Betty Fussell, Learning to Hunt at 82

Award-winning food writer Betty Fussell has a fantastic essay in the most recent New York Times magazine about going hunting for deer for the first time at the age of 82.

I met Betty last month in New York City when she showed up for my Slow Food NYC workshop on deer hunting. She took a lot of notes, asked intelligent questions and said very kind things to me afterward. I can also recommend her recent book, 'Raising Steaks,' which is an excellent history of the beef steak in American cuisine. Betty knows meat in and out.

There is no reason why people can't learn how to hunt at any age, no matter how advanced. My first deer hunting class had a student in his mid 70's who turned out to be as keen a shot and as quick a learner as anyone else in the group.
[Photo by Norman Jean Roy]

Choosing a First Deer Rifle - The Cartridge

I get a lot of questions about what people should purchase as a first deer rifle. There is no one answer that is right for everyone. During the classes that I teach, we take everyone to a shooting range and let them try a variety of rifles. Bolt actions, lever actions, sometimes some single-shots and semi-automatics as well. All chambered for different cartridges, some with youth-sized stocks and others with extra length. Any given person will find that some of these fit and shoot quite well, while others are a bad ergonomic fit or hit them with too much recoil.

These individual variations mean that I can't cite one rifle that will be perfect for everyone, but I can at least express some of the general conclusions I've come to while helping rather a lot of people go through this process. The first thing which I think needs to be examined is the cartridge that the rifle shoots.

A beginner should hunt deer with a rifle chambered for the most powerful cartridge that she can shoot comfortably (without getting into the serious dangerous game tools). I consider the lighter centerfire cartridges to be more appropriate for advanced hunters. The reason why I say this is that a heavier bullet of larger caliber will tend to do more damage and penetrate farther than a lighter bullet of lesser caliber. With a high-quality bullet designed for deer, the hydrostatic shock of a .30-'06 will destroy more tissue surrounding the actual path of the bullet than, say, a .243 will.

Now I'm not going to say that there are magic bullets that will correct bad aim for you, but I have done enough post-mortems on deer to say with real certainty that a good bullet from a .30-'06 or a hot-loaded 8mm Mauser within 150 yards or so can literally turn the heart into jelly through hydrostatic shock even when it missed by a couple of inches. This is one of the things that sending a bigger piece of lead downrange can do for you. For a beginning deer hunter who may not have either the degree of precision in his aim or the instinctive grasp of precise anatomy that a more experienced hunter has gained, that can be the difference between a dead deer and a wounded deer that runs half a mile before dying and may never be found.

Cartridges such as the 7mm-08 and the .243 can kill deer. No question there. I have carried a 7mm-08 into the field many times, although I have also passed up shots with that 7mm-08 that I would have taken with a more powerful rifle on account of a difficult angle requiring deeper penetration to reach the heart and lungs than I thought the 7mm bullet capable of reliably accomplishing.

I believe that deer cartridges up to the .30-'06 in caliber and power generally increase in versatility as you go up. A 7mm-08 can do more things than a .243 can, and a .308 can do a little more than a 7mm-08. The .30-'06 trumps them all.

Beyond the power of the .30-'06, I think that for most people the increase in recoil and muzzle blast begins to adversely affect them enough that its best to avoid such things unless one is also going to be hunting much larger prey with the same rifle. The .300 Winchester Magnum and the other fast or magnum .30s and .33s are arguably part of a whole other class.

Many expert hunters and marksmen trumpet light deer cartridges like the 7mm-08 or the various 6mm options as ideal for whitetails. They often say that they really don't need anything heavier than that to kill something the size of a whitetail deer quickly and as humanely as possible. And you know what? They are right. They don't need anything heavier. A beginner might.

I am not suggesting that new hunters should grit their teeth and shoot whitetails through punishing recoil that affects their shooting skill. What I am saying is that they will do best to shoot a bunch of different rifles and cartridges and find out how heavy they can go before that discomfort appears.

There is far more that I could write about picking out a rifle. Stock fit, action type, barrel length, etc. The cartridge that the rifle shoots is only part of that overall decision. I'll leave it right here for now and at some point we'll pick this up again and look at some of these other issues in future articles.


