Ontario Interview

Yesterday I did an hour-long interview with Walter Garrison, host of the 'Locavore!' radio show in Ontario. It is being split up into two parts for broadcast on CFRU 93.3 out of Guelph, Ontario (not far from Toronto).

The whole interview is available streaming right here. While the goose thing is what most interviewers have been asking me about for the last few weeks, Walter's questions covered broader local food hunting issues and my work with invasive species for the 'Eating Aliens' project.

[Photo copyright 2010 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved]

The State Decoded

My fraternal twin brother, Waldo Landers Jaquith, just got a big grant to finish developing this culture-changing piece of software. He also received an award at the White House a few weeks ago for this same work.

The idea is to make state codes accessible and understandable to ordinary people without having to spend vast sums of money on legal fees.

Conceptually, this builds on his work creating Richmond Sunlight, which makes it simple for regular people to track, understand and critique legislation in Virginia.

[This photograph, copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers, has nothing to do with anything in this blog entry. I don't like posting without a photo, and I have all of these pictures of turtles, so here you go.]

Gathering Wild Chanterelles

I am not a mushroom expert by any stretch of the imagination. However, there are a few edible species that I can recognize and am really good at finding. This past week I have been obsessively gathering and eating chanterelles.

Chanterelles taste delicious when cooked. Raw, they don't have much flavor although they do exude a fruity aroma. They are very easy to cook with. A few minutes in a frying pan with some butter or oil and they are ready to add to any meal. I've been eating them in omelets and scattered over steak, but also slumming it and using them to improve twenty five cent packets of ramen noodles.

Before eating any wild mushroom it is important to learn not only what your intended meal looks like, but also the finer points of how to distinguish it from any other species with a similar appearance. In the case of chanterelles the deciding factor for their identification is usually the distinctive appearance of the underside.

The mushroom on the right in this photograph that I took a few days ago is a chanterelle. The one on the left is not. Both are yellowish mushrooms with convex caps that looked very similar from above, but note that the one on the left has true gills that are discrete structures attached to the bottom of the cap. The chanterelle features 'false gills', which are really just very deep wrinkles. Also notice how the false gills run down into the stem rather than stopping abruptly.

When chanterelles come up after a rain, they seem to do so in force. You probably won't be able to eat all that you gather before they spoil. I have found that they freeze very well. Spread them out on a baking sheet and put that in the freezer until the mushrooms are solid. Then transfer them to a sealed bag or other container.

Tip of the hat to my friend Abe from Oregon, who identified some of my mushroom pictures on Facebook and started me on a chanterelle obsession.

[Photograph copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved]

Parlez Vous Francais?

There's an article that discusses my work in Le Point magazine this week, but I have no idea what it says on account of my not speaking much French. I suspect that this is about my deer classes, though I'm not quite certain. If anyone can clue me in then I would appreciate it.

In the photos up top (not the photo shown here with this blog entry) they've got Mark Zuckerberg on the right holding a lobster and then I'm pretty sure that those are my hands and one of my cheaper knives trimming a venison backstrap on the left.

Any minute now I swear that I'll get back to writing about nutria and carp and my conversations with chef Philippe Parola, which is what I was supposed to be doing all this month until the goose situation re-asserted its self.

[Photo composite copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved]

Interview on 'Q'

This morning I did a live interview with Jian Ghomeshi of 'Q,' which I gather is a popular morning show in Canada on CBC radio. My audio cut out a few times and I couldn't hear anything, but hopefully I didn't end up talking over him during those bits.

Somehow, I'm pretty sure that I ended up promising on the air to take some geese up to Toronto this fall to prove to some skeptics that they are truly worth eating. If they'll have me, I'm prepared to make good on that.


[Photo used courtesy of Melissa McEwen. That's me on the right and Leighton Edmondson on the left. Leighton is the chef I worked with for the Slow Food goose event in Brooklyn last fall.]

Kerner Blue Butterfly in Virginia?

Entomology has never been my strong suit. The up-side of this is that I can easily get really excited about what must be very mundane beetles and butterflies to anyone who knows what they are looking at.

Today I'm all a-flutter (see what I did there?) about a little blue butterfly that I photographed.

Can someone more knowledgeable than myself weigh in as to whether this is the endangered Karner blue butterfly, or some more common variety of Lycaeides melissa? If it is in fact the Karner blue then I believe this would be the first sighting in Virginia for a very long time.

Click on the photo for a bigger image. I realize that odds are that this is some very dull, common subspecies that is totally not worth paying attention to, but if someone could let me know for certain than I would appreciate it.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved.]

Off to the Printer!

