The Three Things Every New Deer Hunter Must Know

I spent this past weekend giving one presentation after another at the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, PA. Around 15,000 people attended the fair and my publisher kept me very busy speaking and performing venison butchering demonstrations. My first book, 'The Beginners Guide to Hunting Deer for Food,' sold out completely (don't worry, its still available on line).

We had a great mixture of aspiring and experienced hunters. My favorite part of the event was hearing from attendees afterward who told me how the approach to hunting deer that I teach would completely change the way that they learned to hunt.

The methods that I teach in my classes and in my book can be boiled down to a very few concepts that open up deer hunting to people who are otherwise unable to start hunting.

1. Learn to quarter and butcher your own deer in the field. Above all else, do this. New hunters don't usually own a pickup truck and don't have a way to transport a whole, gutted deer to a game processor. Instead of dropping ten grand on a pickup truck you can spend $35 on a medium-sized cooler with wheels. Quarter the deer in the field, put the meat in the cooler, put the cooler in your car.

Knowing how to do this also opens up a lot of public land that you wouldn't otherwise hunt. Most hunters don't go more than a mile from where they parked the truck because they know that they will have to drag the deer out later. If you learn how to disassemble the deer right where it died then you can go miles farther out with the much easier task of carrying 40 pounds of compact meat in a pack or cooler rather than 100 pounds of dead deer. This method is taught in the book.

2. Hunt from the ground, assuming that there is no local law requiring you to use tree stands. Tree stands cost a lot of money. You can easily drop $150 for an mid-priced stand, $100 for a ladder to get up to it, $100 for a safety harness and another $50 for a good rope. There you are $400 into it for the ability to hunt from one single spot. What happens if that spot isn't working out and you want to move to another area that day? Moving a tree stand and ladder is sort of a big production so you've got to drop another $250 for another stand and ladder for each additional spot.

That gets pretty expensive pretty fast. Tree stands work and they can be a good idea. But the sheer cost is prohibitively expensive to most aspiring new hunters. Especially given that new hunters are still figuring out where the deer are and will need to try new spots more often than experienced hunters.

Also note that falling out of tree stands accounts for a majority of deer hunting accidents and fatalities.

I'm not opposed to the use of tree stands. Go ahead and use them. But I think that they are better tools for experienced hunters or perhaps for new hunters who have an experienced hunter to show them exactly where to hang it. Learn how to hunt from the ground first and then move up to the trees later.

3. Study the animal, not the catalogs. There is an astounding array of hunting tools and accessories for sale. Most of them really work but few are really necessary to the new hunter just looking to put meat on the table. In sporting goods stores and in some hunting magazines it is too easy to become enamored of pieces of equipment that all seem ready to solve your problems.

You cannot hunt deer with your wallet. You hunt deer with your brain and a weapon. The only tools that you really need are a weapon and a knife. A thorough understanding of what motivates and influences deer throughout the year is the most essential thing to prepare you for the hunt. Understand the natural history and the anatomy and the landscape and then you will be able to predict where deer are likely to be. This, to me, is the essence of hunting deer.

These concepts are the underpinnings of my book and of the approach that I believe is needed to recruit new adult hunters. Telling someone that they need to drop thousands of dollars on equipment in order to hunt is totally counterproductive. People who have been hunting for their whole lives are often willing to make those big purchases but we cannot expect aspiring hunters to spend that kind of money on something they still don't know whether they will enjoy.

$350 for a rifle and scope. $30 for a knife. $17 or less for the book. That is all that you absolutely need to spend money on in order to successfully hunt deer for the rest of your life.

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

The Post-Domestic Cougar

Three years after I wrote a blog entry about wild cougars in Virginia I still get new comments on it regularly and I still get emails from total strangers on the subject about once a week. In fact, Helenah Swedberg, the documentary filmmaker I am working with, found me initially through that entry.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the effects of population bottlenecks and their potential application to cougars in Virginia. I have personally encountered some very strange behavior among invasive species while traveling to work on 'Eating Aliens'. Often the accepted traits of a species as observed in its native habitat do not apply in an introduced habitat and population bottlenecks can sometimes account for that.

