FREDERICTON -- A New Brunswick man who dug up a pair of live Second World War-era mortar shells says he'll be a bit more careful the next time he goes treasure hunting with his metal detector.

Hollis Justason, from St. George, has quite a story to tell, but knows it could have had a tragic ending.

"I thought they must have been dummy rounds or practice rounds. It didn't really cross my mind that they would be live rounds," he said.

Justason and a friend found the mortars last Thursday while cutting through a blueberry field in Charlotte County. For safety reasons he won't give the exact location.

That part of New Brunswick was home to a military training base and a Royal Canadian Air Force training base during the 1940s.

The two men had been looking for coins and other artifacts around an old log cabin site and were walking back to their truck when the metal detector alerted them to something metallic just below the surface of the field.

"A friend of mine who was with me picked up a signal and he dug up a mortar tail from a two inch mortar. So we started looking around and found a few of those," Justason said.

He says they then found two complete mortars -- one that was badly rusted and another that still had its markings in place.

"That one was in pretty good shape, colour-wise and numbers and stuff. So thinking that these are duds we decided to take them home and do a little research on them."

Justason said he was cleaning the mortar shells when his father-in-law called.

The father-in-law -- who had been in the military -- advised him to call the RCMP, who in turn called the bomb squad at CFB Gagetown, about 100 km to the north.

He says the bomb experts determined the mortars were high explosives and were still live. They were taken away to be detonated.

Justason says he's surprised the mortars -- that were only a few centimetres below the surface -- had survived so long.

"These are only two inches down in a blueberry field. They burn blueberry fields every couple of years to make the berries grow better. I'd be a little nervous about that," he said.

Justason is still quite matter-of-fact about the incident, but says he does realize now that his story could have had a tragic ending.

"I guess ignorance is bliss and didn't really cross my mind that being over 70 years old that they could still be active. Obviously the one that I found that was intact had been fired because it was stuck into the ground," he said.

Justason said you never know what the metal detector has found until you dig it up, but he plans to be a bit more cautious in the future.

"In the future if I ever did find something like that, I would just tag it with a ribbon, call the authorities and leave it where it lays," he said.