The Salmon Sisters — Emma Teal Laukitis and Claire Neaton — grew up working on their family's commercial fishing boat in Alaska. They continue to preserve and celebrate their unique coastal heritage today through their work in commercial fishing, their nautical-inspired clothing and gear, and their incredible cookbook infused with the flavors and culture of wild Alaska.
Read MoreThis is my fifth season of black bear hunting, and I feel very blessed to have just harvested my eighth black bear. Each year I hunt two states, which allows me to take one bear in New Hampshire and another one in Maine. All eight of these bears — seven of which we’ve eaten and one that we tragically lost (that’s another story) — have been harvested under the tutelage of far more experienced hunters. I still consider myself a student. My first and most recent bears were both taken over bait, and the six bears in between were harvested over hounds. These last two years I’ve had the opportunity to take two exceptional bears, animals whose lives we continue to celebrate and give thanks for every time we gaze upon their incredible skulls — both of which occupy a place of dignified honor in our home.
Read MoreIt was late 2018 when my hunting buddy and foraging mentor, Arthur Haines, began showing me studies about lead from hunting ammunition contaminating meat harvested by hunters. He kept gently nudging me to make the switch.
Initially, I was a bit defensive. It wasn’t that I disagreed, I know lead is a toxic metal — and I was well aware of the health implications, like reduced IQ, increased aggression, reduced motor skills, and cancer, but I was — like a lot of hunters — slow to make the change. I knew I was feeding this meat to my wife and friends, and of course, consuming it myself too — and as Arthur points out in a blog he wrote on the topic, lead level increases are often detectable in people shortly after consumption. What was stopping me?
Read MoreLike the rising and falling of the tides, there’s an annual rhythm to the amount of meat piled up in our freezers. We spend the summer and fall filling them up, and the winter and spring slowly eating through what we’ve accumulated. Summertime is — aside from the saltwater fish fillets we’ve put away — our freezers’ equivalent of low tide.
Read MoreI wake up to the morning twilight appearing through the fabric of my tent. It’s cold, but I know it’s time to get up and get moving, maybe even take a cold plunge in the creek to get the blood moving.
Each summer for nearly 2 decades I’ve ventured to these mountains in search of medicinal plants, to learn from them, to listen for their voices, and now, to renew old relationships that have fortified my life.
Read MoreWhile on a recent walk through a local wooded area, I encountered quite an array of mushrooms — some edible, some not so edible, but all fascinating in their own right.
One species in particular caught my eye because of its close resemblance to oyster mushrooms, and upon closer inspection, its true identity was revealed to me.
Read MoreThis is a traditional, unsmoked Italian-style pepperone that has been dry-cured and fermented. It’s tangier than the store-bought stuff, delicious on a charcuterie board or on a pizza. This was one of the first cured sausages we made, and it’s definitely going to be part of our annual rotation. A lot of charcuterie recipes call for the addition of pork fat, but this one doesn’t. It’s 100% wild game, perfect for a purist.
Read MoreCommon Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) is probably the hardiest vegetable that I forage all summer. It provides many substantial meals during the few July weeks that it flowers.
Read MoreLast week Avani and I took the boat down to the coast for the first time this season. The larger striped bass (Morone saxatilis) have, once again, been making their way up the coast as part of their annual northward migration. Though most of these fish winter in and around the Chesapeake Bay area, each summer they migrate as far north as Canada’s Saint Lawrence River, arriving in Maine in late May and early June.
Read MoreAs modern hunter-gatherers, our subsistence practice is lived by the seasons. The uninitiated often assume that you simply forage for the species you know all year round, however, the reality is far more complex. Each animal has its season, a specific time when we hunt or fish for them. Sometimes for ecological reasons and often due to the regulations pertaining to them. Similarly, with plants, each species has its specific season, and usually it's just a specific part of the plant that we gather at that time. Nature’s calendar dictates what we harvest.