For example, the black spiny-tailed iguanas of Gasparilla Island, Florida, are very much omnivorous throughout their lives. I have personally watched adult spiny-tails pouncing on anoles and flying insects. I have examined the droppings and stomach contents of these iguanas and seen fragments of insects. Yet scientists who have studied the iguanas in their native range in Mexico will swear that only the juveniles have any carnivorous habits.

I think that the explanation for this is in the fact that the entire population on Gasparilla Island appears to be descended from a very few pets released by one individual. If one lizard among a population of tens of thousands has an unusual habit caused by genetic mutation then it can go unobserved. Most mutations are probably dead ends. Even the successful ones will take a very long time to propagate among an entire population unless there is some type of upheaval that gives a rapid edge in survival to the animals with that behavior.

That all can change when a small number of animals are introduced to a new area and the genes of those few animals are the template for everything there that follows. Early on in an invasive paradigm an exceptional mutation -- even a disadvantageous one -- can rapidly become the new standard.

Stay with me here because I promise this is going to come back to the wild cougars of Virginia.

Consider also that the bottleneck of two or three lizards came from a captive population from the pet trade. Animals kept as pets for generations are often selected by humans for particular traits. Is it possible that people who owned pet black spiny-tailed iguanas preferred the ones that they could watch eating live food?

A similar example was pointed out to me in a conversation last month with biologist Duane Chapman. Over a meal of silver carp that had literally jumped into my boat that morning, Duane told me that silver carp in their native range in China are not known for violent mass jumping at the approach of a motor boat the way that the invasive silver carp in America are. His explanation for this is the effect of the population bottleneck. Only a small number were initially imported into the US to begin the breeding program. One or two carp who happened to have this strange habit that also happened to be good breeders were able to have their strange genes dispersed among the entire new population as it grew.

Now you are probably wondering how this applies to cougars. We have a very good body of science that has been done on native wild cougars in Florida and out west. These are populations that have been continuously wild for their entire history. While this research is very sound I do not believe that it will necessarily apply to the habits of modern cougars in the eastern United States.

For reasons I have explained in other articles I do not believe that the cougars people are seeing here are the native (and probably extinct) eastern cougar subspecies. I strongly believe that these are primarily the descendants of cougars from the exotic pet trade that have escaped and sometimes been deliberately released.

What we have here is a population bottleneck stemming from cougars that were captive-bred for generations by humans. More aggressive cats were not top choices to use for breeding. Picky eaters that required only their wild diet were probably sorted out of that gene pool very quickly.

A population of wild cougars in the eastern US, descended from former pets, would behave differently than their wild cousins elsewhere in the US. They can get away with what might otherwise be disadvantageous behavior. The native wolves that used to live here are long gone. Aside from a few coyotes, modern eastern cougars do not have much competition for prey.

When we are weighing the veracity of cougar sightings I don't think that anything should be discarded on the basis of unusual behavior. For example, I've heard all sorts of stories about cougars in Virginia seen feeding on roadkill. In the western US, scavenging is something that cougars only seem to do occasionally. One study that has been following 21 cougars for the last three years found that only 13 of 21 have scavenged at all. That behavior was very rare in all but one animal in the study.

Given the small population of cougars here (I'm just guessing about that, figuring that if it was a large population then we'd have more physical evidence), it is easy for a biologist or policymaker to dismiss the frequent claims of roadkill-scavenging behavior. But the cougars here are probably the result of a bottleneck population.

Everything from preferred prey to habitat to the total size of their individual ranges could be completely different from what we have known about cougars until now.

To even begin having this conversation I think that we need a name for this population other than 'eastern cougar,' which already refers to a probably-extinct subspecies. I nominate the 'post-domestic cougar.'

