What is that? I think that's coyotes.
Mistake was made years ago.
They put a bounty on those because they killed the doer or because they killed the message of the animals.
The staple of the wolves diet are the small animals.
And when the wolf wasn't there to eat these small animals, these animals ate more of the lower growing vegetation, which is also the deer's diet.
And pretty soon you found deer standing on their hind legs, which you could see by the tracks in the snow, to reach the upper branches of trees.
The deer starve to death.
Also when they get up on their hind legs, they're in a very precarious position.
A lot of deer poke their legs doing that.
I don't know that they really die of old age.
I don't think any animal wild dies of old age.
They get to the point where they can't catch food or escape being food.
Well, in here we're in a private game preserve, strictly private enterprise.
And we've maintained in a limited area a limited number of animals.
In order to properly maintain those animals, you've got to have a certain balance in all the herds.
You can't shoot too many of them out.
Ideally you don't shoot out all the breeding bulls.
You don't shoot out all of the fertile cows or does.
But there's an excess number of bulls that have to take out.
One elk bull breeds with 25 or 30 cows.
White -tailed buck breeds with a large number of does.
The others don't breed.
So we can take out a fair number of bulls.
If they're not here to eat, there's more food for everyone.
OK, Reg.
Let's stoke up a couple of these front loaders.
Have a little fun with them.
Why don't you put these on? Once in a while, get a little fire, a little spark traveling around.
Safety precaution? A little safety precaution.
Why don't you stoke yours up? OK.
And we'll get ready to do some shooting.
The hunting I most prefer is a walking, hunting, moving around quietly, standing, listening, looking.
That's a good load.
Or a squirrel sounds like a bear coming through the leaves.
I've sat out here in a log and I've listened to the wing feathers on a raven.
Whirr and ruffle as he made corrections.
That's part of what it's all about.
If you know the Schomburg area, there's a forest preserve there.
I drive through it and one day I saw a red fox.
Where do you get to see a red fox today? Heavy, isn't it? Mm -hmm.
I still hear the call of the pheasant, like 6 o 'clock in the morning, and you hear them.
And it's beautiful.
You're clumsy, aren't you? When you're working with muzzle -loading guns, it takes quite a while to stoke them up.
You're trying to pick your shots.
You can do that just so many times in an hour of hunting.
That could affect the time, about the time of the American Revolution, the colonel in the colonial army wrote out the orders for the training of recruits and read that no recruit shall be dismissed from the drill until he can load and fire his firelock 15 times in three minutes and three quarters.
That's roughly 13 seconds to load a gun.
You put a charge of powder and a ball down the bore, ram it home, open the pan, put powder in the pan, close the pan, bring the weapon up, cock it, fire it, and that's fast.
What's the loading time average now? This? Not 15 seconds.
Not 13 or 15 seconds for me.
No way.
Half cock.
Yeah, it's a long way back to half cock.
We almost went off half cocks.
Mm -hmm.
Okay.
Beautiful.
Why don't you stoke up the other bore on this one? I'll take this one, get over and join Bob the speed range.
Soon as you're loaded, come on over and we'll start shooting.
Okay.
Pull it.
And you must give yourself a little bit more leeway in the fact that the muzzle loader goes off slower.
It doesn't travel with the velocity that the other breech loader does.
Pull it.
Pull.
We had a misfire.
Reg, on occasion you're going to have a misfire like that.
We'll try the other barrel and see if this one works.
Pull.
As you can see.
Pull.
Wow.
Super.
Good boy.
Good boy.
Get the bird.
Come on, Spike.
Work them up.
Come on, Spike.
Come here.
Come on, Spike.
Come on, my boy.
Spike, come.
Come on.
Come on, Spike.
Work them up.
Work them up, boy.
Mm -hmm.
Got a whip.
Uh -huh.
Come.
Good boy.
Little birdie.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
Whoa, whoa.
No bird.
No bird.
Come on, Spike.
No bird.
Come on, Spike.
Come on.
We'll get lots of powder and shot.
Come on.
Good boy.
Awful quiet over there.
Everybody got their malls up in the air as they went in.
Birds are real nervous this morning.
Come on, Spike.
Oh.
Oh.
That was a good flyer.
That last one.
He did a nice long lead.
Very mature.
Let me see if I can.
Wait a minute.
You know what I just hit.
Oh, look what he's got.
My fishing pliers.
Now.
Turn me.
That's your turning and pulling at the same time.
Let's turn it.
Now, you're coming up.
There we go.
Spike, come on, Spike.
Come on, Spike.
Come on, Spike.
Everybody does this every day.
He'll get himself in shape.
Oh, yeah.
Fun gun, isn't it? Come on, Spike.
Good boy.
Good.
Good boy.
Yeah.
Now, they were back here.
By the fence.
By the fence.
By the fence.
Yeah.
Come on, boy.
Come on, Spike.
Oh.
That's a bird.
Where are they, Jack? Dead bird.
Bring them in.
Good bird.
Good boy.
One thing about those birds, they don't stand still.
That's an unrunning bird.
Is that a game warden? No.
Bring it.
Oh.
Get the bird.
Runners.
Down.
