First of all, published writers--no matter the field--have to get used to taking incoming rounds. It's part of the package. And all of us are guilty of mistakes. The oft-sainted Jack O'Connor wrote in his "Shotgun Book" that LC Smith didn't make any .410's. In view of the fact Jack was around when Elsies were being made, that one sort of jumps out at you.

Sometimes copy editors do you in. In a discussion of the conversion of good bird habitat to crop ground, I mentioned a "tiling machine"--for putting in drainage tile--which the kind copy editor changed to "tilling machine". My farmer friends had a lot of fun at my expense over that one: "Hey Brown . . . tilling machine . . . is that what you outdoor writers call a plow? Har har har!"

Then there is the "reinvention of the wheel" syndrome. Many folks credit Sherman Bell with discovering that it's perfectly fine to shoot 2 3/4" shells, loaded to appropriate pressures, in a gun with 2 1/2" chambers. Fact is, Burrard, Thomas, and an American with long experience in the firearms business named Arthur Curtis all said the same thing. Decades ago. No knock on the material Sherman's written, but that's one wheel he did not invent. I have an excellent book by a French gun guru named General Journee. The late John Brindle gave Journee due credit for his work on ballistics, but Journee is almost forgotten today, at least in the English-speaking gun world--mainly because no one has ever translated his book into English. (I thought about taking a shot at it, but it's way too technical for me.)

And although I'm also certain Mac's 250 pheasants with a 28 in a single season were indeed preserve birds--or at least the vast majority of them--we have to be careful when we say "couldn't have happened". The Iowa pheasant season opens Oct 25, closes Jan 10. 78 days, 3 pheasants per day. Seasons in the Dakotas and Minnesota open before Iowa's, and the Kansas season (you can shoot 4 a day there) runs to the end of January. So it's certainly mathematically possible to kill that many wild roosters in a season, if not practically. I once killed half that many without ever leaving Iowa, and when I look back at my notes from that season, I wonder how the hell I did it. But I didn't kill any with a 28ga.