Today’s guest is Senior Cyber Tracker Kersey Lawrence.

If you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you’ve heard Daniel speak to a few skilled trackers in past episodes. This skill, of studying, identifying, and ultimately tracking and trailing animals was — most likely — fundamental to the development of the modern human brain and perhaps even to language itself.

At one time, this skill would have been nearly universal amongst humans, but of course, in our more modern era, it’s atrophied to the point that most of us can’t identify the tracks of the native wildlife around us, no less interpret them.

Now, modern hunters are a bit of an exception. Most of us are aware of the track patterns of the animals we pursue, and use these tracks, albeit in a rudimentary way, to locate our quarry. That kind of tracking is a bit like learning an alphabet, or maybe even reading a few monosyllabic words. What Daniel's talking with Kersey about today is different. It’s more akin to reading sentences, paragraphs, and ultimately books of knowledge about how animals have used the landscape in the recent past and potentially might use it in the future too.

There are places and peoples in the world where this skill is still alive, part of an unbroken lineage that stretches back into the deepest recesses of human antiquity. And there are also folks, for whom this field of study came later in life but who have developed it into a contemporary art-form and culture — who’ve codified it and who are ensuring it doesn’t blink out of existence the way so much of our ancestral skills and technologies have.

Kersey has a foot in both worlds. She lives part time and works alongside trackers in Africa, who come from communities where tracking is still practiced the way it always has been. Places where the practice of this art was never generationally interrupted. But she also lives part time here in the US where she teaches tracking to folks whose lineage forgot the art of tracking long ago.

Kersey is the first woman to ever earn the title of Senior Tracker in the internationally renowned CyberTracker system. Today she’s going to tell us what CyberTracker is, and about the art of tracking. She’s done the deep dive, and she’s going to introduce us to something our ancestors forgot long ago, and maybe even invite us to pick it up where those distant relatives left off.

To not just follow in their footsteps, but to follow their footsteps themselves.

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Today's episode is with our good friend Randy Huntley. This guy is a hoot. He’s a hunter, a registered Maine guide who leads bear and moose hunts, an Animal Damage Control trapper, a maple sap tapper, an avid fiddleheader, and all-around outdoorsman. He’s got one of the best beards in his field, and he’s also Daniel's beaver tapping mentor.

One of the things we like the most about him, he’s as into eating wild game as we are, and for him, eating beaver is no exception.

As you probably know, for most of modern beaver trapping history, it was the pelts that motivated trappers to wade into the beaver's watery world. But today, with the price of pelts so low, it's scarcely worth your time to trap for furs alone. Even when selling the Castor glands into the market, it’s hard to imagine breaking even as a money-motivated beaver trapper. But when you start considering the incredible food value, and the fact that they can weigh 20-60 pounds apiece, trapping as a wild food strategy starts looking really enticing. Furs and glands become a secondary consideration.

So, with eating beaver on our mind — insert laugh track here — we've been setting off to the stream banks with Randy to “lay some steel” as they say. The result, some of the best eating game meat the wild world provides. Beautiful red meat for steaks and braises, and lots of succulent fat. Not what you normally associate with rodents, but then again, these are the continent's largest, and they’re in a culinary category all their own.

We think beaver is one of North America's most underutilized game meats, so if you're looking to fill the freezer without needing to fire a single shot, consider a beaver trapline. After all, it hunts while you sleep. But you’ll need to go find yourself a mentor like Randy Huntley first because there’s no substitute for a great teacher.

And if he comes with a highly polished Maine accent, just consider that a bonus!

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Today’s guest is John McGannon — chef, author, television host, a true pioneer in wild game cookery and a veteran of the wild-game cookery television space that we at WildFed are still fledgling to.

We really appreciate the opportunity to talk to someone like him, since he’s already tread much of the landscape we're now exploring, and also because he can give valuable context to what the last couple of decades in the space has been like.

