Leprosy is Bad, M'Kay?

The New York Times today reports on a study showing that a small number of humans in the US probably contract leprosy every year from contact with armadillos. This is absolutely something that locavore and invasivore hunters should be aware of. We tend to eat things that most people don't and need to stay on top of wildlife issues like this.

However, I don't think that this study really changes anything. The fact that armadillos near the Gulf of Mexico carry leprosy has been well-known and studied for decades. It is nice to have some figures about transmission to humans, but informed hunters in Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi should have been avoiding contact with armadillos in the first place.

The bacteria that cause leprosy do not survive for long outside of a host. Among humans the disease is normally transmitted through exhaled droplets in the air during close contact with other humans. Armadillos are not particularly social animals, so transmission tends to take place through bacteria on the soil at the entrances to burrows. Soil conditions near the Gulf of Mexico happen to allow the bacteria to survive long enough for regular transmission.

Farther away from the Gulf, it just isn't really much of an issue. Eating armadillos in Georgia, the Carolinas or in Colrado poses no risk presently of contracting leprosy. Good data on this is available from the Journal of Wildlife Diseases. There have been a very few cases of leprosy found farther away from the Gulf, but these instances are probably individuals that originated close to the Gulf and later dispersed a long way inland. Transmission from those relocated individuals to other armadillos probably isn't happening, but the situation needs to be monitored and studied regularly to be certain.

Personally, I will have no qualms about eating armadillos from the mid-Atlantic US for the next few years. Just in case, I'll continue to wear latex gloves while butchering them and I will cook the meat thoroughly. And if I was to somehow contract leprosy, I'd take a course of free antibiotics and that would be that. Worrying right now about a disease among armadillos in North Carolina because of cases over 600 miles away just doesn't make any sense. In ten or twenty years, maybe we could have a problem. For now its not going to stop me from eating them in the right places.

[Photo used courtesy of Lauren Mitchell under Creative Commons License 2.0]

Persistence Hunting: Beyond the Running

There is a great article by Charles Bethea in Outside magazine about a group of marathoners who tried using persistence hunting to take down a pronghorn recently. I really recommend the piece.

My father, Harry Landers, is a serious competitive marathon runner. He has run Boston three times, New York several times, and he usually places very well for his age group. He's even won some races. A few years ago I showed him some video (from the last episode of David Attenborough's excellent 'Life of Mammals) of a group of Bushmen (or 'San', as they are also called. Some people in Africa consider 'Bushmen' to be a derogatory name but few readers would likely recognize any other term for them) in the Khalahari desert running down a kudu on foot. I was hoping to interest him in getting a pronghorn tag and hitting the badlands, but its just not his cup of tea. I still couldn't get the idea of running prey down on foot out of my head.

Then last fall I had the pleasure of hunting feral pigs with Daniel Gentry in Georgia. I found that the farm we were hunting was also riddled with armadillos and I wanted to add one more invasive species to my list of things hunted and eaten. The pigs in that area tended to disappear for hours at the sound of a gunshot, so we didn't dare to shoot an armadillo for fear of ruining our odds at the main attraction.

Our solution was to run the cute little buggers down on foot. Our second attempt on our second night out was successful. We spotted the pale armored blob in the beam of a flashlight, handed the rifle off to my father-in-law, and took off after it. Flanking it like a pair of wolves after an elk, we worked to simultaneously tire the animal out and to keep it from exiting the field and disappearing into the thick surrounding brush and woods.

It was like a game of soccer with a ball that moves on its own. Absolutely some of the most thrilling hunting I have ever done, probably owing to the fact that I was connecting myself to what was probably the first, aboriginal human hunting experience.

I succeeded on the second night because I had realized what I did wrong on the first chase. On our first chase I hesitated as I closed in. There was that moment of not being sure what exactly to do if I got right onto the armadillo. And in that moment the animal got away. On the second night I had considered that and I approached the chase mentally with the same frame of mind with which I usually hunt deer on my own. That frame of mind being that I have to eat, that my family will go hungry if I do not kill something, and that I must embrace and even crave the act of the kill in order to provide them with food.

