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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!!
“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."
“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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
This 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.
It 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?
Like 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.
I 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.
While 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.
This 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.
Common 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.
Last 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.
As 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.
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.