If you happen to think killing two birds with one stone is
a bit inefficient, or you have found your way into a zombie apocalypse, you might be
interested in a special type of gun known as a “punt gun,” that used to be somewhat
common among commercial waterfowl hunters.
What’s so special about this gun?
It is capable of killing upwards of 50-100 birds in a single shot.
Market hunters first made their appearance in what would become the United States around
the time of the Pilgrims and continued plying their trade en masse until around the beginning
of the twentieth century.
Some earned their living by bringing as many ducks or other waterfowl to market as possible.
While various methods were used for bringing down the maximum number of birds per hunting
trip, the most effective was ambushing a large flock with a punt gun.
punt-gunFirst put in use in the 1800s, the punt guns were never manufactured on a large
scale, with each being custom made by a gunsmith to fit a buyer’s specifications.
But in general, the barrels had openings upwards of 2 inches (5 cm) in diameter and weighed
over 100-pounds (45 kg).
They generally could fire more than a pound of shot at a time and usually measured over
10 feet (3 m) long.
As you might imagine from this, they were too heavy and the recoil too strong for a
hunter to fire them by hand.
Instead, they were (usually) mounted to small, often flat bottomed, boats known as “punts.”
Hunters aimed the gun by maneuvering the boat into position one or two dozen meters from
their targets, and then fired.
That said, not all punt guns were always mounted to boats.
One of the smallest examples of a punt gun is the Herfurth’s Cannon.
Crafted by German gunsmith August Herfurth in Wisconsin, it measures 63-inches (160 cm)
long and includes a 46-inch (116 cm) long Remington octagonal barrel with a one-inch
diameter.
As for the weight, it’s approximately 26-pounds or just under 12 kilograms, making it a featherweight
compared to most punt guns.
However, it is still much too big and has too much kick to be fired like a normal shotgun.
But its relatively small size did allow the owner to hunt from the shore with proper bracing
before pulling the trigger.
On the other end of the spectrum, the world’s largest punt gun, “Irish Tom,” was reported
to have taken down a little over 100 birds with a single shot, according to its original
owner.
(However, a more usual haul per shot was in the typical range of 50 birds, give or take
a dozen or two.)
Irish Tom’s barrel measures more than 14-feet long (4.2 m), and the whole gun weighs more
than 300 pounds (136 kg)!
More akin to a cannon than a shotgun, it could fire over three pounds of shot with the help
of about 10 ounces of black powder.
The size of Irish Tom meant its first owner was forced to build a specially reinforced
punt boat 24-feet long.
Punt-gun2Market hunters used punt guns from the nineteenth through the early twentieth
century.
The hunters often worked in groups of eight to ten and fired their combined punt guns
at the same time to maximize the number of waterfowl they could hit.
As an example of how effective this was, a market hunter in the eastern United States,
Ray Todd, claimed he and three other hunters with punt guns managed to kill 419 ducks one
night in a single volley after encountering a huge flock “over a half-mile long and
nearly as wide.”
After the first volley, he stated, “The birds flew off a short distance and began
to feed again.
We made three more shots that night.
By morning we had killed over 1,000 ducks.
They brought $3.50 a pair in Baltimore, and it was the best night’s work we had ever
done.”
Not surprisingly, in the years after market hunters began using punt guns, the population
of wild waterfowl began to decline in the United States dramatically.
Punt guns most certainly played a role in the decline along with the decrease in available
habitat.
Sportsmen who hunted for personal use of the killed waterfowl, rather than for profit like
the market hunters, began advocating for hunting regulations and limits.
In response, many states in the U.S. outlawed the use of punt guns by the 1860s, while the
Lacey Act of 1900 and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 effectively ended their use in
the country.
That said, punt guns are still legal in the United Kingdom, though their barrels are restricted
to a diameter less than 1.75-inches.
Hunters must also have a permit from the government for the gun and black powder, and they must
adhere to strict hunting seasons.
All this hasn’t proved much of a problem as there are only a few dozen currently used
punt guns left
in the U.K. today.