This has been literally true many times that I have hunted deer. I had no money for groceries and a family to feed. The instinct that this develops is one that does not hesitate. That is the difference between winning or losing.

With a great leap, I threw myself through the air and landed with one foot on the poor armadillo's tail. In a flash I drew a long knife from the sheath on my belt and stabbed it in hard and quick into the gap in the armor at the base of the armadillo's neck, cutting the spine and killing it instantly. No real hesitation. Figuring out how to butcher it afterward was a whole other problem, but I had a dead armadillo in front of me (thanks also to Daniel's quick reflexes and good instincts for keeping the prey in the cattle field).

This is what most of the marathoners described in Outside's article seem to be missing. The Kenyon, Andrew Musuva, had what it took. He appears to have grown up in a situation where he had to kill or starve. But the others didn't.

Running for a long time and wearing down the prey is a big part of persistence hunting. But that isn't all of it. Successful persistence hunters in America are going to need more than excellent marathon times. Young lions and cheetahs grow up watching hundreds of stalks and chases, mostly unsuccessful, before they need to start succeeding themselves. This gives them a keen understanding of how a given animal will react to varying terrain, weather, wind direction, and the presence of other animals. These marathoners, or those who follow them, need to put in the observation and practice time to develop those instincts.

They describe their hunt as a success, but it wasn't. At 25 yards they got close, but not quite close enough. There is no way that someone who had only held a pistol once before could make a kill shot at 25 yards with open sights and the heaving, shaking body of someone who has just ran so many miles. Nor would a spear or rock thrown from 25 yards have been likely to hit or finish off the pronghorn.

There was no dead antelope, in spite of all of the work and the $985 they spent on the tag for it. That is a failed hunt, though one that they and others can learn from.

What I think that they lacked was the killing instinct. As Bethea wrote:

Now they're within 25 feet of a panting pronghorn buck. It's starting to seem feasible. "For a second, we don't know what to do," Esposito later recalls.

That second, or seconds, is the difference between success and failure when hunting up close with primitive weapons (or a pistol, for that matter). Esposito is a good runner with the right idea about how to go about this, but he lacked that desperate need for the kill that is the difference between hesitation and success.

It is possible to be successful as a hunter without that killing instinct when one is sitting in an ambush shooting the prey from 150 yards away with a scoped rifle. And don't get me wrong -- I practice that type of hunting as well. I have nothing against it. But in that situation at a distance you've usually got time to pull yourself together, establish your resolve and squeeze the trigger. If it takes five seconds to do that then its probably not an issue.

You can't hesitate for five seconds when its time to close the deal on foot, or with a knife, a net or any other up-close tactic on a prey animal.

I am not a serious runner, but if I was helping to coach a group of runners who wanted to succeed at persistence hunting then I would take them way out in the middle of nowhere for a week with little or no food and send them out hunting with .22 rifles for small game. Within a few days I think that the instinct to close the deal would begin to establish its self.

In spite of the fact that they failed, I am still very impressed that these guys went out and tried to do what they did. For a first attempt it was really excellent and I hope that some of them will keep at it.

[Photograph used courtesy of the BBC]

Eating Aliens in New Orleans

In late May and early June I'm hitting the road again for a week-long trip to New Orleans, a city I've never visited before. Naturally, I'm going there to hunt nutria, muscovy ducks and various other invasive species for my second book, 'Eating Aliens.'

I will be accompanied by Grant Stoddard, who is writing an article about my work for Men's Journal magazine. Grant and I met by chance in Florida last summer when we were both on Gasparilla island to hunt iguanas with George Cera. I had been reading his work in publications like Nerve and the New York Post for years and was really very pleased when he of all people happened to walk into George's living room. I put him in my TV pilot (he's the guy wearing sunglasses, sitting at the table with us drinking a beer and eating iguana tacos at the end) and we kept in touch afterward.

Neither of us seems to know anyone in New Orleans and it would be really great if we could find some locals to meet up with on arrival. Especially anyone who can help us with local knowledge about where to go either in New Orleans or out on the bayou to hunt and fish for invasive species.

