doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Fiber wads

Mike, you might have been laughing at your post at the end, but don't think that can't happen. Incorporate fertilizer and seed in a base wad and a paper hull, add some rain and now you have scattered, whatever.
Sounds like a patent to me. (you)

David

David, this sounds like a possible big problem for the DEA to me--think I'll keep it in the box for a while (Sure don't want "flower power" to get out of hand...again...).

I try to pick up my spent shotshells, but it only works when the hunting is slow. When the shooting gets fairly hectic, I tend to forget some of the empties! Most of my doubles have ejectors, and that doesn't help with the litter problem, either. Actually my Ithaca 37s are less objectionable in this regard since they dump the empties on your boots.

A combination of paper hulls with steel bases would degrade pretty fast (the steel tends to degrade in my hunting vest overnight--before each bird season I have to go thru the survivors from last season and cull out the really rusty ones to recycle the components (the mutants) or shoot them up on the range (the merely crusty ones). The steel based shells are environmentally better in this respect; I have found brass shotshell bases in the dry West that had been manufactured in the late 19th century; heaven knows how long they had been sitting there.

Another of my hobbies is artifact collecting. I also have found lots of old brass shotshell bases from the paper shell era while surface hunting old fields for arrow-heads. In Argentina the pass shooting on hilltops between the roosts and the feeding areas produces tremendous accumulations of plastic shot-wads. The outfitters do a good job of cleaning up the shell cases because there is a market for them, but the shot wads apparently have no utility and stay where they fall. Degradable substitutes would be a benefit...Geo

Hi, George! I also "acquire" other hunters' junk. When in NY, I used to find the old "boundary trees" that hunters used for stands in the old days when most of upstate NY (now forest) was pastures. Ran my metal detector around their bases and found no end of crap--ctgs. fired and unfired, coins, hunting knives, Zippos, almost all in an advanced state of decay. My favorites are two silver Deutschmarks dated 1900 and an unfired nickel .38 Colt Super Auto softnose. Now that I'm back in CA I have to search canyon overlooks for Western style deer stands. But last weekend I found 3 Savage headstamped .22 Hi-power cases on top of an arroyo up by Ojai, so I guess there is still stuff to be found (sorry for the OT, gus; I'll shut up now...).

Actual seeding from a shotshell would be a Dept of Ag nightmare. Besides what farmer would want you to seed his field with whatever seed someone else decided upon? Let alone seeding something from say the west into the east or visa versa, or even across nations. I think it's gotta be "no impact" to the local ecology in all respects.