'Feral' isn't quite accurate after the first generation and I wouldn't call them 'invasive' either, since cougars have been here for many thousands of years. Cougars seem to belong here in an ecological sense, though we still don't know how the post-domestic cougar is going to fit in.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. I wish I had a picture of a cougar to use but I've never had the opportunity to take one. This depicts a black spiny-tailed iguana in Florida moments after bagging it with George Cera.]

Five Things I Don't Pay For

1. Bobbers. I have purchased bobbers exactly once in the last five years, although I use them pretty regularly. If you keep your eyes sharp around public fishing areas you will see that they are all over the place. Why pay for them?

I actually pick up all sorts of tackle this way. When I'm walking around a public fishing lake I'll stop at spots that look heavily fished. Not to fish there but to look for dropped hooks, lures and sinkers. I figure that I'm helping myself and the ecosystem at the same time. All of that lead and hooks can't be good for the wildlife. I usually pick up discarded line at the same time. Rusty hooks go in the trash along with old line but I find a lot of very usable stuff as well. When in a canoe I will paddle close to obvious snags in the water near the same types of spots and pull anywhere from $5- $50 worth of snagged lures out of tree branches.

2. Tree stands. I know that in some parts of the country you cannot legally hunt deer with a rifle from the ground. And in other places the land is flat and houses are everywhere and it isn't considered safe to shoot unless you are in a tree stand. Personally, I don't care for the things. My home state of Virginia does not require their use and my home county of Albemarle is also reasonable enough to allow me to hunt from the ground in the rolling foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains.

I get bored sitting up there, I can't move around enough, they are expensive (you can drop $500 easily on stand, ladder, harness and rope in order to hunt only one spot), and falls from tree stands are the leading cause of deer hunting accidents. Hunting from the ground is free and I've had a lot of success with it. Hunting magazines usually seem focused on tree stand tactics and you'd think from many of those magazines and TV shows that there is no other way to do it. I suppose that the bigger ad money is in tree stands.

3. A pickup truck. Don't get me wrong; I could really use a truck. I've owned one before. But nothing like that is in the budget any time soon. Yet hunting out of a 2 door coupe hasn't held me back one bit. I butcher the big stuff on site and pack out the meat in cooler on wheels. The cooler full of meat fits easily in my back seat. If you can't afford to buy an extra vehicle you don't need to let that stop you from taking up deer hunting. Drop $32 on a wheeled cooler and you're all set.

4. A Tom-Tom or similar GPS device. People are getting to where they don't even know how to read a regular map any more. I don't want to be one of them. I've driven all around the country this past year while working on Eating Aliens, racking up somewhere between ten and fifteen thousand miles. All of it with regular old paper maps from AAA or road-side welcome centers.

5. Fish and meat at the grocery store. For obvious reasons.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. I realize that this picture has nothing to do with anything in the actual blog entry. Ok, I didn't pay for the spider or mushrooms either. How's that for topical?]

The Mother Earth News Fair

This coming weekend I will be appearing as a speaker at the Mother Earth News Fair in Seven Springs, Pennsylvania. I'll be demonstrating how to turn a whole venison hindquarter into usable cuts of meat while also explaining how an adult beginner can start hunting for food. I'll also be doing a book signing and participating in other things going on at the fair.

It is very exciting to be invited to speak at this particular event. I've spent the last few years working very hard (read: devoting my entire life) towards legitimizing hunting as a critical component of the local and sustainable food movement. Mother Earth News is arguably the American publication most emblematic of the sustainable food movement. As far as I know, I am the first hunter who has ever been invited to speak about hunting for food at one of their events. The worlds of hunting and sustainable food are finally about to shake hands and formally collide with one another.

While I'm there you might notice some cameras around. Helenah Swedberg, a Swedish filmmaker is producing a documentary film about me. Show up for the book signing or the venison event and you might possibly end up in the movie.