Probably most valuable is hearing his key take aways about game cookery. After many years of trial and error, he’s distilled down a few key strategies for making every cut of game shine in the kitchen and on the plate. Most significant — John says they’ll probably put it on his epitaph — is his emphasis on dry-aging. So, if you're looking for take-aways from this episode, listen to how he suggests you age game meats at home.

You’ll want to work these ideas into your field-care and kitchen.

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We’re joined today by Zach Elfers, aka @woodlandrambler of the Nomad Seed project.

Zach has a unique suite of skills and knowledge base that centers around the intersection of botany, horticulture, foraging, wild-tending and traditional ecological knowledge. As a member of the foraging community, Zach is going a lot deeper than mere plant identification or gathering. He’s looking at creating large scale, reciprocal ecological relationships between people, the plants, the land, and the rest of the non-human beings that we share the landscape with. And while this was a get-to-know-you kind of conversation, Daniel left it feeling like "this is the kind of thinking he hopes can start to infuse North American foraging culture over the next decade."

Our conversation quickly veered away from merely foraging and went into some of the challenging-to-traverse terrain of the socio-political aspects of our cultural relationship to the land and each other. Of particular interest to us is the juxtaposition of top-down vs bottom-up approaches to implementation. We look at indigenous vs colonial land management paradigms, and discuss possible roads back to a more long-term sustainable path of nature integration.

This interview gets into some of the high-level, big-picture thinking that we really enjoy. It’s a reminder that wild foods are about a lot more than what’s on your plate. It’s about how we relate to the landscape, to the creatures we share the planet with, and how we relate to each other too. Because food is so much more than calories. It’s a representation of how we choose to walk in the world.

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Rebugging The Planet?

We spend a lot of time and energy considering the role that charismatic animals play in our ecosystems and why we should conserve them. But what about less charismatic critters? The ones that aren’t so pretty.

Vicki Hird is here to speak on behalf of the bugs — not just insects — but invertebrates in general. Throughout this interview, we’ll use the term bug loosely to encompass insects, arachnids, plankton, and just about any other invertebrate too, because, as it turns out, in many cases, their populations are in decline. The culprits are many. Some obvious — like habitat loss and deliberate or unintended chemical assault. But there are some surprises too — like the impact that high-energy communications systems like 5G technology may have on invertebrate populations.

It’s easy to muster the public will to conserve the polar bear, the blue whale, and the bald eagle. But what of bugs? Are our unconscious biases keeping us incognizant of their decline?

We’ve all been inculcated, not intentionally, but subconsciously, with a cultural bias — disdain might be a better word — for bugs. Squash them, spray them with pesticide, avoid them at all costs. But in an era that, looking back a few hundred years from now, will likely be defined by ecological crisis and the measures taken to confront it — what we need most is a reframing of the way we view our fellow life forms. Because we can’t sustainably change the way we act without changing the way we think.

Many of us received a miseducation on what Vicki calls bugs. We learned they're dirty, they’re dangerous, they’re vectors for disease. Vicki is here to correct the record and offer us the opportunity to reframe our relationship with these all-important creatures. And she’s sharing things we can each do, individually, to promote the return of their numbers.

She’s here to help re-bug the planet! But first, we have to re-bug our minds.

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David Meltzer is Professor of Prehistory at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, an archeologist who has conducted research throughout North America, and the author of over 200 scientific studies, and 10 books, including First Peoples In A New World.

His primary interest is the first peopling of the continent — a subject that, for whatever reason, has always captivated us. It’s not just the idea of Asiatic people venturing across Beringia and into an unpeopled world, which is interesting enough on its own, but it’s the world they entered into — an ice age landscape full of now extinct animals, like elephantine mammoths, deadly saber tooth cats, giant short faced bears, enormous ground sloths, and gargantuan primitive bison.

But what do we really know about these so called “paleo-indian” peoples and their migration here? And what role, if any, might they have played in the extinction of so much of the ice age megafauna they encountered — and in many cases, hunted?