[Photo by Robert Leo Smith, Jr. From left to right, that's me, George and Grant]

Thoughts on Turtle Anatomy

We cooked the snapping turtle yesterday with very good results, which I will detail in a later entry. Meanwhile, I have some thoughts on disassembling the turtle that I want to jot down here. Prepare for extensive amateur zoology geekery.

I just don't understand the animal's nervous system. People like to say that reptiles keep moving after they are dead because 'they have a primitive nervous system,' but that doesn't really explain anything. Nor do I think that that the word 'primitive' is necessarily a useful or accurate term.

How does the turtle manage to maintain so many basic functions for hours after its entire brain has been removed? Perhaps the better question is 'why can't mammals do this?' I suppose that the heart keeps beating because nothing has stopped it from beating. It beats of its own volition without need of instructions from the brain in the first place. Digestive functions probably continue for the same reason. The movement of the limbs is harder for me to understand. Is it possible that some degree of the movement of the turtle's limbs under normal conditions is locally automatic in response to direct stimulus?

The three-chambered heart seemed large in proportion to the overall size of the turtle. The lungs were slight enough in their deflated state to overlook. The animal had surprisingly few muscles overall. Legs, tail, neck. Entire groups of muscles that I have always taken for granted in quadrupeds were simply missing. The liver appeared healthy, was of a rich reddish-brown color, and was partially fused to the stomach.

A tremendous amount of water was contained in the turtle. There was a sort of gel-like membrane beneath the skin and surrounding many organs, which I would estimate was at least 90% water. Perhaps this helps the animal to regulate its buoyancy?

The digestive system was strikingly simple and efficient. The stomach consists of a long white tube which reminded me in appearance of the large intestine of some mammals. The contents included five or six crayfish (the more recent of which had been swallowed whole), one dace of about two inches in length, and several small stones. Along the length of the stomach, which was roughly six inches, the state of the contents varied rapidly. The crayfish at the top was in very good condition while everything at the opposite end was mashed into tiny pieces, well-digested, and only identifiable by the tips of the claws. In only a few inches of tissue the organ appears to do very thorough work.

I wonder whether the stones were swallowed deliberately in order to aid digestion or if those were accidentally scooped up with the crayfish?

Fat content was minimal. I would estimate that the turtle had no more than 1 or 2% fat. What little fat was present was of a yellowish-orange color, very soft, and easily removed. I suppose that this low fat content is probably owed to the fact that it is April and the turtle was only recently out of hibernation.

The skin was tough and strong and difficult to remove. I noticed that my knives dulled very quickly while working on the snapping turtle. There are a number of small, hard scutes on the skin of the upper parts of the limbs. They appear to be hardened, raised scales. I do not understand the purpose of these projections. They are too sparse to work as armor and not sharp enough serve as weapons. They are not positioned in such a way that would aid grip during mating. Maybe these are luxury organs that signal overall health to potential mates?

'Hey look, I'm so good at obtaining food that I can spare all of this protein and calcium to make pointless scutes on my skin that don't even do anything. My DNA is awesome! Come get some!'

The scutes on the top of the tail are also strange, resembling the tail of an alligator. These are thick and numerous enough to possibly function as armor.

Altogether this is a very impressive design. The snapping turtle is basically just a very simple eating machine that can move into almost any water that isn't fast-moving and eat pretty much any small thing that moves. It can root along the bottom and dig up food there, or allow its rock-like appearance to facilitate an ambush. The animal has pared away almost everything that is not essential. During bad stretches in terms of climate and environment, it doesn't take much for these animals to eke out a living. The only excess is perhaps those little scutes on the limbs, which would probably be easily reduced or eliminated in response to change.

Its easy to see why turtles have been around for around 220 million years. The body plan just works through good times and bad times. They pre-date most dinosaurs and all snakes and crocodiles. Snapping turtles (specifically their family, Chelydridae) first appear in the fossil record about 70 million years ago. They survived massive extinction events that wiped out most of the other species in the world. Snappers evolved in a world that they shared with T. Rex, plesiosaurs, and the tiny mammals that would eventually evolve into humans. They are impressive, simple, and fascinating animals.


