NEW YORK — Driving back from Sunset Beach, North Carolina, where we spend two weeks every summer, we hugged the coastline. After crossing the 40-kilometer Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, we stopped for the first time at the Visitors Center for the Eastern Shore of Virginia National Wildlife Refuge. The center turned out to be more like a museum, with several exhibits. One, with some blown-up old photos, was arrestingly called "The Outlaw Gunner."
No, the display was not about a soldier run amok, as I learned soon enough. "Gunner" here is the same as "hunter," and the story is the wholesale slaughter of wildfowl via the "mass production methods" that were practiced around Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries even after the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 made them illegal.
"The Outlaw Gunner," by Harry M. Walsh, M.D., which the visitor's center carried for sale, details the weapons and other devices that "market gunners" — those engaged in mass killing for a living — had at their disposal. Central to this practice was "the fowling piece" or the gun. There were a range of pieces: swivel gun, punt gun, battery gun, etc., and what was simply called "the big gun."