Today we’ll get the big picture overview of what we know about the first peopling of North and South America and what the world was like just 15,000 years ago. It might sound like a long time, but in the scheme of human history, it’s really quite recent. So recent in fact, that conversations like this leave us feeling like that world is almost within reach. It’s exciting and energizing to imagine that world, in all its contrast to the modern one we find ourselves in today.

And while we’re now safer, more affluent, and less inclined to be eaten, there’s a feeling we can’t shake that there was also something essential about that time that’s now missing. Perhaps that’s naive nostalgia talking, but we're gonna indulge it, just for today.

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Today’s show really harkens back to Daniel's roots! His earliest work was focused on nutrition, which has been a primary interest of his for more than two and a half decades. He eventually landed on a wild foods lifestyle by following that thread of interest wherever it led. After becoming very dissatisfied with modern dietary dogma and popular fad diets, he started looking into our ancestral past for clues about what the human animal needs for nutritional inputs, and at what worked historically.

Today's guest — Dr. Bill Schindler — is author of the new book Eat Like A Human. The book lays out simply and clearly, the foundations of a zoologically appropriate human diet, based on both medical and nutritional science, but also on several hundred thousand years of evolutionary history.

Bill and Daniel, while coming from really different origin stories, have landed on really similar conclusions about food and how we relate to it. It's concepts like those he explores in his book that have led to Daniel hunting, fishing, foraging, and making this podcast and the WildFed TV show.

In other words, it was the desire to integrate ancestral practices into a modern life that led to this show. But you don’t have to harvest your own food to start putting these kinds of dietary practices into place. You can learn to forage the produce section and hunt the deli area of your local grocer. Bill’s book will show you how. Follow that path long enough, and you might just find yourself in the woods, or on the sea, chasing the most nutritious and ancestrally coherent food you can find.. so you can, like Bill says…. Eat Like A Human.

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Kevin Kossowan is the creator of From The Wild, a James Beard award nominated, culinary adventure series about wild foods that has elevated field cookery to a level not really seen before in a tv series. A film maker, he’s also the co-creator of Les Stroud’s Wild Harvest on PBS and Nat Geo.

One of the things we love about talking with Kevin is his willingness to get into some of the more taboo and uncomfortable nooks and crannies of the ethical and moral and ecological obligations of hunting, fishing, and foraging... especially into conversations we, as hunters, are often told we shouldn’t have.

While the first part of this conversation is some catch up, talk about recent harvests and the landscapes they happen in, the second part of this conversation really heats up, as Daniel and Kevin start talking about things like pollution in wild foods, ethics in killing, and the things that motivate or deter us from participating or not participating in harvests.

The terrain gets sticky, and that’s precisely why we think it's important to explore. Because what we do, harvesting organisms from the wild for food, needs to be clearly articulated for us to make quality decisions about life and death, and of course, for the public to understand — and hopefully support — our choices, and the system of laws that legally governs our actions. Some of these moral quandaries and ethical dilemmas aren’t solvable, they’re too nuanced and individual for that. Instead, each of us has to dig deep inside to determine where we land on these issues.

We hope you enjoy this conversation!

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Eugenia Bone is a nationally known food and science writer and the author of several books, including Mycophilia, Revelations from the Weird World of Mushrooms, and Microbia, a Journey into the Unseen World Around You. Most recently, she can be seen in Fantastic Fungi, a new documentary you can see on Netflix that looks at the healing properties of mushrooms, from the medicinal to the entheogenic. She’s featured alongside other greats like Michael Pollen and Paul Stamets. We highly recommend the film, and as you’ll hear in this episode, Eugenia has recently edited the Fantastic Fungi Community Cookbook — which is a companion to the film.

Eugenia was a real pleasure to talk to, with her lively style and excellent grasp of all things fungi, from foraging to the most recent science.

