Beach Ducks

The last place I would have ever figured to spot a waterfowl museum would have been on Virginia Beach. Well, I was wrong. On a recent visit, we spotted the Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Museum from the beach. It was a quaint little place, full of old decoys, guns, shotgun shells and numerous other neat items.

Sometimes we think that duck hunting and waterfowling is a southern thing because it is easy to forget that these ducks fly all the way down from Canada every year. In fact, the Chesapeake Bay area is one of the prime waterfowling areas in America. This year more ducks have stayed up there than come all the way south. It’s a combination of warm weather down here and water everywhere.

One of the items that caught my eye at the museum was one of the first old Remington Model 11 shotguns they had on display. It was rigged for the “old days” when the daily limit of ducks was determined by the number of shells you had in your possession. Note the gun in the bottom of the photo below. It had an extension on the magazine that allowed 12 shells to be in the gun at one time!

Laws today require that shotguns be plugged to hold no more than three shells at one time. Wow!