My editor recently informed me that at long last my deer book was going off to the printer as of last Monday. This was both a major source of stress and a great relief. The stress came from the inevitable round of last-minute changes, mostly to captions of the many illustrations. The relief was my realization that finally they can't possible ask me for any other changes to the text now that the book is going out the door.

It won't hit the book shelves until the launch in September, but it is already available for pre-order on Amazon.

By the way, yes this is a professionally published book. I do not self-publish, blog aside. Both this book and 'Eating Aliens' (which won't launch until 2012) are being produced by Storey Publishing. They pay me book advances and royalties, I write the book, and then they spend months pointing out to me everything that is terribly wrong with it.

In all honesty, 'The Beginners Guide To Hunting Deer for Food' is now a much better book than it was when I first handed in the manuscript. A good editor can make a big difference in the quality of a book. Storey specializes in how-to books and they are very good at figuring out how to express instructions for complicated tasks in clear language and images. This means months of back-and-forth between me and my editor, but the result really was a better quality book than I could have produced on my own. At least in this genre, the traditional publishing system has some really strong benefits.

The first complete draft of 'Eating Aliens' is due in August, which will bring a relief of its own even though months of revisions will surely follow. I've been working mostly full-time on 'Eating Aliens' for close to a year now. I have lived and breathed invasive species issues each and every day during that time and while the topic has become very important to me I look forward to starting other projects. I have the first few chapters of a book on hunting and cooking small game (intended to be branded as a sequel to the deer book), and I expect to have that finished by mid-winter. The big question is what to do for a follow-up to 'Eating Aliens.'

I have three different major projects in mind, only one of which necessarily involves hunting. All three involve adventure travel and weird encounters with wildlife.

Canada on Canada Geese

The National Post ran a nice piece this morning about our victory on the goose front.

This is really very satisfying. The policy got changed without protests, or naming-calling, or lobbyists, or any money at all. I simply made my case and turned hunting and cooking into a political statement which proved that wild geese aren't trash and that they should be eaten instead of thrown into landfills.

Neat.

According to the National Post, the Canadian Wildlife Service has starting looking into using their culled geese as food as well.

Gail Nyberg, the executive director of Canada's largest food bank doesn't want to serve them on account of two reasons.

First, because the birds need to be plucked. Well, I strongly suspect that all of the other poultry she serves needed to be plucked at some point as well. This can be avoided by skinning, or when they know that they are about to receive a good number of geese they can get a big pot of water heated up and dunk them before plucking. It goes much more quickly. I would also be very happy to try to raise the money to buy them a Whiz-Bang plucking machine. My father-in-law just built one for his chickens and they are very easy to use.

Secondly, she thinks that geese taste bad and are too fatty on account of having tried goose once. She doesn't want to serve something she won't eat. Gail, I've eaten badly cooked chicken before but that doesn't mean that the ingredient can't be good. Promptly gutted and quickly refrigerated, you will love wild goose. I would be very happy to bring a few geese and a chef up to Toronto and prove it.

[Photo used courtesy of Michelle Sanders. That's me in the orange vest gutting and plucking geese with Michael Macfarlan of Glass House Winery]

Invasive Beavers in Nutria Country

Today the Washington Post has an article about invasive beavers that were introduced to Argentina and have been expanding their range.

According to the Post the beavers probably number about 200,000. The Argentine government still has not given permission for the beavers to be harvested for food, in spite of a good effort having been made by local chefs to work with them.

My opinion is that they do not have a prayer of getting rid of these things. If they are still regulating the hunting of the species to the extent that they only allow them to be killed under particular circumstances and for particular reasons then there is absolutely no hope of removing the beavers.

The way to eliminate a species like this is to simply kill them. Stop studying it, stop regulating it. Create a continuous open season year-round and allow people to hunt them with traps and rifles on all public land and on private land with the owner's permission. No bag limits, no restrictions. Add a viable bounty per head on top of that (at least $10 each, if not more), while also allowing the meat to be eaten and the hides to be sold, and you have the makings of a program that could work.

Argentina doesn't sound prepared to do this.

Meanwhile, back here in the US we have invasive nutria that were brought from Argentina last century to provide for a fur-trapping industry. Ironically, this was the same reason why beavers were introduced to Argentina. Can't we all just be happy with the big furry aquatic rodents that we already have?

I've just spent about a week and a half hunting nutria in Louisiana and my conclusion is that they aren't much farther along in their thinking than Argentina is. They still have a closed season on nutria for much of the year, and they even still have bag limits. In a few areas like Jefferson Parish we find local governments that are seriously doing something about the problem but the state and federal government are both really just giving the problem lip service. They'll do anything to get rid of the nutria, short of actually letting people go out there and kill them.