[Photo used courtesy of BlackburnPhoto under Creative Commons license 2.0]

Spots Still Open for April Deer Class

Following some unexpected cancellations, I still have spots open in this last deer hunting class at the end of this month (April 30th-May 1st). I really do need to fill these as soon as possible. If anyone has wanted to take one of these classes, this might be your last chance.

This is certainly the last one of the season and then this fall I will probably be on the road promoting the launch of my book, 'A Beginner's Guide to Hunting Deer for Food.' Depending on what my publisher has me doing, I might not have the time to teach any more of these (although I am working on a teaching guide that I will distribute for free so that other people around the US can start teaching similar courses).

This course is not for any one specific type of person. Women, men, rural, urban, handicapped, white, black, Indian, vegan, carnivore, eighteen years old or eighty. We've had all sorts of people take this course and learn how to be successful hunters. Even if you've never even held a firearm before, you'll probably do just fine.

(Photo used courtesy of Nicholas Hamilton)

On Butchering Turtles

One of my goals for this spring was to successfully hunt some snapping turtles in order to eat them. Assuming that I like the taste and that I can become somewhat competent at butchering and cooking with them, my intent is to include a chapter on snappers in a future book on hunting and eating small game.

I must confess that last week I learned the hard way that it will not do to shoot a snapping turtle on the water. I landed a perfect shot through the head with a 7mm-08 and the creature immediately sank into 20 feet of water. Totally unrecoverable. It looks so easy with the turtle sitting right there with its head sticking out of the water but don't do it because you'll never see it again.

When I finally bagged one, it was when I least expected it. The turtle was standing on a sandbar beside the swimming hole that my children were about to jump into this afternoon. My daughter spotted the animal and I quickly dispatched it with a shot from my .38 special revolver.

Death is a relative term among the reptiles. Three hours after being relieved of its head, the turtle's legs were still moving. This proved to be a serious impediment to orderly butchering. I thought that iguanas and snakes were bad. Snapping turtles just keep going and going and refuse to admit to death. Even after I was completely finished with the butchering, as I packed the claws, head and tail in salt for preservation as scientific curiosities, the damned tail was waving back and forth.

It just goes to show that one really can get used to just about anything. I knew that the animal was not suffering so I disregarded the movement from an emotional standpoint. But it just kept clawing. It is very difficult to butcher an animal that keeps moving about so. The claws kept grabbing and pushing the blade of my knife.

Probably I took more time than really needed to be taken. I wanted to preserve both the shell and the plastron, requiring that both be removed with care. Then I gutted the turtle, skinned the limbs, and stripped the meat. All of this could be done much more quickly by using a long thin knife to slice out the limbs in the first place without bothering to gut it. Salvaging the shell adds considerable time.

There is really no meat to be had between the plastron and the carapace. Yes, there is technically a pair of backstraps laid in against the shell but there are arches of bone fastening them to the carapace and in practice I think that it would be too difficult to remove that meat to merit bothering.

Rather than stripping the meat off of the limbs, next time I think that I will be inclined towards skinning them and cooking them whole, along the lines of buffalo wings.

The shell, I will bury in some topsoil in order that the maggots and beetles may strip off the flesh so that I can display what remains. I removed all four clawed feet, the head and the tail. These I packed in salt to preserve them. Every few days I will shake off all of the salt and re-pack them in fresh salt until they are all dessicated and properly preserved.

Tomorrow evening we will cook the turtle meat for dinner. I will report back on our results.

[Photo used courtesy of Scott Larsen under Creative Commons license]

Product Review: Kodak Play Sport

Perhaps I'm harder on equipment then most people. My hunting rifles are not only dragged through brush, rain and snow when I hunt with them but are also subjected to extensive use by somewhere around 100 hunting students and clients every year. My knives, from the little Swiss army number that lives in my right pants pocket, to the big Buck sheath blade in my pack, are all generally expected to to butcher a deer, gut and scale a fish, and pull regular kitchen duty.