Well, we're working with shotguns up here.
A shotgun is essentially a piece of smooth pipe with a charge of shot and a charge of powder to blow the shot out in between the shot and the powder we need a wad of some kind to form a seal to the barrel.
Powder to blow the shot forward.
The first gun was undoubtedly a shotgun, a smoothbore.
Just a length of pipe plugged at one end.
They would pour a charge of powder down the barrel and then some form of projectile, either a single or something, to blow a lot of little projectiles out, like a handful of gravel and a handful of rusty nails the boys were using at Breed's Hill against the British.
Warm water.
The early guns, first guns, usually referred to as matchlocks.
Match being a slow burning wick or fuse.
This was put in a little arm atop.
The gun about where a hammer would be on a gun today.
And it held that fuse, that match, slow match, which had to be kept burning if you were anticipating a need to use the gun.
And near that plugged end of the barrel was a hole drilled into the barrel so that when the match was brought down to that hole, the only fire in it would fire the powder, discharge the gun.
Look at that from one barrel.
That's making it a little tough to drive those rods down there.
That's why you couldn't hit those birds today.
There you go.
This was replaced by the wheel lock.
Pieces of iron pyrite mounted around the perimeter of the spring wound wheel.
As the wheel spun against the steel, making a shower of sparks where the hole had been drilled into the barrel.
Now on the side of the barrel by the powder, they put a little pan and they put a little powder in that pan.
So the sparks would fall in the pan, flash the powder, fire would travel through the touch hole, discharge the gun.
The flint lock has again a hammer on it, spring loaded, clamped in the jaws of the hammer, a piece of flint.
The pan is still there from the wheel lock and the touch hole on the side.
It has a little cover on it and rising from the cover, a piece we call the friezen, a piece of metal.
And as the flint falls, it strikes the friezen, making sparks, and in so doing forces the cover of the pan open.
The sparks flash the pan, fire travels through the touch hole, sets off the charge in the barrel.
We hope the touch hole is a little blocked up with something and we get a misfire, generally referred to as a flash in the pan.
That gun was around for probably 350 years, a very dependable gun.
It's the gun of the American Revolution.
They then devised methods to carry dried fulminative mercury.
There was a gun with a roll of paper caps, and as you cock the hammer a new cap would come up right over the nipple going into the touch hole.
Then they put it in the bottom of these little copper cups we call percussion caps, which are so easy to slip over the nipple on a cap lock and away we go.
If you were out in the woods 100 years ago or 150 years ago, you'd plant it in a creek.
Long before this, of course, they were wrapping powder and ball in paper and calling it a cartridge, making for much faster reloading than pouring from flasks and...
which is that.
By the time they got to putting powder and ball in a brass cylinder, it didn't take someone very long to figure out they could put that percussion cap or something similar to it in the back of that brass cylinder.
And lo and behold, we have the modern ammunition.
The priming cap is at the rear end of the cartridge.
Powder in front of it, and in front of the powder the wad and shot are single projectiles, in case maybe.
What we're doing is stepping back in time to where we stuff the parts down the front instead of carrying them around in a nice little package they call a shot shell.
Spe Nikolaev Game really starts with nature's management.
Before, let's say before man became an intelligent, highly skilled hunting animal, there were game animals or prey animals and predators to take them.
A man that's eliminated, let's say almost eliminated the timber wolf.
Bobcat numbers are highly reduced.
We don't have as many natural predators.
On the other hand, the white -tailed deer, which is native to how many states in the United States, the whole eastern half of the United States, up into Canada, is present in larger numbers than many Indians have in this country.
Oh sure.
White -tailed deer are so numerous.
White -tailed deer were hunted down.
And other game species have been hunted or have through other means come close to being lost to us.
Illinois closed deer hunting back in the early 20s if I remember correctly.
A few years ago, perhaps 12, 14 years ago, Illinois opened up deer hunting again.
We're loaded with deer in Illinois.
I think it's a very workable system.
Deer management is a long practice in the deer hunting states.
I think there's deer hunting in 48 or 49 of the 50 states, by the way.
And I think you can give the hunters credit for the fact that the non -hunters can see deer.
We can all see deer out there.
Because of land management, bird management.
The deer wouldn't be here if it weren't for the hunters.
The ring -necked pheasant wouldn't be in this nation at all if it weren't for the hunters.
It's not a native bird.
It's an import, along with the Hungarian partridge, the chuckler partridge.
They're only brought here because hunters found them in other places.
The money spent by hunters as a tax on arms and ammunition for hunting licenses for the federal duck stamp and donated to Ducks Unlimited and other organizations of that type often goes into buying up areas or waterfowl where hunters cannot shoot.
The ducks are protected.
All right.
Canada has cooperated, which is very important because so many of the species we shoot at, particularly the geese, nest in Canada.
That money has been spent on buying up marshlands.
It doesn't go into a general fund.
Those monies do not go into general funds, they go into conservation work.
Some things seem to work pretty well.
How efficient it is, I don't know, but it does seem to work.
All those ducks are out there.
We've got mallards living in Illinois.
All over the Forest Preserve, around Chicago and Illinois, now mallards are living.
They weren't there when I was a kid.