The interactions between nutria and beavers are interesting and unfortunate in the US. Nutria have a habit of ganging up into large groups to attack and kill beavers in order to take their lodges. I spent several days in the backwaters of Caddo Lake near the Texas border ambushing a group of 'nutes' that had done exactly this. The beaver lodge was occupied by nutria and the beaver were nowhere to be seen. Trees with obvious beaver chewing signs were seen here and there, but all of the weathering suggested that they'd been gone for at least a couple of years.

In Argentina the invasive beavers seem to be moving straight into the native territory of the nutria. Will the nutria provide a check against their advances, just as they have hurt beaver populations in North America? I don't know. There are certainly other factors involved as well, such as a lack of predators in Argentina that specialize them. There may also be diseases and parasites that periodically control beaver numbers in their native range which do not occur in South America.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. That's me holding the nutria. It was delicious]

Cooking with Canada Geese

Someone asked me for a good recipe for Canada goose, so here it is. This is a recipe put together by my friend Dan Schleifer, who was one of three chefs cooking at a goose event that I put on with Slow Food Virginia last winter. This is not a simple recipe, but then of course the whole point of that event was in fact 'slow' food.

When cooking with wild goose in general, understand that this is nothing like chicken or other poultry. Canada geese are all red meat and that meat is more like lean roast beef than anything else. Keep the meat moist during cooking, and take advantage of the superb fat that lies just under the skin (not marbled within the meat). Too much heat or overcooking will dry out the goose and turn it into shoe leather. If you accidentally find you have done this, the meat can still be salvaged by smoking or slow-cooking it for a very long time.

Goose doesn't need to be all that elaborate. You can carve off the breasts into thin slices and pan-sear them quickly in some olive oil and red wine and pepper and be eating dinner in 15 minutes. You could strip the meat and fat off of the bones and run it all through a meat grinder for goose burgers. This is potentially a very flexible ingredient.

Goose Rillettes with Dried Fruit Mostarda

Goose Rillettes

4 goose hind quarters (leg & thigh)

3 oz kosher salt

8 cloves garlic, crushed

1 T juniper berries, crushed

3 T black pepper, coarsely ground

4 cups rendered goose and/or duck fat

Rub the goose quarters with a mixture of the salt, garlic, juniper and pepper, and allow to sit in the fridge for 24 hours.

Rinse the goose under cold, running water to remove all of the seasonings. Place the goose quarters in a shallow pan, and cover with the rendered fat. Place the goose, covered in foil, in a 200 degree oven for 8 hours, or until the meat is fork tender.

Allow the goose to cool, and remove from the fat. Separate all of the meat from the bones and skin, and set the meat aside. Separate the fat from the drippings using a gravy separator.

Place the goose meat in a standing mixer with the paddle attachment, and mix on low, slowly adding the reserved drippings until the meat takes on a moist, spreadable texture. Add 1/4c of the reserved fat, and salt and pepper to taste, mixing to incorporate.

If preparing in advance, spoon the rillettes in to a clean glass jar, and cover with a 1/2 inch layer of the reserved fat. Refrigerate for up to two weeks. Bring to room temperature before serving.

Dried Fruit Mostarda

1c golden raisins, coarsely chopped

1c dried figs, coarsely chopped

1c dried apricots, coarsely chopped

1T mustard seeds

1/4 sugar

1/2 cider vinegar

1/2 water

1/2t salt

Mix all ingredients in a small sauce pan and bring to a simmer over low heat. Simmer for 10-15 minutes, or until alll liquid has been absorbed. Add additional sugar or vinegar to taste, to balance sweet/sour. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

To serve:

Spread a tablespoon of room temperature rillette over a toasted slice of baguette, and garnish with 1/2t of cool mostarda.

[Photo used courtesy of Michelle Sanders of Glass House Winery. Left to right, that's me, Jeff Sanders of Glass House, and Dan Schleifer. Those are some of the goose rillettes on the table, along with bowls that are about to receive a smoked goose soup.]

Vindicated on Canada Geese

At this point I've been banging away on locavore hunting and invasivore issues for a couple of years now. I quit my day job and went full-time last year. Honestly, there have been times when I looked at what I was doing and thought that maybe it was completely hopeless. Sooner or later one hopes to see some substantive change in a society as a result of one's work. In case anyone was wondering, this particular career path doesn't pay especially well.

I've finally turned a corner. The New York Times reports today that the authorities have relented and the geese being culling around NYC-region airports will now be donated to hungry families instead of being dumped in landfills.

