Four small-game hunting gunshot mishaps in 12 days labeled coincidence

Four people suffered minor gunshot wounds in small-game hunting accidents in 12 days this month. State hunting safety officials say the incidents were coincidental.

In the most recent, a 17-year-old Pennsylvanian was struck by pellets in the mouth and leg on Oct. 12 when his uncle fired at a rabbit. The uncle didn't realize the youth had knelt to scan the undergrowth for the rabbit while hunting in Mayfield Township in Somerset County.

"It's more of a coincidence than anything," said Mike Sawyer, regional safety and vehicle coordinator with the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.

"We could go the rest of this month with the bird hunting thing or the rest of the year hunting birds and not have any more (shooting accidents), so you never know," he said Wednesday. "There certainly isn't anything here to say there is any pattern."

The other mishaps:

• A Mapleton man in his 20s was hit with birdshot in his lower leg and foot on Oct. 10 while pheasant hunting with a friend in a remote area of Aroostook County.

• A 45-year-old Virginia man was struck in the cheek by a pellet that apparently ricocheted off a tree when his friend, a Massachusetts man, fired at a woodcock flushing along the road on which the Virginian was walking.

• A 59-year-old Yarmouth-area man entered underbrush on Oct. 1 on Chebeague Island with his dog and was struck in the chest by a shotgun-shell pellet fired by a friend shooting at a pheasant flushed from bushes.

Each wounded hunter was treated and released from a Maine hospital. Investigations by the Maine Warden Service into the mishaps are continuing.

"The majority of these are really very minor, as far as the injury type, and what we've got is, in some cases, you've got cover involved, where they don't see the other hunter," Sawyer said. "Or, in some cases, they're swinging or shooting on game and you get a stray pellet or something like that."

That's why hunter safety course instructors are using the incidents as educational tools.

"I was at a hunter safety class in Farmington last night and the coordinator there mentioned these instances as a good reminder," Sawyer said.

Maine law requires successful completion of an approved hunting safety course from this or any other state unless the adult hunting license applicant can show proof of having previously held an adult license to hunt with firearms in any year starting with 1976.

According to the department, it provides more than 350 courses per year on hunting with firearms, bow and arrow, and trapping.

Upcoming courses for firearms hunting can be found at http://www.state.me.us/ifw/education/safety/firearm.htm. More than 800 volunteer instructors trained by the department teach these 12-hour courses to an estimated 7,500 students.

Sawyer said people shouldn't assume that apparent hunter safety lapses during small-game seasons will transfer into big-game seasons, which are already under way with moose and bear hunting. Firearms for deer season starts next month.

"Moose hunting's been fine, and bear hunting's been fine," Sawyer said of the lack of big-game mishaps, so far. "I think it would be very difficult to draw any analogy to the big-game season in that sense."

"We see the situations annually — maybe not quite as many or quite as grouped together (as the four mishaps) — but that's the way things go, if you look at motor vehicles or anything like that," he said.

Sawyer said department officials would continue to remind people to be sure of their targets and to make sure — if hunting with partners or in groups — of where the other persons are. The department also will continue to encourage hunters to wear hunter orange, he said.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com