Whad'Ya Know?

This Saturday, January 15th, I will be appearing as a guest on Michael Feldman's Whad'ya Know?, broadcast on National Public Radio on around 270 stations nation-wide. I'll be on at about 11 am, Eastern Standard.

I've been listening to Whad'Ya Know? since I was a kid and its going to be really weird hearing the guy on the radio answer me back. It also happens that I owe a certain debt of inspiration to Michael Feldman. He takes the show on the road regularly and I once saw in an interview that he always reads the local paper for a week prior to doing the show in a new location. You can really hear the effect of that, since he is able to tailor his performance to the local audience.

That sounded like a really good idea to me, which is why I usually do the same thing before traveling anywhere for pleasure or as part of my work on the 'Eating Aliens' project. Its also the reason why I make a point of researching the local invasive species situation before doing an interview with a journalist based elsewhere in the US or around the world. Michael Feldman's habit turned out to be a pretty valuable part of what I do.

[This photo has nothing to do with anything. Its me with a severed iguana tail immediately prior to slicing it up and eating it. The blog entry just looked naked without some sort of picture. Yes, in fact it did taste like chicken.]

'Hunting Deer for Food' Hits Amazon

My first book is now on Amazon! This is really cool for me to see on a computer screen after all of the time and work that has gone into producing the book. Second only to holding a printed copy in my hands, I should think.

I want to point out that this is probably the first book ever published about deer hunting that does not have any antlers on the cover. This was a special request that I made to the nice people at Storey. Not that I have anything against most trophy hunters. Its just that that isn't the topic of this book. The point here is obtaining meat from the wild in an efficient manner.

The book will not actually launch and ship until September. As far as I know, this is the world's first professionally published beginner's guide to hunting deer, written for adults who have never hunted anything in their lives. This has been a gaping hole in hunting literature and I really do think that lack of such a book has been a serious obstacle to recruiting new deer hunters.

Meanwhile my new book, 'Eating Aliens,' is being offered to publishers starting this week. The wonderful people at Storey get first look at it, of course. The proposal and sample chapters are available by request through my agent, Angela Miller of The Miller Agency. Interested editors and publishers can contact her at info@milleragency.net.

The Story So Far

For those of you just now joining us and looking for things to do with hunting and invasive species, I'll make it easy for you. While I have written about many different things here over the last five years, I have been very interested in hunting and eating invasive species during this past year. Here are a few of the greatest recent hits from this blog, on or close to the topic of invasive species. The order has nothing to do with relative quality. I'm just going from the most recent on back.

1. Lionfish on Eleuthera, Bahamas. Lionfish are all over the Caribbean, unfortunately. I went all the way to Eleuthera to hunt them because I wanted to work with Mojo White, who is probably the most passionate lionfish hunter in the world.

2. Green Iguanas on Big Pine Key, Florida. I know, they make nice pets and are very charismatic. But right next door is Bahia Honda Key, where the Miami blue butterfly is in danger of extinction in part due to the invasive green iguanas that are eating the primary food source of the butterflies.

3. Black, spiny-tailed iguanas on Gasparilla Island, Florida. In addition to that blog entry, you can find the short TV teaser/pilot right here that was shot at the time.

4. This is something terrible that I did to some geese in order to serve them at an educational event in Brooklyn for Slow Food NYC.

5. Fergus and I keep it old-school. This is us skinning a deer with a chip of obsidian. It is a species that is non-native to the US. Warning: Gory. If that isn't DIY enough, another friend and I build the rifles that we hunt with. For a modest fee, you can too.

6. While my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens,' deals solely with things that have a central nervous system, I'm all in favor of eating invasive plants as well. Here's a 'Cooking With Kudzu' event that I put together for NPR last spring.

7. Shooting starlings is harder than I expected.

8. Zombies are invasive, right?

9. Sasquatch is probably indigenous. Also probably endangered. Sorry.

Another New York Times Write-Up

I almost forgot to point out a nice piece that the New York Times wrote today that includes some bits about yours truly. James Gorman, deputy science editor, has written a good article for the Sunday edition about eating invasive species.

Thus far I seem to be the only person around who is dead serious about actually making a point of killing and eating invasive species. But its nice to see I've got some company out there who is at least thinking in that direction.

Carl Akeley's Grave

There is a lovely piece in the City Room column of the New York Times today that I would like to direct your attention to. This regards the gorilla diorama at the American Museum of Natural History. A curator, Stephen Quinn, recently visited the exact spot in the Congo which is depicted in that diorama, built in the early 20th century.

What isn't mentioned in the Times' piece is the fact that (at least according to Peter Capstick) this diorama also happens to depict the exact spot where Carl Akeley was buried after dying of a fever during his final expedition to Africa.

Carl Akeley was an amazing man. He is best remembered as the father of modern taxidermy, but he was also an accomplished naturalist and inventor. Not for nothing was the 'Roosevelt African Hall' renamed the 'Akeley African Hall.' When Teddy Roosevelt gets bumped aside for someone then you'd better believe that it was someone worth paying attention to.

I first became aware of Akeley when I read Peter Capstick's 'Death in A Lonely Land,' which is not Capstick's best book but is still very good. You can find whatever Google Books lets you see of the chapter on Akeley here. This is a guy who once killed a leopard with his bare hands, invented shotcrete, wrote a bunch of good books, inspired the founding of the first national park in Africa, and was probably the world's first advocate for the protection of gorillas. He did all of this and more with only three years of formal schooling.

I'm not even sure whether Akeley's grave remains marked. In 1963, George B. Schaller visited the site. Writing of the visit in his book, 'The Year of the Gorilla' he observed: "The Kabara meadow was little changed. The marker on Carl Akeley's grave was buckled and shattered, apparently by the ponderous foot of an elephant."

Assuming that Akeley's marker was not repaired or maintained since that time, I suppose that Stephen Quinn of the American Museum might very well have been standing right on top of it without knowing what was under him.

Africa is filled with the graves, marked and otherwise, of the various intrepid adventurers who met their ends there. Reading about some of the things that Akeley got into, like being gored by an elephant and left for dead by his porters, gives me the overwhelming sense that nothing I have done thus far as a hunter, conservationist or adventurer really amounts to a hill of beans. Which it really doesn't, compared with his ilk. The fact that he died of something so undramatic as a fever seems to undersell the astounding risks that this man took for his work as a naturalist and conservationist.


[This photo is, I believe, in the public domain. He looks very sour here, but you would look sour as well if you had gotten your arm chewed to shreds by a leopard and had an elephant tusk you straight through the torso and on into the ground.]