Many of our kid firearm exploits were actually useful in many instances. For example, we kept the sparrow and starling populations to a manageable level during our BB gun and later .22 rifle years. I couldn’t begin to total the number of birds we had to our credit. Tim, being a much better marksman than I, had many more “body counts” than me. He got so good with his BB gun, he used to aim at one of the overhead telephone wires and usually hit it! The resulting sound was a high-pitched ping. (It’s a good thing he didn’t try this with his .22 rifle)! I guess being “farm kids” gave us some measure of common sense even at a young age. Perhaps the greatest constructive contributions with our firearms were greatly thinning out the woodchuck population that “ate away a lot of profits” in our soybean fields every summer. Young succulent soybean plants were the woodchuck’s favorite food, a variable “Caesar’s Salad”! The best time to ambush woodchucks is twilight when they are out of their holes and most active. We would wait in the brushy fencerows and let the hapless woodchucks venture further from their holes and when they were fully engaged in eating, we would take careful aim and BLAMO! One less pesky woodchuck to “eat up the profits”. Tim especially got good at woodchuck sniper techniques since he had more patience than I did. When most of the woodchucks were “thinned out” at our farm, we would then go ambush woodchucks in our neighborhood farmer’s soybean fields. We used to get 25 cents bounty for each woodchuck we ambushed from the neighbor’s fields. Tim made quite a “killing” and made really good money in those days! I usually made about enough for a bottle of pop and a few candy bars at Heckleman’s Sohio Station. After several days of slowly ambushing the population, the other woodchucks got very paranoid about leaving their holes, so we usually waited a few days to give them a false sense of security. In tough cases of really paranoid woodchucks and those we caused severe anxiety in, we would purchase “Gopher Bombs” from Shinrock Elevator. They looked like a big firecracker, you lit the fuse and threw it down the hole, and they were killed by the poisonous gas inside their holes. However, instead of lessening our profits by buying “gopher bombs”, we usually just poured gasoline down their holes and waited a few minutes for the fumes to permeate and then threw a lit match in the hole. It would go KERFLEWWWWIEEEEE! We could then spot all their “escape holes” as the smoke poured out of them. The woodchucks ALWAYS had a labyrinth of escape tunnels! One time there was an old smart woodchuck that seemed to taunt us by just barely sticking his nose out his hole, then quickly ducking it back into the hole just as we got a bead on it. Tim outsmarted him after we had several days of frustration. He quietly sneaked up behind his hole and laid down in a prone position with his .22 aimed and ready to fire. When the wily old woodchuck stuck his nose up, Tim slowly rose up behind him and got him with a point blank shot through the head! One other time we chased a woodchuck into a small culvert in one of our fields. Tim wanted to see if he could get a kill with his hunter bow and arrow set, and ran to get it. He used the same tactic of waiting just above the culvert and when the woodchuck FINALLY stuck its head out he shot it with the arrow. The hilarious thing was that the target arrow glanced right off its head and it ran away at full “woodchuck speed”! Now THAT was really funny and we were rolling on the ground laughing! We learned that woodchucks must have had harder and thicker head bones than we did! In more recent years, Tim and I used to sit on his deck and take pot shots with high-powered rifles at woodchucks in the north field. I finally abandoned this practice because the loud noise scared all my horses and I didn’t feel comfortable going to a gun store to see if I could get a silencer for a .30 “ought” 6 rifle and explain to the clerk that I needed it to shoot woodchucks! Besides, with the pitiful price of soybeans these days, we might as well let them eat their suppers in peace!