I'm just hell on cameras. I've gone through, I think, three Flip Minos in the last year before switching to the Kodak Play Sport (did you know that the muzzle blast of a 7mm-08 will permanently disable the screen of a Flip Mino? Me neither). I expect an item to do what it says on the box and I certainly do put my gear through the paces. Wherever I travel for 'Eating Aliens' I've made an effort to get lots of good stuff on camera that we can edit into short movies for Youtube during the month running up to the book launch. Before leaving for Eleuthera to hunt lionfish with the great Mojo White I moved from the Flip to Kodak's Play Sport because I wanted something waterproof for underwater photography.

On the first few dives, the Kodak performed more or less all right. Image quality is very, very good. I will give them that. Focus on close objects is non-existent, which I find annoying but at the sub-$200 price I'll accept that.

What I find unacceptable is the fact that on the second salt water dive the camera started picking up a buzz on the audio while underwater. Some little bit of water seemed to be seeping in and causing a short somewhere in the mic or adjacent wiring.

Oh, but it got worse. Recently I've been filming minnows in the streams near my house as they approach spawning. In only about six to twelve inches of water, the screen started fogging up inside. Moisture was making its way into the shell. I got some good video, however. I went back out again and got some really great footage of southern mountain daces engaged in weird pre-spawning behavior, only to find on my return that the interior of the lens had fogged up. Everything I had filmed was clouded over and it was all unusable.

This morning I brought my four year old son out in the woods with me and tried to take a picture of him sitting on a tree. The camera wouldn't even turn on. It appears to have leaked so much that it has finally fried its self.

Less than five hours of underwater use and probably less than ten hours of total use in the last five months. Kodak's Play Sport just crapped out. The camera was never dropped and never went deeper than the ten feet it is supposed to be rated for. I'm not impressed.

Is this typical of Kodak's underwater cameras? I don't know. I've only ever had the one. I'll see what they have to say about honoring the warranty.

Performance out of the water would probably have been fine. This camera would work well for general use on dry land. Maybe even in the rain. But is there any point to that particular piece of equipment any more? The Flip company is being completely shut down in spite of being industry leaders because smart phones with built-in cameras are making most specialized, inexpensive camcorders redundant. I don't personally own a smart phone (we don't even have cell phone reception where I live, let alone 3G and I couldn't get my money's worth) but I can see where things are going.

If stand-alone camcorders are going to have a future in the marketplace then they need to offer features that smartphones don't. The thing about a smart phone is that people tend to be very dependent on them. Taking your Droid on a dive along a coral reef, or on a rockclimbing trip, might not be a great idea. Camcorders need to become more rugged, more shock-resistant, and more water-proof. They need to hold up to abuse that smartphones either won't take or that we aren't willing to risk. Otherwise its hard to imagine that Kodak will have anything for sale that anyone will want to buy five years from now.


[The photo is a typical example of the Play Sport's image quality when used in 5 megapixel still photography mode. I took the photo yesterday.]

Filming Minnows

I really hate modern nature documentaries. Aside from 'Blue Planet' and a very few other exceptions, I have stopped even bothering to watch nature documentaries made in the last eight years or so. 'Reality' TV style production has crept in and completely ruined pretty much the entire genre of documentary film. Everything is dumbed down, sliced and diced and interspersed with computer animations, some expert in a lab, and horrible reenactments.

What I want to watch is just some animals or fish or whatever doing their thing in the wild and maybe hear someone telling me stuff about them. Why is this so hard to find?

At the same time, my car happens to be inoperable for lack of money to fix it and I've been stuck at home for the last month or so without transportation. I am waiting around for a check from my publisher. I happen to have this camera, which happens to be an underwater-capable model that I picked up for my trip to Eleuthera to hunt lionfish last winter. I went for a walk with said camera and found a stream full of minnows. Huh.

Suddenly I find myself making a short documentary film about minnows. Why? Because they are there and because I have an underwater camera. Also because I hate most of the nature documentaries on Netflix and I want to make a movie that I would actually want to watch.

