By Phil Bourjaily

Tired of claimers taking your birds? Spectra Shot was invented specifically to settle duck hunting arguments. The shells contain colored pellets so you can determine, via autopsy, who shot that banded bird.* If waterfowl hunting is a team sport for you, as it is for a lot of people, you might be interested in colored pellets.

By Phil Bourjaily

Today we have a law lesson, courtesy of my older son, who starts law school in a few days. While reading up on property law he came across and told me about Pierson v. Post. It's the case often used to introduce students to proprety law, and it’s about hunting.

Pierson v. Post concerns the ownership of a fox. Lodowick Post was pursuing a fox in New York state with his hounds around the beginning of the 19th century. David Pierson saw the fox, and, despite knowing Post was after it, killed it and took it home. (accounts vary, some say the fox hid in a well and was killed by Pierson’s son). Neither Post nor Pierson owned the vacant property on which the fox was killed.

What do you do when someone takes your fox? This is America, so even in 1805, you sue. Post sued, claiming the fox was his because, by giving chase to the fox, he established possession. The trial court ruled in favor of Post. Pierson appealed, and the case of the filched fox was heard by the New York Supreme Court which reversed the decision, saying that mere pursuit of a wild animal was not enough to establish ownership,* unless the animal had been “so wounded, circumvented or ensnared . . . so as to deprive them of their natural liberty, and subject them to the control of their pursuer.”

By David E. Petzal

In the late 1990s, I attended a class on survival given by Peter Kummerfeldt and was spellbound at how much the guy knew and how well he presented it. Mr. Kummerfeldt, in case you’re not familiar with him, spent 30 years as an Air Force survival instructor and finished his career as head of the survival course at the Air Force Academy. He has taught the subject to other government agencies, is a flyfishing and hunting guide, and has been involved in search and rescue operations as well.

Peter is not one of the television survivalists who eats wolverine dung for the camera. He is not in show business; he is deadly serious about staying alive in the outdoors because he’s seen, first-hand, what happens when your skills are not up to that job.

By David E. Petzal

Every time you pull the trigger, you squirt a flame of 3,000 to 5,000 degrees (Estimates vary wildly, but it’s pretty damned hot.) up your rifle’s barrel. And every time this happens, the barrel melts a little. It’s charred an unattractive black, and cracks and fissures develop at the rear end of the rifling where the flame is most intense. Eventually, the rifling is literally melted away and your rifle no longer shoots the way it once did.

This seems to happen in two stages. The first thing you’ll notice, assuming you’ve kept decent records, that that your groups get bigger. Your minute-of-angle rifle will no longer put three shots into 1.000; it will do 1.200, or 1.250, or something on that order, no matter how carefully you hold.