In my opinion, the common error of all American fowlers and duck shooters, lies, in the first place, in the overloading the gun altogether, causing it to recoil so much as to be exceedingly disagreeable and even painful, and in the same degree diminishing the effect of the discharge; for it must never be forgotten that when a gun recoils, whatever force is expended on the retrogressive motion of the breech, that same force is to be deducted from the propulsion of the charge. In the second place, he erroneously loads with extremely large and heavy shot, the result of which is, in two respects, inferior to that of a lighter and higher number. First, as there will be three or four pellets of No. 4 for every one pellet of A or B in a charge, and, consequently, as the load is thereby so much the more regularly distributed, and so much the more likely to strike the object, and that in several places more, in the ratio of three or four to one, than could be effected by A’s or B’s. Second, as the flesh will constantly close over the wound made by a small shot, so as to cause the bleeding to go on internally to the engorgement of the tissues and suffocation by hemorrhage; whereas the wound made by the large grain will relieve itself by copious bleeding, and the bird so injured will oftentimes recover, after having fallen even to the surface of the water, or lain flapping, as it were, in the death-struggle on the blood-stained sand or grassy hassocks. This fact has been well noticed, and several examples adduced to prove its truth, by Mr. Giraud, in his exceedingly clear and correct, though, to our taste, far too brief volume on the “Birds of Long Island.”
For my own use I invariably adopt for all the smaller species of duck—as the two varieties of Teal, the Summer Duck, the Golden Eye, and the Buffel-headed Duck, _Anates_, _Carolinensis_, _Discors_, _Sponsa_, and _Fuligulæ_, _Clanguid_, and _Albeola_—the same shot which is generally used for the various birds known on our shores and rivers as bay-snipe, viz: No. 4 or 5—the latter best for the Plovers, the former for duck, whether in large or small guns. In this relation I may observe that, on one occasion—the only one, by the way, on which I ever saw a green-winged teal in the summer season—I killed a couple of these beautiful birds, right and left, while woodcock shooting, in Orange County, New York, with No. 8 shot. They sprang quite unexpectedly from behind a willow bush, on the Wuwayanda creek, and I dropped them both quite dead, some what to my own astonishment, and to the utter astounding of Fat Tom, who witnessed it, into the middle of the stream, respectively at twenty and twenty-five yards distance. Until I recovered them I supposed that they were young wood ducks, but on examination they proved to be young green-winged teal, of that season, in their immature plumage. This must have been in the last week of July or the first of August—it was many years since, and as at that time I kept no shooting diary, I unfortunately am unable to verify the exact date. The birds must, I conclude, have been bred in that vicinity, by what means I cannot conjecture, unless that the parent birds might have been wounded in the spring, and disabled from completing their northern migration, and that this, as is some times the case with the minor birds of passage, might have superinduced their breeding in that, for them, far southern region. In corroboration of this I may add that, in the spring of 1846, a couple of these birds haunted a small reedy island in front of my house, on the Passaic, to so late a day in summer—the 29th, if I do not err, of May—that I sedulously avoided disturbing them, in the hope that they would breed there. This I yet think would have been the case but for the constant disturbance of that lovely river throughout the summer by gangs of ruffianly loafers, with whom the neighboring town of Newark abounds beyond any other town of its size in the known world, boating upon its silvery surface day and night, and rendering day and night equally hideous with their howls and blasphemies.