Bridle shiners, rosyside daces and the mountain redbelly dace. Also some non-striped species of shiner that I haven't IDed yet. Minnows. Because they're there.

Also I find the daces to be sort of fascinating. I recall finding a dead one floating down the Little Patuxent River in Maryland as a child, holding it up in the air and studying it carefully in order to research it more carefully at home that evening. The Amazon basin has a different species of teensy little algae-eating catfish in just about about every stream, and the James River watershed seems to have daces almost like the Amazon has catfish. Stumbling across these things right when they are about to spawn has been tremendously good luck.

For the next few days I will be spending all of my mornings with my front end immersed in the freezing waters of swollen mountain streams, filming minnows. Mostly I'm just waiting until the bigger rivers in the area clear up after the massive rains lately, so that I can move on to fishing for smallmouth bass and gar. But I'm honestly hooked on filming the indigenous fishes of Virginia in their natural habitat. If we have a drought this summer that results in the big rivers flowing slow and crystal clear, you will find me with mask, snorkel and camera, looking like a complete idiot while I try to get within narration distance of a smallmouth bass.

This clip is just some of today's raw footage. The finished product will be a lot smoother, with more close-ups and a voice-over.

Brown Trout are an Abomination in Virginia

Hopefully mainstream fishermen (no pun intended) won't be too cross with me over my words about the abomination that is brown trout in Virginia. Ted Strong of the Daily Progress wrote an excellent article about the issue and he quoted me quite a bit.

Are brown trout fun to fish for? Sure. So are rainbow trout and brook trout. Brown trout are not filling some sort of void that would otherwise be an empty hole in the soul of the fly fisherman. The world is full of many places where brown trout are supposed to live and I'm fully in favor of fishermen going there to catch them. Here in Virginia, we have our native brook trout, which are not so common. The larger, invasive brown trout are pushing them out of their habitat. Since the brown trout guys have so many places to catch brown trout, perhaps we can just leave the brook trout habitat to the brook trout.

While I am generally an advocate of hunting and eating invasive species, you are not helping things by purchasing a trout stamp for your fishing license and taking brown trout from stocked streams. Wildlife management agencies will then see you as a customer who wants some more brown trout and they will restock accordingly. It is better to look for streams where brown trout are present but are no longer stocked. In Virginia you don't need a trout stamp to fish non-stocked streams. Catching and eating brown trout in those places will have the effect of helping the native brook trout to recover.

This stocking and management issue is something that I have taken very seriously while working on my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens' (to be released by Storey Publishing, probably in early 2012). There are all sorts of invasive species in North America that are very tempting to me as book material. Oryx in New Mexico was originally high on my list of things to eat, but hunting them would require that I buy an oryx tag, which directs my money towards a program of maintaining or even increasing the numbers of oryx. It would just be hypocritical to claim that I'm trying to get rid of an invasive species while directly supporting a program intended to harvest them sustainably. I don't want a sustainable oryx population - I just want them out of the North America wild. I feel the same way about brown trout.

[Photo used courtesy of Philthy54 (as best as I can tell) under Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0]

My Dogs that Live Forever

I will not claim to know much of anything about the science of diet or about veterinary medicine. But I should mention something that was only just pointed out to me as being odd. I have three dogs -- the only dogs I have ever had. The youngest is eight, the middle one thirteen, and the eldest is about seventeen.

It seems that this is very unusual. All three of my dogs are in very robust health for their ages. The eight year old will still spend all morning chasing rabbits (when she is allowed). My thirteen year old doberman mix can still jump up on the bed, will still go outside to bark at neighboring dogs, chases squirrels, and still follows me on walks in the woods. His life is grand. The seventeen year old dog remains in good spirits, although she has lost a lot of weight and has trouble with stairs. She is prone to barking at visitors without getting up; which I can't decide whether that is rude or preferable or both. It seems like the least that one could do for a guest is to stand up and walk over to the door to bark at them.