Long-time readers will recall that I became incensed at this previous act of wanton waste and that I vowed to do something about it. I immediately backed myself into a corner where I had pledged to put on a wild goose event with Slow Food NYC and had no choice but to follow through or look like a moron. The New York Times reported on it, as did Gothamist and I think the Village Voice as well. The event was a great success and I later repeated it with Slow Food Virginia at the Glass House Winery.

Through these events, I proved to the media and to the public that Canada goose meat tastes really, really good once you know how to cook it. And now that effort seems to have helped to create a meaningful change in policy.

At the same time, I suddenly find myself knee-deep in a project with the great chef Philippe Parola. Philippe and I met in Baton Rougue, Louisiana last week and discovered that each of us has been engaged in work for years that perfectly complements the other. Philippe has spent a lot of his own time and money developing the technology to process invasive Asian grass carp from American waterways into high-quality frozen filets that could be sold at grocery stores all over the US. This brilliant project of his (and the idea is 100% Philippe's -- I take no credit) had run into funding troubles and I'm now doing everything I can to line up investment to get this processing plant built. Long story short, our prospects suddenly look very good. If Philippe's vision for a carp processing plant gets built, this would be the most effective implementation of the 'Eating Aliens' concept that imaginable.

Suddenly its all starting to feel really worthwhile. The last few years of work are starting to pay off and turn into real change that's going to help people and ecosystems. Maybe I'm not crazy after all.

[Photo copyright 2011, Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. Ok, its not the best goose photo ever but I'm trying to move more towards using my own original photos instead of stuff from Creative Commons]

The Guns of 'Eating Aliens'

This morning I was a guest on my friend George Cera's radio show ('Let's Talk Wildlife,' on 107.5 FM in central Florida) and a caller asked about what weapons I had come to favor for hunting nutria. I get a lot of questions about my gear in general so I thought it would be fun to outline what I bring when I hit the road.

First of all, I don't have a truck or an SUV. I drive a little Ford ZX2 coupe that has plenty of engine but gets great gas mileage. This car doesn't have a whole lot of room and that means that I have to make some tough decisions about what comes and what stays.

When I travel to work on Eating Aliens I always have a specific species that I'm after but I also want to be prepared to take advantage of any other opportunities that might come alone. Anything from one pound iguanas to three hundred pound wild boar could be on the menu, depending on whom I happen to meet and what species they can direct me to.

I've settled out to three long guns and one pistol that always come with me (unless I'm visiting a state or country with gun laws that prevent me).

First, my Marlin 925 bolt action .22 rifle. I carry an extra magazine for it. The Marlin sports a 32mm Pine Ridge scope by Cabela's on quick detaching rings by Burris. The QD rings are essential, in my opinion. I spend a lot of time hunting in some very awkward places at strange hours, often under a deadline. That .22 gets used so much for small game that I cannot risk having it out of commission even for a few hours if the scope takes a hard knock. Just a few days ago I was sitting on a riverbank in Port Vincent, Louisiana hunting nutria close to dusk. Rain began to fall and between the fog on the scope lenses and the low light, I could not make anything out through the crosshairs. It took me less than a minute to pull off the scope and keep hunting with open sights. The following day, the ability to switch to those open sights allowed me to pot a couple of fast-swimming nutria from an airboat. I doubt that I could have made snap shots like those if I'd had to find the targets in a magnified scope.

At some point I will probably upgrade to a stainless and synthetic version of the same rifle. Meanwhile the blued steel and laminated wood of my 925 seem to be accepting the constant abuse of the elements with dignity.

A Mossberg 500 pump action 12 gauge shotgun also lives in the trunk when I'm on the road. There are other brands and action types that are better at specific tasks. My side-by-side 20 gauge Stevens would make a dandy gun for European pigeons, for example. But I don't know if I'm going to be hunting pigeons one day and maybe muscovy ducks the next. I need one gun that does it all reasonably well and that is the Mossberg 500 in 12 gauge. I bring both lead and steel shot (use lead if you're going to use shotguns for nutria, by the way) in the car with me in several different sizes.

Among the things that I like about the 500 is the fact that its not an expensive gun. I can abuse it all I want and its not a big deal. I have literally used this gun as a barge pole at a moment of need and the action cycled just fine afterward. I have pounded stakes into the ground with it. It just won't quit.

The third long gun that comes on the road with me every time is my Remington model 700 XCR, chambered in .30-'06. Yes, there are better tailored deer cartridges. There are lighter, faster varmint cartridges out there. There are bigger cartridges that will put a bigger hole in a feral pig. But if you need one gun that can handle anything in North America (which I do), the .30-'06 is the way to go. I strongly prefer a stainless steel and corrosion resistant finish, because I've had some bad experiences with Remington's blued steel rusting up quickly in rough weather. The lower-priced Model 700s have really suffered in quality over the last ten years or so, but the higher-priced versions such as the XCR remain solid guns.