Read MoreEach spring there’s a phenomenon taking place in our coastal river mouths that, despite having taken place for millennia, has never been witnessed by most of our residents. The running of the alewives.
Alewives, a species of anadromous river herring, live much of their lives in salt water but are born and spawn in freshwater ponds and lakes. Each year they make a spring migration from the sea into the rivers and brooks to reach the still-water where their young will be born.
Read MoreMy pack basket nestled in an early spring colony of wild leeks — Allium tricoccum.
It's fascinating the way baskets remain a relevant technology to the forager. Despite being an early and somewhat “primitive” development, they’re still — even today — the optimal tool for the job.
Read MoreHis head glowed a phosphorescent white in the early morning’s crepuscular light, like a dimly lit light bulb tangled in a crisscross of shadows. Darkness still obfuscating everything else inside the forest’s murky wood line.
At its edge, where it gave way to a green field that stretched to a mountainous horizon, an aggressive hen was attacking a decoy, too inanimate to submit. Unlike her, this hen was a ruse — hollow and plastic, only capable of spinning in merry-go-round circles around the central stake that held its body upright against her constant assault.
Read MoreAs a hunter, particularly as someone who started late in life, it’s common to get the question: “Why do you hunt when you can just buy meat?” or to hear “People no longer need to hunt, it’s barbaric in the modern world.” Of course, I have a sequence of somewhat canned responses. “It’s important for me to know where my food comes from” or “It keeps me connected to the ecology of the place where I live.” or even “It’s the most free-ranging, organic meat a person can get, and this animal’s life was wild and free”. Now, however, with meat shortages beginning to be seen and felt around the country, hunting has suddenly acquired some renewed relevancy in the eyes of the public.
Read MoreJust as the birch syrup season is winding down, in the days that precede the turkey season, there’s a wild food opportunity lurking in the shallow water inlets where snow-melt swollen brooks feed into freshly thawed lakes and ponds.
Read MoreBirch syrup will probably never receive the recognition it deserves.
It’s just too easy to compare it to maple syrup and if you were to try them side by side it’d be easy to taste why. Maple’s explosively sweet sucrose lights up your tongue — and dopamine circuits — in a way with which birch simply can’t compete. Maple is cheaper to make, less prone to being scorched and burned, and — at around $65 per gallon — has a surprisingly strong market value. Maple is iconic too — even someone who’s never had the real thing has at least tasted a knock-off.
Read MoreWe just finished cooking off our maple syrup for the 2020 season — and despite the interruptions to our otherwise regularly scheduled lives — our final total is just over 8 gallons of finished syrup! I’m pleased to report that this is just about a quart more than last year's yield, so we are trending in a positive direction.
Read MoreThere’s a winter tradition here in Maine we call “smelting”. It’s how we refer to the catching of a rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax) through the ice on estuaries where freshwater rivers flow into the sea. Smelt are found both in the ocean and landlocked in fresh water (though the freshwater fish are considerably smaller). When we go smelting we’re after these sea-run fish. (as opposed to “dip-netting for smelt” in the spring, a freshwater activity).
Read MoreEllie is a Plott Hound, a southern hunting breed developed for tracking, trailing, and treeing game. The pack she was born out of are black bear hunting specialists. Like them, she’s not been spayed — most hunting dogs are kept intact for breeding — but unlike them, she’s mostly a house dog. No kennel dweller, she’s got a soft, warm bed at home. Though her mother, father, brothers, and sisters all pursue bears at an elite level, she spends her days with Avani and I as our companion animal. That’s what she’s doing here, tucked into a sled on the ice, fishing with us.
Read MoreWe were targeting sheepshead, a delicious spade-shaped fish in possession of a distinctly human smile, sporting people-like teeth evolved for feeding on crustaceans and bivalves. Using fiddler crabs as bait we were feeling for the faintest sensations in the line as they delicately picked apart our offerings. Slowly we were filling the icebox with fish.
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