Habits of a Successful Locavore Hunter

Jacket in hand, I slipped discreetly out the back door of my parents' house last Saturday and left my grandmother's 92nd birthday party behind. I popped the trunk of my car open and picked up my 12 gauge pump-action Mossberg shotgun with a bandolier of shells. A walk up and down the long driveway would only take a few minutes and might yield a few starlings.

The driveway runs over a tall earthen dam that holds back a pond of a few acres. As I approached this dam I saw 4 or 5 Canada geese on the water. On the last day of goose season.

I swapped out the #7 field loads in my shotgun for #2 steel shot that I keep in my bandolier for exactly this sort of thing.

Considering that there are tall trees surrounding most of the pond's perimeter, as well as the fact that there was little to no wind at that moment, I figured that the geese would have to take off flying towards the tree-less dam. I walked towards the pond and the geese swam away. They were nervous, but I wanted them more nervous. I wanted them to take to the air and head for the next pond down the hill.

Finally, as I stood beside the water they took off exactly the way I'd expected them to. I swung on to the lead bird and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. Oops. I flipped the safety off and swung on to the last goose. The trigger broke properly this time. The bird tumbled out of the sky and into the water.

10 minutes and a hurried canoe portage later, I looked at the enormous goose on the ground in front of me. Its webbed feet were rough, black and leathery to the touch. They had tiny, sharp toenails. I had never noticed that geese had toenails before.

The bird dressed out to about 10 or 11 pounds. We'll probably be eating it for the next week. I doubt that I missed more than about 20 minutes of the party before sitting back down in the living room with little more than a few clumps of down on my boots to betray what I'd been up to.

That goose hunt wasn't a big expedition. It was a few minutes of walking around with a shotgun and a variety of loads, ready to take whatever was in season and edible. Most of my hunting actually consists of hunts between 10 and 30 minutes. This is a big part of my success as a part-time subsistence hunter. I haven't bought meat at a grocery store for my family of 4 since last summer.

I have come to believe that unless you have the opportunity to hunt something really big that will feed you for a long time (such as elk or bison), the key to feeding yourself dependably with wild meat is habit. Hunting and generally spending time outside needs to be a regular habit that is practiced almost reflexively. Even indoors, if you are sitting in front of a window then some part of your brain should be pouncing on a flicker of movement behind a tree or the sillouette of a flock of birds against the clouds. Regular, short hunts will not only provide more opportunities to get food but they will also hone your instincts as a predator in a way that makes you more effective on the longer hunts.

So long as anything edible is in season, I take a shotgun and maybe a .22 or a deer rifle in my trunk when I'm going to be somewhere that one could legally hunt. Outside of hunting seasons I keep a fishing rod in the trunk at all times. Even if I can only slip away for 10 minutes I could come back with a few doves, a bass, a turkey, or in this most recent case a goose.

The habit eventually bears fruit. Right now I've got a fridge and freezer full of venison, wild turkey, doves, goose and probably some squirrel meat stashed somewhere. We're going to be in good shape for a couple of months with what's on hand. Spring turkey season is coming up in April and we'll try to top the freezer off with a few more birds. Fishing and starlings should keep some protein trickling in through the summer, plus there's the 2 weeks of squirrel season in June. We might have a bit of a shortage by the end of August but geese and doves are back in season in September and then I'm really back in business.

Short, opportunistic hunts don't work for everyone. It helps to live out in the country where one can spend 10 minutes in the front yard with a shotgun or rifle before commuting to work. If you do live in such a situation then you'll find that this approach disrupts the rest of your life a lot less than the 'lunar expedition' approach to hunting.

The other habit that has helped me get to this point of near-self-sufficiency is becoming less picky about weird food. Unless you come from a family of hunters (which I did not), you are not going to be accustomed to eating doves, geese or squirrels. Well, get over it. They all taste fine. Shot shells are cheap and you're passing up a whole lot of almost free food if you don't make the effort to learn how to cook these things in a way that will be palatable to you.

In summary, the following points are the keys to ditching factory-farmed meat in favor of the DIY approach:

- Lots of small, opportunistic hunts can be as good or better than a few big ones.

- Be a generalist. Always know what is in season and go out prepared to take any opportunity presented to you. This can mean having multiple types of ammunition on hand, or it can even mean complimenting your deer rifle with a .22 target pistol on your hip to take smaller game.

- Gut promptly and learn to butcher everything yourself. Move beyond the Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose approach to butchering and cooking the birds. Go ahead and turn it into more casual food that doesn't need to be a big all-day cooking event. Make fried turkey using a fried chicken recipe (this works for rabbits and squirrels, too) or turkey nuggets, turkey stir-fry, etc. Carve the goose up and use it for lunch meat. Run pretty much anything through a meat grinder and put it in pasta sauce or tacos.