The Perennial Plate Episode 85: Goose Dilemma from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.
Back in September I filmed an appearance for the web TV show, 'The Perennial Plate' with Mirra Fine and Daniel Klein. We met up at Glass House Winery in Free Union, Virginia to hunt and cook giant Canada geese.
The episode is finally finished and online today. I really like what they did with the editing.
Helenah Swedberg put together a quick three minute segment about the same outing. She was filming the filming while working on her movie about me. They each captured an slightly different take on the day's events, with the common theme being lots of shots of my butt.
One thing that I want to clarify about the goose situation is that Canada geese are in fact native to the eastern part of Virginia. I don't want people to think that I'm saying all geese are invasive in all of Virginia. Here in Albemarle County we are way off of the Atlantic flyway where Canada geese would traditionally have been found. What we have here are resident geese of a subspecies that isn't even native to the Atlantic flyway. It was those non-native resident geese that we were hunting in this episode.
The other guy hunting with me in this episode is Michael Macfarlane. We probably wouldn't have gotten any geese that day without Michael's help. Our strategy for bagging the three geese that were warily hanging out on the other side of the pond, out of range, required a two-person approach.
We checked the direction of the wind, knowing that the geese would need to take off into the wind to create the necessary lift (like an airplane). Michael positioned himself straight down-wind of them in plain view. The idea was to distract the geese with Michael's obvious presence. I wanted them to be watching Michael while I stalked up behind them from the woods. Then once I started shooting they would have to fly straight at him and he could drop any that I missed.
The plan worked beautifully. I caught the geese totally by surprise with Helenah and Daniel filming behind me. I bagged one on the water (the point was culling here -- not sport) and took a second on the wing. The third one came right at Michael as planned and he dropped it perfectly.
Those extra shots that you can hear me taking were to finish off the birds as they fell.
Michael also did equal work plucking, gutting and butchering. I was the one being interviewed and filmed but Michael was an equal partner in the day's success.
5 comments:
I'll sign up for your blog....sounds like my kind of place....Daniel & Mira are way cool.
However, I think assigning specific goose flocks to specific flyways is total bullshit.
Best, Rob
Rob,
There are many, many decades of data from tagging geese and seeing where they migrate to. We know for sure that there are flyways that flocks use year after year.
But this isn't an iron-clad rule for any single flock or goose whose DNA shows it to have come from a given flock. Geese get lost and separated from one another sometimes and can end up joining or following a different flock of geese. I'm not 100% convinced that the geese sucked into Scully's engines were migratory rather than resident.
That said, there is no migratory flyway here in Albemarle County, Virginia. All of these geese are just hanging out on the same few ponds every day all year round, though when the weather turns cold they tend to form up into flocks and fly around more or less aimlessly within a radius of a few dozen miles at most.
Great video, that young woman was so totally not impressed. I thought hunting birds was supposed to be an effete sport of lawyers and tofs. You ran up and plugged that sucker, and again and again. Good one, dead is dead, in the pot. Wonder what one of those big things weigh. That's some meat.
@Anonymous 4:25,
Mirra is a vegetarian who feels very compassionately towards animals and I thought that she did pretty well for herself that day, under the circumstances. She wasn't really happy about things being killed, but she never complained or got in the way or criticized those of us who were hunting.
A Canada goose will typically weigh anywhere between 5 and 20 pounds. Larger is possible, though rare. I have never bothered to weigh one of mine although I probably ought to. It *is* a lot of meat, for certain.
I remember asking "why are you messing up migratory geese like that?" when you first described the hunt, and you explained the situation, as you did in this post.
That's critical information and I'm super glad you added it. I'll never forget a February hunt about 5 years ago when we killed a 15lb (giant resident) goose and a 7lb (poss. migratory) goose out of the same flock!!! One of these things is not like the other.....
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