[Photo used courtesy of John Athayde under Creative Commons license. This photo shows Paul Fritz and myself introducing a class to various hunting rifles]

Something New Under the Sun

This morning I was thinking about some of the things I've learned in the course of the starling project thus far. The different ways that starlings respond to structure versus doves and other birds, and techniques I've discovered like running over to get under the trajectory of a flock that passed by out of range in order to wait for the inevitable stragglers spread out over several miles.

Then I started thinking about how this same learning curve is going to play out with most of the other species that I'm going to hunt for 'Eating Aliens.' I suddenly realized something really, really awesome.

I get to write articles and chapters over this next year about things that no outdoor writer has ever covered before. I have read more articles than I can even remember about getting ready for dove season or how to place a tree stand in mixed hardwoods and pines for whitetails. Don't get me wrong - I keep reading it all. But when I go back and read such articles from 10 years ago, 20 years ago and 50 years ago I find that not all that much has changed.

The great challenge of outdoors and gun writers today is writing about more or less the same damn things that Peter Capstick and Elmer Keith did, without it being too obvious that you're re-treading the same ground over and over again. The 'Eating Aliens' project is a means of breaking out of that situation. When I publish that chapter about how to hunt starlings, it will probably be the first time that anyone has written a serious and studied piece about shotgunning for starlings. New ground at last!

This is where I think that outdoor writing should go for a while in order to remain interesting. I'm not saying that Field & Stream should stop printing articles about deer and turkeys. I just think that both in terms of good ecology and in terms of coming up with some fresh material it is time to start looking at 'trash fish' and invasive species as potential prey that are worthy of serious examination and development of new hunting and fishing techniques.

April Deer Hunting Class is Scheduled

I would like to announce what is probably my final 'deer hunting for locavores' class that will be open to the general public until this fall and perhaps indefinitely (depending on how my various obligations shape up). This is a two day course running on April 10th & 11th.

After April I will still be continuing to offer the course most likely through group bookings only. For example, a New York City paleo diet group is coming down for a class in May. I will also be doing a series of 3 hour workshops to benefit Slow Food chapters in cities around the US and Canada. Anyone representing such a group or Slow Food chapter is encouraged to email me.

As covered by the New York Times in their print edition, documented in a video on their web edition, and recently reviewed by We Love DC. The class will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia with field trips to points nearby. If you're on the East coast, note that Amtrak runs straight from all of the major cities into Charlottesville with no changing trains.

On Saturday morning we will start out in the classroom covering natural history, anatomy, deer evolution and gun safety. That afternoon a shuttle van will take everyone out to a shooting range. At the range you'll all have the opportunity to try out a variety of deer rifles and cartridges in order to make an educated decision about what you'd want to hunt with. Another experienced hunter and marksman will assist me in teaching basic riflery skills to those with zero to minimal experience and our goal will be to help everyone find out what is the longest shot that they can safely manage on a target the size of a deer's vitals. A catered lunch will be provided at the range.

Sunday will be a similar mixture of classroom time and field trips. I've secured a deer for us from a farm about 2 hours away and arranged for someone to drive there to shoot it, load it into a truck on ice, and bring it to our field dressing location about 15 minutes outside of Charlottesville (a shuttle is provided). Everyone will have the opportunity to try their hand at helping with gutting, skinning and quartering.

Final butchering and some cooking will take place at a commercial kitchen only a few blocks from our classroom. You'll learn how to turn the deer that we dressed that day into meal-sized packages like something that would come from a grocery store. We'll be cooking as we go, making dinner and drinking wines that pair well with venison. The remaining meat will be donated to a local homeless shelter.

Enrollment is limited to 10 students. The fee for the complete course is $380. I regret that I've had to raise the price since the first course, but obtaining a fresh deer and transporting it immediately to our site has added significant cost and logistical complexity. There's just no other way to guarantee a deer for the class to work on.

