Processing acorns into food is one of the most useful “survival skills” you could ever learn!

This is our homemade acorn flour — we make ours from red oak (Quercus rubra) because that’s our most abundant and easy-to-access species.

I believe that everyone in the oak-rich temperate regions of the world would be well served to learn how to process acorns into food. I’m not suggesting that people need to eat them often, rather, that they simply learn the skill. Since most of us live in a place where acorns can be foraged, we have the ability, in a pinch to make our own food security. Not that we’ll ever need it, but if we did, it’s nice to know where to turn.

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For me, being WildFed — hunting, fishing, and foraging — is about a lot more than just getting my groceries. It’s an antidote to the Metaverse. These endeavors megadose you with reality. They’re real, actual experiences that nourish your senses with the authentic. Tangible, undeniable encounters in un-curated spaces and with the other-than-human beings with whom we share the biological world.

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Our family headed out this year to "forage" our tree in the Arapaho-Roosevelt National Forest near our home in Colorado. Due to a recent wildfire that impacted the traditional cutting zone, our forest service opened up Christmas tree cutting to a much larger area, making it so we didn't have to travel very far from home to access. We went on the first weekend day available for our zone, and much like opening day of your favorite hunt, there were many people out to harvest their own wild conifer!

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I made a lot of mistakes harvesting this doe. All that was required was a bit more presence.

It’s something we don’t talk about much, so I’ll broach the subject here. But first a story.

I set out quickly for my tree stand — doe tag in hand — after an intense conversation with a friend. I was there to support him but am also emotionally invested in the situation. I tried to walk quietly, to stay alert, since I could feel my distraction. Climbing up, I failed to check my surroundings. As I reached the top I saw two does bounding off, spooked by me, just 25 yards away. If I’d paused and looked around I could have had a clean shot on an animal unaware of my presence.

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If you’re looking for an inroad to hunting, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better mentor than the squirrel.

While the above image is of a gray squirrel, it’s true of other members of the family Sciuridae too. Tree squirrels and ground squirrels. In Maine, I hunt gray squirrels, red squirrels, and groundhogs. Maybe where you live that would include fox squirrels, prairie dogs, or even arctic ground squirrels. Whatever the species, their anatomy is similar and so are breakdown and cooking methods.

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Travis ‘Good Bull Man’ Condon and I harvested this bull along the Grand River, on Ron Brownotter’s ranch, the country’s largest native-owned bison operation. What I’d thought would be a simple, fenced, farm-style harvest quickly became a half-day search for a herd of several hundred animals freely roaming the 31 square miles of his rolling-hill prairie ranch land. It felt like we’d gone 500 years back in time.

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Have you ever had a Swamp Apple?

This is Annona glabra, a wild, North American tropical fruit that I didn’t know existed until I found one last week! I’ve spent a lot of time in South Florida over the years, yet had never heard of this large and delicious fruit!

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Chokecherries (Prunus virginiana) — often overlooked by wild food enthusiasts — are known as “bitter” by those who don’t love them, though, to this day I’ve still not detected any bitter flavors in their fruits. In the seed kernel perhaps, due to the presence of prunasin, the compound that gives all of the stone-fruit seed kernels (like peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, domesticated cherries, almonds) a bitter almond flavor. But that’s a delicious taste, hardly an off-putting one. In fact, we love to make a dried “fruit leather” by crushing them with their seeds, laying the mash on a baking sheet and drying them in the sun.

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Gathering fireweed (Epilobium angustifolium) at the peak of its bloom.

As I write, I’m sipping a tea made from its leaves and flowers, areal parts of the plant that I fermented for several days before grinding and drying (a tip from our friend Ben Belty of Wild Food Warehouse).

The research on this plant — both in vitro and in vivo — is astonishing. Like many plants, it demonstrates antioxidant, antimicrobial, and anti-inflammatory activity but it’s also cytotoxic and anti-proliferative — meaning it has activity against certain cancer cells.