My 700 wears a Leupold VX-II scope mounted on Leupold rings and a two piece Leupold base. The only thing I don't like about it is the lack of back-up iron sights, which is also the reason why it doesn't have QD rings. The barrel has been cut down and re-crowned to 19 inches, which is unusual for a .30-'06. I like it set up this way because when the gun is slung over my shoulder the barrel doesn't protrude above my head. That helps a lot when I'm moving a long way through thick brush to get to a hunting area. Given the efficiency of modern smokeless powders, the loss of velocity doesn't amount to much more than 75 feet per second, if that.

The .22, 12 gauge and .30'-06 ammunition all offer the advantage of being ubiquitous. If I need to pick up ammo on the road, I can find what I need at any store that sells ammunition. While I'm a big fan of cartridges like the 8mm Mauser, 7mm-08 and .303 British and I hunt with them at home, I won't often take those guns on the road for fear of not being able to find ammunition on the shelf quickly if I need it.

Another gun that usually makes the cut and comes along with me is my Ruger Mk III Hunter. This is a .22 semi-automatic target pistol with a long, fluted bull barrel. The stainless steel finish is nice in bad weather. Sometimes when I'm hunting small game in an out-of-the-way area I like to bring the Ruger for the sake of having less weight and encumbrance as I hike in and out. I'll put a pair of collapsible safari sticks in my pack and use the pistol exactly as I would a rifle. This little pistol of mine has taken everything from squirrels to nutria to turkeys (any firearm is legal for turkey hunting in Virginia).

In my next post I'll outline some of the things other than firearms that always come with me on an expedition.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved.]

An Ambush Still-Life

Still-life during a daylight ambush. I hunt all sorts of small game with this Ruger mk. III .22 target pistol. Easy to stuff into a pack (yes, I have a concealed weapon permit) and carry a long way out into the woods or swamps with far less weight than a rifle. I carry a set of safari sticks and for ambushes within about 30 yards or less I find that off the sticks the target pistol is every bit as accurate as a rifle.

The bug spray and granola bars are must-haves. Just remember to open the granola bars right when you first settle in so that you won't have to make noise with the packaging when you get hungry.

As for the book, I always throw some little paperback into my bag when I go hunting. More often than not I end up with some stretches of downtime that can be filled by reading.

On the Road

I have been on the road more or less non-stop for over two weeks now with very little time in front of a computer or even with a cell phone signal. Catching carp in Massachusetts, European green crabs in Connecticut, stopping in New York City for a publishing convention and then bagging some very hard-won nutria down in the swamps of Louisiana. All of this for my new book, 'Eating Aliens.'

Right now I'm stopped for the night in Alabama on my way home. This will be the first night in about a week that I will get to sleep for more than about 3 or 4 hours. There might have been one six hour night in there somewhere but I've lost all track of time. After resting for a day or so, I have a ton of writing to do, including writing up some useful blog entries about what I've learned on the road lately.

A few lessons learned:

1. Nutria don't always float when you kill them. Don't assume that it isn't dead if you can't see the body.

2. It would be a really stupid idea to go wading into the water to retrieve a dead, bloody, recently thrashing nutria in the middle of the night in alligator country. Sometimes you just have to let those ones go if you don't have a boat.

3. It is a very good idea for serious hunting rifles to have both open sights and a scope mounted with quick-detaching rings. I've always been an advocate for using QD rings whenever possible and it paid off in low light with a steady rain when my fogged scope could have ended the hunt.

On this trip I finally had the pleasure of meeting, cooking, and hunting with the great Philippe Parola in Baton Rouge. Philippe's work with nutria a few years ago was nothing short of stunning and what he is trying to do now with carp is even more promising. He will be contributing a nutria recipe for my new book and I'm going to do everything I can to support his work to get invasive carp out of American rivers and to save the Great Lakes from them.

I realize that this blog entry is totally scatter-shot and doesn't come anywhere near to forming the sort of cohesive article-type writing that I prefer to post here. Sorry about that. I just need a few days of rest and I'll be back in proper form with some real articles.

Ever watch that TV show, 'Supernatural?' That's pretty much my life right now, only with invasive animals instead of demons. Trunk full of guns, cheap motels, late nights in places that nobody should really go. Never really sure what state I'm going to be headed to the next day. I have a really weird job.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. Just ask and I'll probably let you use it.]