The fine print:

A 25% deposit is required in order to reserve a spot ($95). This can be made via Paypal, or if you give me your word that you have put a check in the mail then I'll hold the space for you. That deposit is fully refundable for cancellations up to a week before the course starts. After Feb. 13th I will refund the deposit if the vacant spot is filled by someone else. Payment of the balance is due by the start of class on February 20th and can be made through Paypal or mailing a check, or you are welcome to bring the payment with you to the class in person. If an insufficient number of people have signed up by April 3rd then I reserve the right to cancel the class with full refunds given.

If interested, please contact me at jack.landers@gmail.com

Photos used courtesy of John Athayde via Creative Commons.

Project Starling: Honing My Technique

Like so many other things, it turns out that my best place to hunt starlings is literally in my own yard. Regular readers of this blog are of course familiar with my desire to develop recipes for invasive European starlings in order to encourage people to hunt and eat them, with the side effect of helping to protect our indigenous songbirds.

I've been having my best luck during the last 2 hours before dusk. This starling hunting business is like dove hunting on speed. I might be sitting there for 20 minutes with nothing whatsoever going on and then suddenly a squadron of 40 or 50 birds will zoom in. This can happen with doves, but with the starlings you can have a whole string of these groups of between 4 and 400 all spread out along a few miles and coming in right after each other in spurts.

The birds come in very fast and usually a bit high. 20 yards is the closest passing shot I've had presented thus far. When I say 'fast,' I mean really, really fast. I've watched a group of starlings overtake a dove that happened to be going the same direction. They also seem to meander in their flight path more often than doves do. Sudden shifts of the whole group to the right or left are frequent.

As in many other types of bird hunting, choosing one and keeping track of it is essential. In these large flocks with their sudden shifts I find that it is harder to swing on and lead a single bird than it is with geese or doves.

Altogether, I am finding that this is very challenging and interesting shooting. Yesterday was especially interesting due to the high winds that we experienced. And by 'interesting' I mean 'damned near impossible to figure out my lead on passing shots.'

Thus far I have been using plain-Jane Remington 12 gauge field loads loaded with # 7.5 shot. However, I believe that as soon as I scrape up the cash to buy some more ammunition I will switch to something along the lines of Federal magnums in either #6 or 7.5 shot. I find that the inexpensive field loads do well enough on doves but these starlings usually seem to be moving a bit higher and a bit faster and that bit of extra oomph from a higher velocity round would be worth the additional recoil to me.

As to an appropriate choke for starlings, I haven't the faintest idea. My only 12 gauge (and I really don't see a 20 gauges being the right tool for this job) has a fixed modified choke, meaning that its up to me to find a way of getting just about everything done with a modified choke.

Meanwhile, the occupants of the sole neighboring house that has a good view of my meadow must think I am out of my gourd. Day after day, there I am standing around in the middle of this field with a shotgun my hands at a time when nothing anyone thinks of as a game bird is in season. They pull up in their white minivan and get out of the vehicle and give me a good long stare before hustling inside and away from the gun-wielding lunatic in the meadow.

Last Saturday, the gentleman from next door got close enough to possibly inquire as to what was going on. I was sitting on a log with a shotgun in my hands and had the new issue of Saveur on my lap, alternating between scanning the sky and reading about a recipe for Northern fried chicken and wondering whether it could be used with geese; when my wife walked out to ask me to entertain our 3 year old.

"Not now - I'm working," I called out to her.

The gentleman from next door turned around immediately.

I'd go knock on their door and generously offer them a few starlings for dinner, but somehow I don't think that would help things.


[Photo used courtesy of Goingslo via Flickr under Creative Commons license.]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goingslo/ / CC BY 2.0

What to Eat on St. Patrick's Day

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day and many of us will be gorging ourselves on green beer, cabbage and potatoes. This is all well and good but I would like to suggest a meal more appropriate to the experience of Irish immigrants in America.

A large wave of Irish immigrants came to the United States to escape the great famine in the middle of the 1800's. About a million people died during the famine while another million or so left Ireland. The famine was caused by several things. Best known is the potato blight, which ravaged the primary source of food for about a third of the Irish. But the problem was primarily a social one.