What have I done to keep these dogs so healthy for so long? It certainly isn't special veterinary care. I rarely have enough money to take them for checkups. Even the humans in my house haven't been to the dentist since the last Bush administration. I can say that two of these dogs have been through major health crises during which most people would have given up on them while I did everything possible to help them through it (with full recoveries in each case). Aside from that, the biggest difference between my dogs and everyone else's is diet.

All of my dogs eat a lot of venison. When I butcher any prey at home I keep a large bowl handy to toss in any scraps that won't pass muster for the meat grinder. Bits with too much hair on them, too much fat, etc. This adds up to quite a lot of meat in this house, given how much hunting I do every year.

They still eat a lot of dog food from the grocery store, but this is supplemented with lots and lots of venison. I also save a lot of the bones and roast them in the oven before cracking them slightly and giving to the dogs to chew on and enjoy the marrow. They also get one free range chicken egg each, at least twice a week. I drizzle some milk over it and mix it up with a bit of venison for a 'raw omelet.'

That's it. That is the only thing that I can point to in the life of my incredibly hardy and long-lived dogs that is different from the lives of most dogs and could possibly be a contributing factor. They eat a ton of deer meat every year and sit there with that particular expression whilst I butcher the meat and toss them scraps.

Is it really the whitetail deer meat or just pure chance? I don't know. All I can tell you is that the locovore diet really seems to be working for dogs.

April Deer Class

I'd been expecting to spend most of the month of April traveling to work on the new book, but it now looks like I'm not hitting the road until May. Ok then, what to do with the last weeks of April?

Deer class!

Its a little bit last-minute, but since the time has opened up I'm going to try to squeeze in a last 'deer hunting for locavores' class open for general registration before the weather gets too warm.

As per usual, this will be a two day intensive class covering everything you need to know in order to hunt whitetail deer and turn them into food. Natural history, anatomy, tactics, basic marksmanship, field dressing, and butchering. The course includes a field trip to a shooting range and a 'live' field dressing demonstration which everyone is welcome to participate in. We will take a freshly-killed deer all the way through the butchering process to the table. This is the same class covered by the New York Times, only it is compressed into two days to accommodate people coming in from other states or countries. You can also find various on-line reviews of the course since it was compressed into two days.

The cost is $370 per person, which includes all ammunition, use of rifles, several meals, transportation to and from field trips, etc. I know that its a bit of money, but I have several instructors and staff members to pay in order to make this happen and you would be appalled at the logistics involved in making a freshly killed deer appear at precisely the appointed time and place.

I'm scheduling this in Charlottesville, VA for the weekend of April 30th. If the demand is there, I'm willing to do a class on the weekend of April 23rd as well. Enrollment is strictly limited to a maximum of ten students. If fewer than six students register for a class then I reserve the right to cancel. A 25% deposit is due in order to reserve a space, with the balance due by the first day of class.

Anyone coming in from major cities on the east coast may want to take note of the fact that Amtrak runs directly from Boston through NYC, Philadelphia and other major cities straight into downtown Charlottesville without needing to change trains. No driving required, if you don't want to.

If anyone has any questions about the class, please feel free to send me an email at jack.landers@gmail.com

Wild Onion: A Subtler Take on Garlic

The first wild plant that most American children learn that they can eat is usually wild onion. Pulled up from the back yard, nibbled on, and usually never eaten again except to prove to other children it can be done.

These early experiments usually give the impression of a thin, bitter stalk that tastes like a bad parody of onion and it probably has dog pee on it. I don't blame you if you never gave the stuff a second chance.

However, I've been cooking with wild onion regularly for the last few years and have found that it can taste very good if you choose the right plant and the correct part of the plant.

In the first place, I should mention that there are several plants found wild in North America that are known as 'wild onion.' The native variety isn't bad but I have come to prefer to eat the invasive species, Allium vineale. Also called 'crow garlic', it has a decidedly garlicky odor and flavor, though the bulb is shaped more like a very small conventional onion.