From cutting edge cuisine to modern building materials, from environmental clean-up to cancer treatment and even psychotherapy, mushrooms are finally myceliating the western mind and its formerly mycophobic culture. So here’s to mycophilia, the antidote to the anti-mushroom sentiment of bygone days. The future is bright, if not partially decomposing and covered in spores.

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Our guest today — Josh Niland — is changing the way the culinary world thinks about fish. From the way we handle it, to how we store it, to the way it’s cooked, Josh has single handedly created a new school of fish cuisine. Though part of it is a strong ethic of using more of the animal, that’s really just the beginning.

Imagine, at present, in restaurants and at home, only about 45% of a fish is utilized for food. Now imagine a James Beard award-winning chef who is getting 90% yield and creating dishes no one has ever conceived of before. Josh is dry-aging fish too, discovering that, with proper storing — and contrary to all convention — the flavor of fish flesh, like that of land animals, can be improved with hanging time, provided it’s kept dry and cold.

It’s hard to overstate the impact Josh’s work is going to have on the science and art of processing and cooking fish. If nothing else, it’ll change the way you see fish forever.

At WildFed, we're slowly shifting our approach to handling, processing, aging, cooking, and eating fish. There’s a lot of habit, convention, and institutional inertia to overcome. But the results Josh is getting make it clear… We can do more to honor the fish we eat, the people we feed, and the oceans, lakes, rivers, and ponds we harvest from. 45% is unacceptable. Let’s start eating scale to tail!

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This week's interview is with Brian Hammons, CEO and President of Hammons Black Walnuts — the country's largest commercial producer of finished black walnuts. Black walnuts, of course, are a wild food very different from the English Walnuts most of us are familiar with, and sourced from nut trees native to North America.

Each year Hammons buys millions of pounds of Black Walnuts from foragers all over the middle of the country, through an innovative network of buying and hulling stations they set up each harvest season.

Brian is passionate about Black Walnuts, just like his father, and his father’s father were. He and his company embody the noble, but not so common traits, of hard work and work ethic, good stewardship, family tradition, and transparent business practices. And all of that comes through in the way he talks about what they do at Hammons.

We often quote the writer and foraging icon Sam Thayer here on the show. He talks about what he calls “Ecoculture” as a more ancient and sustainable alternative to Agriculture. He’s quick to point out that with the right shifts in landscape management, viable wild food sheds are possible on a scale we can’t really imagine at present. To us, Hammons represents a company that’s been doing precisely that — creating a viable market for a wild food, sustainably, for decades. Not only that, but it’s a win-win-win, because as the customer gets a healthy, sustainable wild food, Hammons prospers and so do the foragers who supply them with their raw materials. Supporting companies like theirs moves us towards a new — or perhaps old — way of engaging the landscape for our food needs. It’s exciting to us, and it opens up a world of possibilities! Here’s to happy foraging!

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It’s our pleasure to share a conversation with Sunny Savage of Maui, Hawaii — a modern-day wild food pioneer and incredible asset to our community of foragers. Sunny teaches wild food internships, created a foraging and cooking television series, ran a food truck featuring foraged ingredients, and has even created a foraging app.

While most of us think of Hawaii as a kind of tropical paradise, there are — in some parts of the archipelago — darker forces at work there than just the endless golf courses. Villainous bioengineering companies test their toxic wares there, and invasive species — otherwise balanced into their own native ecology — wreak havoc on the native floral and faunal assemblages of the Hawaiian islands. While the typical response of conservation groups has been to reach for pesticides — very often from those same bioengineering companies we just mentioned — Sunny has been presenting a different approach. Making them, when we can, into foods.

Sunny shares some powerful insights in this interview that are very important to the ongoing conversation we’ve had here on this show about deleterious, non-native plants, and this is just a compliment to her otherwise wonderful wild food wisdom. So, enjoy this conversation with the one and only Sunny Savage!