Irish Catholics had been forced by British law through two centuries to live only in rural areas. Until the early 1800's they were, literally, slaves. Prohibited by law from being educated, living within 5 miles of a town, or entering any profession other than farming. The land that they farmed was, almost entirely, owned by the English and managed according to the priorities of landlords rather than the people doing the work.

By the 1840's pretty much all of the agricultural land in Ireland was doing one of two things. The good land was used as pasture to raise beef and some grain for export to England. The cost of this beef and grain was out of reach for Irish Catholics. The poor land with bad soil, being good for nothing else, was being used to grow potatoes for food. When the blight hit the potatoes the Irish had nothing else to eat. The sensible thing would have been to immediately start using some of the grazing land to plant other crops. But no, Britain essentially just let the Irish starve.

People died of malnutrition even as they were surrounded by plenty. Food was still being exported from Ireland. Streams and ponds were full of fish and forests and fields full of deer, but Irish Catholics had no legal right to hunt or fish. Anyone who did so was called a poacher. Poaching 'the King's deer' technically earned the poacher a death sentence, although in practice the sentence would often be commuted to either a long prison term or transportation to Australia.

For the million or so Irish who came to America, a whole new set of opportunities was available. At the time and today, any law-abiding man or woman may obtain a hunting license for a small fee and legally hunt on good public land made available for this purpose. This is one of the truly remarkable distinctions between America and most of Europe. Hunting is not the exclusive province of the wealthy. It seems like it should be a no-brainer that poor, starving, rural people should be able to hunt for food but somehow America is one of the very few western countries that so readily extends this right.

My ancestor, Henry Cassidy, was born in County Donegal, Ireland towards the end of the great famine and immigrated to Woburn, Massachusetts. He did not have the right to to feed himself off of the land in the country of his birth. But I do and I have. Many is the time when I literally did not have enough money to both pay the mortgage and buy groceries. I would have had to choose between keeping a roof over my head and feeding my family. The way that I have survived these periodic crises is by hunting for food. Once the deer is on the ground, I know for certain that no matter what else goes wrong in life, we will not starve.

This is a magnificent right that I enjoy. I have a right to hunt and I have a Constitutional right to possess the arms that are needed to do so. These legal rights have been the difference between the experience of my ancestors starving in Ireland and my own family eating well even when we're out of heating oil and the car won't start.

For this reason, I will eat venison on Saint Patrick's Day. I will revel in my lawfully killed wild meat. I am contemplating a large, covered roast cooked slowly in a broth of root vegetables for 4 or 5 hours. Certainly this will be paired with a pint of stout porter, Guiness or otherwise. I suspect that Henry Cassidy would be pleased to see the damned potatoes and cabbage left off of the menu.

Legacy Venison Recipes Are Drivel

I must confess a bias that I have developed when reading recipes for venison in particular and wild meat in general. If I see the words 'juniper berry' in the list of ingredients then I run screaming.

Juniper berry has long been utilized in recipes for venison because it is helpful in covering up the flavor of gamy meat. 'Gaminess' is a word which arguably describes the taste of badly handled and possibly slightly spoiled meat. Many hunters and cooks have convinced themselves and others that wild meat is inherently gamy. This is utter nonsense. If meat tastes gamy then the blame should be placed squarely on the hunter and/or the butcher.

Waiting too long to field dress the meat, failing to cool it down quickly, or allowing bacteria-laden material from the digestive system to contact much of the surface area of the meat will cause a gamy flavor. If people handled beef the way that many hunters handle their venison then cows would taste gamy as well.

The common practices of handling venison in Europe and in the US reflect oral traditions that pre-date both refrigeration and an understanding of what bacteria are. Hanging a whole, often ungutted animal outside in fluctuating temperatures for a week or two will result in spoiled meat. If you like the taste of spoiled meat then have at it. But most of us do not enjoy this taste, which is why so many old recipes for wild game are elaborate means of hiding the delicate funk of roasted e. coli.