In other news, I found out a few days ago that Cabelas will soon be carrying my first book, 'The Beginner's Guide to Hunting Deer for Food' at 36 stores as well as online and in their print catalog.

My schedules for October and November still have a lot of openings. If your school, business or organization is interested in booking me as a speaker, please feel free to shoot me an email at jack.landers@gmail.com

[Photograph used courtesy of Helenah Swedberg, copyright 2011. Helenah is photographing me while I'm photographing a fairy ring and getting ridiculously excited about finding it].

Five Products I Like Fishing With

1. Northland Fishing Line. While I was at an outdoor writers' convention I grabbed some samples of Northland's 'Bionic' fishing line. All of the samples have performed well but the one that I like the best is their 5 pound test panfish line in blue camouflage.

Why blue camouflage? Because panfish tend to feed upwards from below their food. I have a native green sunfish in an aquarium in my home library and I feed him bugs several times a day. When he is hungry he sits there about five inches below the surface with his face tilted slightly upwards. The fish in my house is used to me and is practically house-broken. But a wild fish will spook sometimes at the sight of a line attached to what looks like food -- especially if the area has been fished a lot. Panfish can definitely learn, if my green sunfish has anything to say about it. Making the fishing line blue can help it to blend in with the sky and water that the fish expects to see above him on a clear day.

Northland's 5 pound test is actually more of a 6 or 7 pound test line in terms of strength but is rated as a nominal 5 pound line based on the thin diameter of the line. It is sensitive and reasonably strong and makes the smallest bluegill feel like a trophy as you wrangle it in.

Don't use expensive lures with this line around a lot of snags, though. I find that it breaks off pretty quickly when I'm trying to free a snagged lure. This is only to be expected with a 5 pound test line, I supposed.

2. The Jitterbug fishing lure. When I was a kid I remember that my father had one of these in his tackle box. I never had one myself until this summer. This lure is a classic that has been in production for nearly 75 years and experienced bass fishermen are probably already familiar with it. This thing is absolute mayhem on largemouth bass. My second cast with it landed a 17 inch bass. The fifth cast pulled in a nice 13 incher. After that I figured that dinner was pretty well sorted out and so there was no sixth cast.

Yesterday while floating down the Rivanna river in a canoe I handed one of these to my skeptical friend Fergus Clare, who is really a much better fisherman than I am. He prefers weedless hooks with soft Powerbait lures, which I also frequently use. Within a few minutes he had hooked what I could see was definitely an enormous something-or-other. It was big, it fought like holy hell and Fergus had just about landed it when it snapped off his four pound test line and left with my Jitterbug.

Wasn't I just saying something about expensive lures and light test line?

3. Speaking of weedless hooks, they really do work. There are various competing designs out there. These Pro-Strikers have worked very well for me. They only cost around $0.75 each and they make a huge difference when you are fishing in heavy weeds. Literally, at times these guys are the difference between whether I keep fishing or get sick of pulling weeds off the hook after every cast and go home.

I have a rule of thumb for buying fishing tackle when I don't have any other information to go on. The product with the plainest package design that looks like it hasn't been updated in the last thirty years gets my money. Somehow that's usually the stuff that works the best.

4. Bent-shaft canoe paddles are miraculous. I cannot even begin to consider fishing from a motor boat for lack of money for a boat, trailer, truck to haul it with, or gas to feed to the boat. What I have to use, on those occasions when I can even afford the gas to transport it to the water, is a canoe. I'm a big fan of long, multi-day river trips in my canoe. In an age where gasoline regularly creeps up around $4 a gallon I like the fact that the canoe is powered by my body, which in turn is powered by the fish and birds that I kill and eat while on the water that the canoe moves me across.

Its like perpetual motion. With guns.

