When Wendell Diller goes crow hunting, he can pick off a bunch of birds and the rest of the flock never knows what happened. That's because Diller has the quietest shotgun around thanks to its extra-long 7-ft. barrel.

The new-style shotgun barrel meets all U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms requirements. Diller says it's much more quiet -- and much more accurate -- than anything on the market.

He says he could have made the barrel even longer, but 7 ft. was all he could fit into his hunting vehicle, a 1988 Plymouth Volare wagon chugging along toward its 350,000th mile.

The shotgun shoots normal 3-in. shells, but Diller loads his own, going up two sizes in steel shot and adjusting the powder load so he can achieve shot velocity of 900 to 1,000 feet per second.

When he pulls the trigger, he still gets a kick. But instead of a normal shotgun blast, all you hear is a soft "poof" that causes minimal disturbance to people or animals.

Diller's built two long barreled shotguns so far and friends have built two more. No two are alike but he thinks a combination of steel and aluminum wrapped in fiberglass, similar to Winchester's Win-Lite shotgun barrel, will probably be the best bet for manufacturing long barrels that are light enough to handle. For liability reasons he's not anxious to try to tell people how he made his barrels, but, he says, "a trained gunsmith can probably figure it out."

To reduce noise, his barrel is vented with a series of 1/16-in. drilled holes, located toward the muzzle. The number and placement of the vents is proprietary information. He's applied for a patent on the design and is working with arms makers who want to produce long barreled guns.

"The vents release gases slowly from the barrel, so you don't have the one big shock wave when they escape the muzzle," he explains. Diller doesn't like to call his long barrel a silencer. A silencer has ports that release gases into another chamber, while his barrel vents gases into the atmosphere. He wants no conflict with BATF over this.

The longer barrel and larger shot in the shell makes Diller's shotgun shoot differently than typical shotguns. "You need to lead a moving target a little more with this," he says.

To help shooters learn to use the longer-barreled guns, Diller has developed shotgun shell tracers. He recently applied for a patent on these, too. "We use a sort of shuttlecock made of a bright colored plastic to replace the wadding in the shell. That lets us follow the trajectory of the shot and see how far in front or behind the target we are," he says. "It really helps in shooting skeet or clay pigeons."

Diller says he hopes to see both the long barrels and the tracer shells on the market sometime soon, but has no idea what either might cost.