooting preserve, where most have changed over to no-tox. Best to talk to your club ahead of any hunts when the preserve season opens up later this summer.) So for today, let’s break down the types of federally approved, non-toxic shot options, knowing I’m probably going to miss a few.
If you were shooting ducks until 1987, you remember what it was like to hunt with lead. The stuff was good, plain and simple, but it was also toxic to waterfowl and anything else ingesting it, not to mention as it accumulated up the food chain and started killing more noticeable animals, like eagles. The phase-out plan by the Feds began in the 1987-88 season, with a complete national ban by 1991. The first approved alternative that was not toxic to animals was steel, and it’s still around today.
Steel is the lightest of the alternatives to lead, which will always be the baseline of comparison. Measured in grams per cubic centimeter, lead falls in the 11.2-ish range, where steel weighs in at roughly 7.8, which was — and still is — its main problem. A light material loses its “downrange energy” quickly, causing penetration problems that are partially remedied by using a larger diameter shot size that consequently includes fewer “pellets” in each shell. Fewer pellets create less-dense patterns and increased chances of missing (though since steel doesn’t deform like lead and actually patterns better than people might think).
A second drawback to steel is its hardness, which can damage older, thin-walled barrels, rendering them unsafe to use. Thankfully, modern waterfowl shotguns don’t have that problem and are steel-approved.
In steel’s infancy, with older shotguns suffering and old-timers complaining about its lack of lethality at ranges they used to shoot ducks (or claim to), a race began for an alternative to steel that performed like lead. Enter, bismuth.
At two grams/cubic centimeter heavier (9.6), bismuth was denser, and, like lead, softer, and thus safe to use in older guns. Approved completely for the 1995 season, it’s been here ever since, but with two drawbacks: brittleness and cost. Upon impact, bismuth pellets have a tendency to cleave, so tin is added (about 3 percent) to firm up the bismuth crystalline structure and reduce cleaving (though I still find shot “halves” when cleaning ducks or geese I’ve shot with bismuth).
Bismuth isn’t cheap. Most of the world’s production comes from China, so with trade restrictions and tariffs, not to mention bismuth being increasingly used as a lead replacement in non-hunting related materials, it’s not just expensive but becoming almost impossible for ammo companies to realistically stock anymore. But if you can find it or have it already, the stuff works just fine, and allows you to take out that old favorite gun now and then.
Tungsten is another metal approved for waterfowl hunting. It’s much denser then lead — about 60 percent more — making it arguably the best alternative in terms of downrange energy and pattern density. In other words, straight tungsten in No. 7 would give me similar results as my typical No. 4 steel Federal load would, not to mention being more lethal at farther distances.
But Tungsten Super Shot (TSS) is extremely expensive, not to mention so hard that, like steel, it can’t be used in older waterfowl guns. Thankfully, there is tungsten-matrix, where a malleable polymer binds with tungsten to make a pellet that highly mimics lead and can be used in older guns. It’s also more affordable than TSS and allows hunters to drop down in shot size, though not as much as with TSS. In my opinion, it’s the best of all worlds if you can find and afford it.
There are other blends and alloys using bismuth and tungsten, but again, more info to cover than I have room for. But for now, these are the current metals we have to choose from, though, like Yoda said in Return of the Jedi, “… there is another.”
The folks at Boss Shotshells are offering loads made of copper and have been feverishly working on its approval and jumping through all the government hoops. As of late June, according to their website, Boss Corrosion-Inhibited Copper (CIC) CuProX has been approved for use this coming season, but it has to be easy for conservation officers to test in the field. It isn’t yet clear if Boss will be using translucent hulls (clear, translucent … get it? Sorry) or if law enforcement will develop or has developed another system for detection so they can use their normal red hulls, but I hope so because copper sounds like a great alternative to the rising unavailability of bismuth.
So, figure out what’s in your budget and get the stuff now. Save a few bucks, practice and pattern with the shot you’ll be using come hunting season, and check off this box on your pre-season’s list of to-dos. It’ll leave that much more time to give some TLC to last year’s neglected decoys!