Anyway, a bent-shaft paddle is much more ergonomically comfortable for long paddles than a standard paddle. I can go for hours longer with this thing in hand. My own paddle is very much like the one in the link here, though not identical. It is one of my most favorite objects that I own. The down-sides to a paddle like this are that they tend to be expensive (bent-shafts start at around $50 or so for a crappy one) and that the fine laminated wood construction of the better-priced paddles tends to discourage their use in serious whitewater. You can find them in more durable carbon fiber construction but expect to pay anywhere from $200-$500 for those.

5. Kill Cliff. My friend, Baker Leavitt, recently sent me a case of a sport drink called 'Kill Cliff'. I started grabbing a can or two when I head out to hunt or fish in hot weather. The idea behind Kill Cliff is to fight inflammation and aid in recovery time after sporting activities. While I'm not an MMA fighter or football player, I have had to do a lot of hiking, fishing and odd hunting on a foot with a torn ligament this past month or so. It hurts and gets inflamed so I think I'm technically within the target market.

I can't say that I know a lot about the science behind Kill Cliff but I do know that I've gotten to like having a can of the stuff mid-way through an afternoon in the field. It has a little bit of caffeine (less than a cup of coffee) but not too much.

[Photo copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. That's my 4 year old with his first sunfish.]

How to Cook Carp & River Chub

There's an old American joke that I've heard a million times about carp. When a new fisherman asks the older fisherman for a good carp recipe, the older fisherman responds with something to the effect of this:

"Take a nice thick carp filet and place it on a piece of cardboard. Cover it on both sides with melted butter and scatter it with carmelized onions. Sprinkle the carp with plenty of salt and pepper. Bake it in the oven for 25 minutes at 350 degrees. Remove it from the oven, throw away the carp, and eat the cardboard."

Then they both have a chuckle and jointly conclude that nobody should ever bother with eating a carp. The young fisherman will file that little joke away in his mind and pull it out at the first opportunity to lecture another fisherman about the folly of trying to eat carp. At no point will he ever bother trying to actually eat the stuff himself. The story is passed around and a whole society of fishermen comes to despise carp and yet none of them actually have any idea what they are talking about.

I have eaten carp. Grass carp, common carp and silver carp. They're all pretty good. But can you throw them in the bottom of the boat for a few hours, fillet them exactly like a bass or catfish, and expect them to make a good meal? No.

The big problem with carp as food is that they have an unusual set of floating 'Y' shaped bones in the fillets. I have found these bones in every member of the Cyprinidae family that I have eaten. Just this very evening I cooked a couple of large river chub (a type of very large minnow, minnows being closely related to carps) and found a set of tiny floating bones exactly like those of the silver carp. They were simple to deal with. I just picked them out and continued eating. By the way, here is the recipe that I came up with. I've used this for fillets of common and silver carp and now for whole river chub:

Smoked River Chub

Ingredients:

A pair of whole, gutted and scaled river chub.
A quarter cup of salt
2 Tablespoons of brown sugar
1 teaspoon of ground black pepper
1 bay leaf
A quart of water

Place all ingredients except for the fish in a small pot and boil for five minutes. Allow the mixture to cool. Place the whole fish into the brine and allow it to soak for at least two hours.

Build a hardwood fire in a smoker or a Weber-type grill. If you are using a Weber grill rather than a proper smoker then place a can of hot water on top of the grill to produce steam and keep the fish from drying out. If you own a real smoker then you probably already know what you're doing. Apple, hickory or oak all work well for the fire. Don't use any type of pine. Keep the lid on and let the fish smoke at low to medium heat for at least an hour. Check it regularly to make sure that it isn't drying out or burning.

The result is a couple of smoked fish that can be eaten on their own (its easy to work around the bones with a fork) or you can remove the flesh and serve it on bagels, use it in salads, etc.

At no point is it necessary to eat a piece of cardboard.

Last month I spent a few days in Columbia, Missouri fishing for carp with the help of some good people from the Missouri Department of Conservation. This was for my forthcoming book, 'Eating Aliens.' Biologist Vince Travnichek let me in on a couple of local Missouri secrets for dealing with the bones in carp and buffalo (the fish, not the bovid).