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Shadbush berry. Serviceberry. Or as my Canadian compatriots refer to them — Saskatoons.

The genus is Amelanchier, and given that they’re blue, relatively similar in size to a blueberry (shadbush berries average slightly larger), that they ripen here just a week or so before the blueberries reach their prime — and that we harvest them on the edges of a vast blueberry plain, it's hard not to compare the two.

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I like to arrive on the farm around sunset and look over the fields as the golden light begins to shift to the murkier purples of dusk. In that last light, I’ll collect range data, using my rangefinder to identify landmarks and taking mental notes about their distances. Then I review my ballistic data so I can account for bullet drop — gravity’s dramatic effects on a projectile as it moves towards its target — at distances beyond my 100 yard zero. Once more I check my pocket, confirming I have the paperwork issued by the warden, permitting me to hunt here after dark. We often call these “nuisance tags”, but here it’s really called a deer depredation permit.

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Brood X (pronounced “Brood 10”) of the 17-year periodical cicadas. That’s right, these insects are 17 years old, just having emerged after nearly 2 decades underground!

And… did I mention they taste like peanuts?!!

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“Half, or less than half.” That’s our rule for the foraging conservation of Ostrich Fern Fiddleheads (Matteuccia struthiopteris). That refers to the number of furled leaves present on the fern crown. In this case, there are 4, so we can take two. The other two will go on to photosynthesize for the plant. Now, there are actually more than four, since the rest are still beneath the forest floor duff, but just to be safe and consistent we don’t count those. If there were 5, we’d still take two — because if there’s an uneven number we take “less than half."

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“Leave it for the birds”

“Bury it!”

“Season to taste, throw away the fish, and eat the cutting board!”

These are the witty responses that you’ll get when asking some fishermen for their favorite Lake Trout recipes. You can add this fish to the long list of species that are — according to many — no good for eating.

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Everyone loves maple syrup. Anyone who says they don’t is lying… or on a diet.

Who can help it? We arrive on earth pre-programmed with a desire for sugar, a remnant survival mechanism from the days before agriculture when we searched the landscape for the precious calories that we needed for life.

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I’m very lucky to have several freezers that stay well-stocked with a variety — you might say “bio-diversity” — of wild meat and fishes.

There are the staples, of course, beautiful maroon steaks of venison from whitetail deer, big, burly roasts of black bear, tender breasts of wild turkey, and flakey white fillets of haddock and pollock. And there are the transient visitors too, occasional denizens of the deep-freeze, like gray squirrel or green iguana. If we dig around in the lower layers, surely there’s a moose roast to be found, or a tenderloin of alligator, or perhaps a salmon or a sea-duck breast or two.

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I crave a dry, crisp cold. Frozen, windswept, brilliantly white landscapes that sparkle sunlight, freeze your breath and bite at your exposed skin.

Here in southern Maine, the winter had been warm and wet. Yes, there’d been some snow, but little ice, and we were plagued by a humidity that hadn’t yet been tempered by the crystallizing influence of subzero temperatures. It was time to go north.

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“Whether your interest is harvesting wild plants for food and medicine, hunting to feed your family, or being better prepared for the potentially challenging times ahead, cultivating natural awareness and a deep understanding of ecology will give you a serious edge.”

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Last week on The WildFed Podcast, we chatted with Dan Gardoqui — nature-based mentor and bird language expert — about how bird language and tracking can make you a better hunter and improve the richness of your experience in the field. Dan shares all sorts of fascinating and useful information in this interview, including the five voices of the birds, how your speed affects wildlife behavior, getting started in tracking, and more.

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Last weekend I had the opportunity to take my friends Rod and Martissa on their first hunt. Martissa had hosted me on her show, the Nekkid Podcast — you can hear that episode here — where she helped me to understand some of the barriers to entry she was feeling as a black woman interested in becoming a hunter. She’s got a defining interest in human freedom, and the idea of hunting and gathering integrates perfectly with her personal mission.

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