[coylh]

http://www.break.com/index/biggest_shotgun_in_the_world.html

[Dave McCracken]

This has been up here before,coylh. Search under "Punt Guns"....

[MCgunner]

Not hard to see how redheads got decimated.

[ezypikns]

Read James Michener's "Chesapeake" for a decent account of how they worked. Evidently they used to wait until the ducks and geese would congregate in small patterns of open water when the rest of the bay was frozen over. You can imagine how much damage could be done. The guns were ususally mounted to skiffs. Impossible to hand hold something like that. They'd fill barrels with the birds and sell them to hotel restaurants in Baltimore.

[MCgunner]

Redheads are rafting ducks. They raft up in huge groups on the open water. The market hunters would skull up to them in punt boats laying on their backs low to the water, get in range, boom, couple hundred in one shot. Even today the redhead population hasn't returned to its former glory, but they're in decent enough numbers down here for a 1 bird a day limit. For years and years they were verboten, but they've slowly come back to huntable numbers through good management. It was mostly the redhead and ducks like the bufflehead, bay ducks, that were picked on by the market hunters with their punt boats. Geese don't land on open bays.