We don't need to keep doing this. We don't need to handle our venison like a sack of potatoes. Personally, I quarter all of my deer in the field, stripping all of the meat off within an hour or two of the kill. It goes straight into a cooler and then into the fridge or freezer, resulting in meat that is not unlike lean beef.

If you are handling your meat properly then I say its time to toss out these old legacy recipes and start cooking your venison like something that you actually want to taste. Even some otherwise great chefs have fallen into this trap. Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall is constantly guilty of this. I love everything about his 'Meat' book, except for his chapter on wild game that is right out of the dark ages. Look at this recipe for venison that he wrote a couple of years ago. Not only does he throw the juniper at poor Bambi but he's hitting it with almost 2 pounds of bacon as well. Bacon is the classic 'lets cover up the taste of this meat with something overpowering' ingredient.

Hmm, Hugh. Why is it that you need to cover up the taste of your meat with juniper and bacon? Oh right, because you leave the stuff out to hang and rot on your back porch for a week.

Just walk away from these types of recipes. Roll up your sleeves and start experimenting with venison and other wild meat for what it is, instead of what it was.

[Photo used courtesy of John Athayde through a Creative Commons License]

How Not to Hunt Starlings

I arrived at the Powhatan Wildlife Management Area at around noon last Saturday to hunt starlings. In my company was Bob, my father in law; Tanya, a vegan anthopology student who is finding out what's wrong with us studying us; and Paul Fritz, a gun-tinkering blacksmith who usually serves as our range safety officer for my deer hunting classes. We unloaded the shotguns and packs and waited for the rest of our group.

Scott, a former student of ours (and the first alumnus to get a deer), pulled into the parking lot and walked over to greet the rest of our hunting party. As he approached, we noticed that he had a 9mm handgun on his hip.

Paul cocked his head and spoke. "That 9mm is a little light for starlings, don't you think? What if they all rush you at once?"

"Always remember to save the last round for yourself," I added.

Somehow that pistol ended up back in Scott's car before the hunt began.

I am on a quest to establish the hunting of invasive European starlings as a practice as common as dove hunting in America. In the interest of doing this, I need to bag a bunch of starlings and come up with palatable recipes for them.

My rationale in hunting the Powhatan WMA was that last season's dove fields might still have enough grain on the ground, hidden under the snow since mid-December, that large flocks of starlings would be attracted to the site. What I was looking for were the mega-flocks of thousands of birds that snake across the sky like a biblical plague.

I wanted as many hunters as possible, my logic being that there would be long periods of nothing in the sky followed by the sudden appearances of these massive flocks in a situation where we'd need to put as much shot in the air as possible for a minute or two before they were gone.

The good news is that I was indeed half right. There were in fact the long periods of nothing happening, precisely as I'd predicted. The bad news is that these long periods of nothing happening were punctuated more by a growing sense of hopelessness and failure than by gigantic flocks of starlings per se.

We saw bluebirds, turkey vultures, ducks, sparrows and a lone turkey. Precious few starlings. Still, it was a nice day a-field and I suppose that from an anthropological perspective Tanya got just as much out of it as she would have if we'd have bagged 100 birds. The only actual starling was spotted by the keen eye of Scott, who missed it since he was still new to shotgunning. In retrospect, he'd probably have hit the thing if he'd used the 9mm.

Naturally as we drove off we saw a huge flock of between 3 and 5 thousand birds snake their way directly over our car.

Starlings are everywhere around my office in downtown Charlottesville but shooting at them is frowned upon. In an urban setting I think that traps of some sort could work well and Paul and I intend to do some experiments in that direction. The pursuit of the large swarms of starlings with shotguns is still worthwhile, I think. Better locations for future hunts will probably be agricultural land. Dairy farms where large amounts of feed are spread out in the open on a daily basis for the cows will also tend to attract huge flocks and the farm owners will probably appreciate some help in being rid of them.

I had hoped to be cooking starling meat every night for the rest of this week and obviously this has been a bit of a set-back. Meanwhile, if anyone reading this in central Virginia has a large tract of land with a constant starling problem then I would love to hear from you.

[Photo used courtesy of Midlander1231 under Creative Commons license]

My New Year's Resolution

Its getting to be about time to start working on my New Year's resolution for 2010. Fishing.

