doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Quick winter morning hunt with Beretta SXS 410E

how sad....

T'was sad, now happy. Good to see another introduced into the
fine pursuit of shooting

A happy kid indeed. We just finished our shoot. The look on the kid's face when the first clay got busted was priceless. The seed has been planted. Now let it take root.

I knew that red foxes had been taken to Australia from Britain but wasn't aware that the brown hare had been too. How are they doing down there? Hopefully not as well as the rabbit did. Lagopus.....

So that's a European brown hare, not some other species? (a guy called "lagopus" oughta know!).

It certainly looks like one Mike. A lot of different species found their way around the globe, some good and some bad. Rabbits are a major menace in Aus. We in Britain have Japanese Sika Deer, not good news but good eating, Asiatic Muntjac deer which breed like rabbits. Chinese Water Deer, and now we have more than China. Australia and New Zealand got a lot of what they don't want that was brought over from Britain. I think that people who emigrate like to have some of the old familiar things around them. Lagopus.....

Thanks! Yeah, we've got, among other things, "English" Sparrows for that reason. They aren't English, nor are they Sparrows, but we've got them due to 19th Century nostalgia.

ON THE OTHER HAND, one day I noticed a gang of them on my back patio searching under the furniture. They were methodically finding and carrying off the Brown Widow and Black Widow spiders that love to live under lawn furniture in Southern California, the former a Mexican species that we have courtesy of NAFTA and/or global warming... I used to cuss those little birds. Not any more.

According to wikepedia: "There are 200 million in North America descended from 60 to 100 birds [1] released in Central Park, New York by Eugene Schieffelin. He was president of the infamous American Acclimatization Society which tried to introduce every bird species mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare to North America in 1890, and this turned into a terrible environmental disaster"

Of course the article is talking about the European or Common starling. The guy should have been strung up for the release!

I haven't seen any positives with those stinking things. If I put the dog out for the day, along with the dog food, her food gets exchanged for a bowl loaded with starling crap, not to mention crap all over the deck, railing and steps.

Sorry to take this off topic, somewhat.

Those starlings are just as bad as the grackles I've been battling the last week. After 8 dead grackles my yard is once again sounding with song birds. My pet pheasant rooster can now eat and pick gravel on my driveway in peace. The only thing those grackles were good for is a little shotgun practice in the off season.

I spoke too soon. Number 9 just bit the dust with a load of #6's. Nice 40 yard shot with the improved choke barrel. If this gets much worse I'm going to get my neighbor with his 4 guage front stuffer loaded with 4oz of shot.