ORIGINAL: SwampCollie
Depends on how good a shot you are.
If you couldn't hit your ass with both hands then you might as well get you a pocket full of rocks and not ring my ears.
I've been shooting (or should I say shot) Hevi for better than a decade. Usually load it as the first shell and back it up with two steel. Before they monkey'd with the formula for that new Hevi-shot duck BS they have now, you'd never have to shoot a cripple. I shot swans, geese and ducks with regular 2 3/4" #6 hevi-shot. When Evironmetal took the loading back over and changed it from just hevi-shot to hevi-duck and hevi-goose... no more. I'm sitting on $400 worth of that hevi-duck junk.
I think that the new HEVI_SHOT DUCK (9.7gr/cc) is one of the biggest waste of money products on the market. Spend another dollar and get the Goose (12gr/cc) which is the REAL hevi-shot.
As for what I'm doing now... shooting up the rest of my hevi-duck... then sticking with Hevi-steel. Basically the same thing as hevi-duck (just a touch less dense) but MUCH less expensive). I shoot too many birds a year to shoot a high density shot exclusively.
SwampCollie: That is some very, very, very interesting information. I confess to having been duped. And I don't think it is just Enviromental Metals that is perpetrating this hoax. I seem to recall having read an article in one of the glossy waterfowl magazines that extolled the virtues of HeviShot and some others. Man . . . that PO's me something fierce. I have bought 6 boxes of 3" #4s and 6 boxes of 2 3/4" #6s since the first of February, stocking up for next year. Talk about feeling like a sucker.