I would characterize crow garlic as a more delicate version of garlic. The Wikipedia's entry on crow garlic describes it as having an unpleasant aftertaste, but I have never noticed any such taste. It works really well in a recipe where you want some garlic flavor but you don't want it to overpower the main ingredient.

The main attraction is the bulb, rather than the greenery. The challenge is to pull it up without tearing it in half. It is best to harvest crow garlic within a few days of a good rain when the ground is soft. Grasp the individual shoot (not just the whole clump) at the base, with your fingers getting a little dirty on the ground. Pull slowly and firmly until the whole thing comes up with the roots and all.

If you've mown the lawn repeatedly and the onion grass is constantly recovering, you won't get those fat and healthy bulbs. The best stuff is found among second year plants in the spring time, coming up in a patch of grass that hasn't been mown yet.

Get yourself a good pile of the plants and clean them off just as you would leeks or spring onions. Chop off the roots. Usually I cut the stalks off right where the plant gets dark green and the greens are discarded, due to their relatively pungent flavor and odor. I'll put them into the fridge like this for storage (which you can see in the background of the photo). Generally I'll make the most careful use of the bulbs, crushing them with the flat side of a knife and mincing them like garlic. The stalks for several inches above the bulb still have excellent flavor. I typically save the bottoms of those stalks and mince them up very fine to add to potatoes for hash browns. Those stalks also make an excellent topping on tacos. Sometimes I might use a very little bit of the dark green section of the plant, for color and a bit of snap in the taste.

Today I gathered up what must have been at least a pound of the stuff and I have been playing with it all night. I had some medallions of wild venison backstrap that I'd butchered yesterday and placed in a bag to marinate overnight in lime juice. With its delicate texture and taste, I thought that this meat would be the perfect medium to showcase crow garlic.

I heated up some olive oil in a pan and browned about half a dozen large minced crow garlic bulbs. Then I added the medallions of venison and pan-seared them, adding just a touch of butter for color. I had been careful when butchering the meat to slice the medallions no more than half an inch thick, to allow quick pan-searing without risk of overcooking the outside or undercooking the inside.

The venison was cooked rare, as good whitetail venison always should be. I served it with nothing more than a crank of pepper, a little salt, and a very little sprinkling of minced, raw, upper crow garlic stalk.

It was delicious. I had just the right level of garlic flavor that I wanted without overpowering the subtle flavor of the venison. This is where the ingredient really shines. Even if you use a lot of it, its not overpowering. You can have high volume with low intensity.

As for the ecological significance of this invasive species, there's not much good information out there. All of the research I've seen has been focused on Allium vineale's problems in terms of agriculture and making people's lawns look untidy. Whether crow garlic is actively pushing out or damaging some native species of plant or insect, I could not say. In the wild, away from lawns and disturbed land, I tend to find wild onion growing at the edge of the woods or in sunny, well-drained areas. It may be difficult to say exactly what this species impact has been given that it has been so widespread in North America for so long that I'm not sure how we'd identify a baseline area to compare invaded habitat to.

Certainly crow garlic ought to be just as indispensable a part of the modern invasivore's kitchen as garlic is to a conventional consumer. I would be interested to know whether it contains any of the anti-oxidant properties that 'normal' garlic is lauded for. If someone would please conduct that study at once, I expect that we'll see the stuff harvested en masse and turned into pills within a few years.

[The photograph is mine, Copyright 2011. Ask if you'd like to use it and I'll probably say 'yes.']

Audubon Magazine Write-Up

The new issue of Audubon Magazine has a nice little piece about locavore hunting, invasive species, and my work in that area. I believe that the article had already been put to bed before Jim Gorman of the New York Times ran his piece a few months ago branding me an 'invasivore,' so the word does not appear in Audubon.

By the way, Audubon magazine has come a long way in the last decade or so. Not that it was a bad magazine last I'd looked in on it, but the photography and layout are head-and-shoulders above what I recall seeing before.

In unrelated news, I have a lovely little video of my seven year old daughter cooking and serving up bullfrog legs the other night that I'll post as soon as I manage to compress it down to something a little more manageable than the 850 megs that it currently stands at.