I regret to say that I have been a very indifferent, uncommitted fisherman. Last year I caught some really tremendous back crappie with my kids (just shy of citation status, thank you), a few eating-size large mouth bass and some bluegill here and there. Ho hum.

My intent this year is to make fishing a serious part of my household protein supply. In order to accomplish that I need to do three things:

- Spend more time fishing. This will involve finding closer places to fish. Possibly spots that are more or less along my daily commute home from work. In warm weather I should be stopping for 20 or 30 minutes of fishing on my way home from work several days each week. I'm already using online satellite maps in tandem with DGIF's website to identify potential fishing spots that I can hit on my way home on a regular basis this summer.

- Get better at it. Perhaps my life-long habit of using $19 rod and reel combos or more frequently a piece of stray line tied to the end of a stick with a home-made lure ought to be broken. Perhaps I should actually read more of the fishing articles in Field and Stream instead of skipping right past them on my way to the hunting stuff.

- Target 'trash' fish. There is a ton of competition in public fishing areas for bass and crappie. But you know how many people are out there fishing for black bullhead? Nobody. Personally, I think that a lot of 'trash fish' taste fine and have found that most fishermen who pooh-pooh carp and bullhead and the like have either never bothered to actually taste them, or never looked into what an appropriate recipe might be. I will happily eat gar, pickerel, carp, alewives or whatever.

Note that more people need to be eating what they catch. This catch-and-release business has gone too far, especially in regard to fish that are regularly stocked. One of the most common problems in ponds in the Eastern US is scads of dwarfed bluegill and sunfish. People catch them and throw them back and the result is hundreds and hundreds of stunted little unhealthy bluegill that are effectively dividing a fixed volume of food among too many fish. Take some of those fish out of the system and the remaining fish will reach larger sizes and have healthier bodies.

In publicly stocked lakes, if the fish is within the legal limits to keep it then please take it home and eat it. We are not going to run out of large mouth bass. Millions are stocked every year. They're good. Just eat them.

Another Book Is In the Works

Long-time readers probably know that I've written a book, provisionally titled 'Deer Hunting for Locavores,' which my wonderful book agent, Angela Miller, is just now about to start offering to publishers. What I don't believe that I have mentioned on this blog before is that I've already started my second book. This one is going to be ever so much fun to research and write.

The working title is 'Eating Aliens.' My new book is about dealing with the problem of invasive alien species in North America by hunting and eating them. Each chapter tackles a different invasive species, explaining how the thing got here in the first place and what its effect has been on the ecosystem. Then I will hunt, kill, cook and eat each species. In some cases I will be working with professional chefs to develop new recipes for some of these things. That recipe part is important, because you can't just open 'The Joy of Cooking' to the section on Nile monitor lizards.

This book is going to be a blast to write. I'm already 3 chapters in and having fun before I've even gotten to the travel part. This Saturday I have put together a hunt for European starlings involving myself, 4 other hunters, plus an anthropology student who seems to be studying me, and Sandy Hausman, the Charlottesville bureau chief of our regional NPR affiliate, WVTF. The goal is to bag as many of the invasive birds as possible in order to experiment with the meat alongside chef Tomas Rahal of MAS tapas. Once we have our recipes in order, the intent is to hold a private dinner with each course involving starlings.

Over the course of 2010, I intend to travel to the Missouri River for Asian carp; Florida for reticulated pythons, iguanas and Nile monitor lizards; pigs in California; nutria in Louisiana, etc. 2010 will be a fun year, and hopefully we can get the book on a publisher's schedule in time for 2011 to be just as much fun when the book comes out.

At some point in the next few months, its becoming clear that I'm going to have to get a proper website together rather than just hanging everything right here on a Blogger account. The scope of cool stuff that I and all of these people I'm working with (former students, journalists, filmmakers, chefs, fellow hunters, etc.) has expanded so much more than I've been able to communicate through this admittedly poorly-designed blog. Change is coming, I promise.

[The photo of me is used courtesy of John Athayde via a Creative Commons license]

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.