The best gun for the job?

Wildfowlers are a loose collection of tribes and mystics. While the tribes jostle for imaginary points over which is the best gun or calibre to use, the mystics are the ghosts of the foreshore, confident in their choice of both. They are most often seen at the club’s annual AGM, calmly making their experience tell in rowdy discussions over access and restrictions, like Captain Quint scratching his fingernails down the blackboard of the Amity town meeting.

Quint’s character in Jaws was made up of several real-life professional shark hunters whose ancestors were the professional market gunners both in this country and the US. For these gunners operating at the end of the 19th century, it was the era of blackpowder. For blackpowder to be effective out fowling, you needed big charges and long barrels to allow the powder to burn thoroughly.

Wounded and lost birds, for