Understand that this is not really a bony fish in the way that, say, shad are bony (I've been experimenting with cooking gizzard shad lately and its not going well). The bones are few but awkwardly placed. With a smaller fish having narrow floating bones, Vince's solution is to score the pieces of fish meat cross-wise against the bones and then fry the breaded fish in hot oil. That hot oil transmits heat so efficiently that the bones are fully dissolved. When I ate carp that had been prepared this way I could not feel a single bone in my mouth.

This method should work well for river chub, too. I have a few fillets from the Rivanna river that will be getting that treatment tomorrow.

Larger carp have thicker bones that are not going to dissolve in the hot oil. The Missouri solution is to embrace the bones instead of fighting them. Vince prepared 'carp ribs.' After cutting the fillets he sliced them into strips along the length of the floating bones, such that each strip contained between one and three ribs. The ends of the ribs were visible. We fried the strips and ate them while holding the ribs like toothpicks. Properly butchered, the ribs turn carp into finger food.

I duplicated this method at a small gathering back home in Virginia with my friend Steve Friedman of Slow Food Virginia acting as chef. I think he used panko for the breading, though I wouldn't swear to it. What I am very certain of is that the peanut sauce that he put out to dip the carp ribs in was absolutely perfect. I will be chasing the recipe down from him to include in 'Eating Aliens.'

Carp meat tastes very much like cod, cusk, flounder or any of several other common types of white fish. Firm, clean, and inoffensive. It isn't as delicious as lionfish but its a perfectly good medium for cooking and a great source of Omega 3 fatty acids.

The things that can make it taste bad (bones aside) are time and inattentive cutting.

Carp tend to spoil very quickly. I had a long conversation with Cliff Rost, a commercial fisherman who nets carp on the Missouri River. He told me that he keeps several very large livewells on the boat and transports them all back to his small processing facility while they are still alive. Anything that is dead before its time is thrown out. Most other fish that we eat can be left dead and ungutted for a little while, especially in cooler weather. American fishermen are used to being able to wait a few hours after killing a fish before processing it. This is risky with carp. They spoil quickly.

An easy solution is to bring a cooler with some ice or cold packs with you when you go fishing. There's no harm in fileting the carp as soon as you've landed it. There is no need to gut the fish at all if you fillet it immediately.

When you are filleting the fish you will notice that most of the meat is white while some is red. Carve off all of the red or darkly colored meat and discard it. That is where the funky, 'fishy' flavor is. The white meat is good stuff and if you keep the red stuff out then it has a very clean taste.

As for how to go about catching carp, I will leave that topic for another article.

[Photograph Copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. All rights reserved. That is a silver carp from a tributary of the Missouri river, shortly before being filleted and cooked.]

Hunter-Gatherer Interview

My friend and former student, John Durant, interviewed me a few days ago for his blog.

John's angle on the hunter-gatherer lifestyle stems from his enthusiasm for the Paleo Diet, which I believe he has a book on the way about this topic coming out some time soon.

That's John in the photo there, eating bone marrow at the end of our class last year or so. Here is John's recipe for venison marrow as best as I can recall it:

Ingredients: one raw deer bone.

Crack bone open with a big rock. Suck out marrow. Serves one.

Hank Shaw in Richmond

To any of my readers in Central Virginia, I want to give you a heads up that my friend and colleague, Hank Shaw, will be hosting an event as part of his book tour for 'Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast' at The Blue Goat in Richmond on September 14th. Hank writes and speaks about hunting and foraging for wild foods and his work is very much in the same vein and spirit as mine is.

I might be on the road myself on the 14th, but if I'm not on my way somewhere to hunt and eat something odd then I'll probably be at The Blue Goat myself. The Blue Goat specializes in nose-to-tail eating and the menu is sure to be something to remember.