HAMMANA, Lebanon — On a Saturday in November, a small group of boys in matching royal blue shirts, the uniform of the Scouts of Lebanon, gathered beside their “hide-out”: a small pine forest on the edge of town. Their mission: Collect as many spent shotgun shells as they could find in the next five minutes.

The task had been assigned to them by two volunteers from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon, a conservation organization focused on protecting birds.

Hunting is ubiquitous in Lebanon, which has the 11th-highest rate of small-arms ownership in the world. In a show of hands, nine of the scouts had claimed to own a gun. Two, both 12 years old, said they were allowed to hunt, and 10 more said they wished they were. Angelo, 16, was not among them.

“Some say it’s a sport, but it’s not, it’s a waste of time,” he said. There were other things you could be doing with the hours spent waiting for birds, he added.