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We're on our way back from North and South Dakota as this podcast comes out. Instead of flying, we drove out, so we could bring our coolers, which, to our delight and gratitude, are now brimming with buffalo meat. Our harvest was enough to share with our host, the many hands that helped us, and our production team too. As he always has, the buffalo provides.

Now, of course, we know they’re properly called bison today — scientific name Bison bison — but after a week on the Standing Rock Reservation, it's hard to call them that. There, the people — Lakota and Dakota — say buffalo. And who knows better than a people whose life way and history has been so inextricably linked to this animal. So, for now, we'll call them what they call them.

Travis 'Good Bull Man' Condon — our host — invited us out to harvest a buffalo on the prairie and to share a traditional meal with some elders from the community. He put in a tremendous amount of work with us, gutting, butchering, and packing our buffalo. He shared meals with us — and ceremony, language, stories and songs. It’s hard to describe all the magic we experienced during our stay there, and most is probably best kept close to the heart anyway, but suffice it to say that we are leaving there with more than full coolers. Our hearts are full too, with joy and love, and appreciation for our new friends. We’re already planning our trip back to what was some of the most beautiful country we’d ever visited and some of the most gracious folks we’ve ever met.

Our hunt, our chokecherry harvest, and of course the incredible meal we shared after, will be featured in Season 2 of WildFed on the Outdoor Channel. We’ve already reviewed the footage and can hardly wait for you to see it.

So, Wóphila — thanks — and gratitude. Your listenership, as always, is appreciated.

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Jess Starwood is an herbalist, forager, chef, and the author of the new book, Mushroom Wanderland. Being on opposite coasts, we've only known Jess through the exquisite photography and ecologically inspired writing featured on her beautifully curated social media pages. With her new book getting the attention of the foraging community, and with so many requests to have her on the show, this seemed like a great time to finally connect with her to learn more about the important impact she's having on modern wild food culture.

In this interview, Jess and Daniel chat about the wild world of mushrooms, herbalism, the sustainability of wild food, the complex tastes of wild food and so much more. Enjoy!

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Today’s podcast is with Jenna Rozelle, a longtime friend of the podcast and someone who has been very involved — if not from a bit behind the scenes — in the modern wild food culture. She was one of our first guests, and we recently sat down with her to catch up and talk about the state of the wild food scene — both here where we live and around the country.

Jenna, our producer Grant, and Daniel have a fun and lively discussion ranging all over the map as they discuss foraging, hunting, fishing, and general wild food ecology, as well as some thoughts about the future of wild food culture in North America. The conversation is filled with a lot of useful info and some good laughs too. Enjoy!

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Mario Kalpou is the host of Man Eats Wild, a new show premiering on Outdoor Channel later this month.

Mario’s lifestyle is larger than life. He’s a self-professed adrenaline addict, who seeks thrills and big adventure, but he’s also a very thoughtful hunter, and his ethics, like ours here at WildFed, center around his approach to food.

A native of Australia, he made the first season of his show in the South Pacific — filming in Australia, but also in New Zealand.

As you’re listening to this, he’s headed off to Africa, where he formerly worked as a hunting guide — what they call a Professional Hunter there — to film the second season of his new show.

Man Eats Wild, like WildFed, airs on Mondays on the Outdoor Channel as part of their Taste of the Wild block, as both of our shows are food-focused. While our artistic styles are a bit different, we both view hunting, fishing, and foraging through a similar lens. We think it's an ancient — but still relevant and important — approach to acquiring quality food and that this food is healthier for us than anything we can purchase in the store.

This was a great conversation, and we're excited to have him as a friend and ally… and we're wishing Man Eats Wild huge success with its upcoming premier!

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We've just returned from a week in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas, filming an episode for Season 2 of WildFed TV show on the Outdoor Channel.

Our host and guide to the incredible property we visited — Bamberger Ranch Preserve — was Jared Holmes, a zoologist, herpatologist, hunter, butcher, ecological steward and landscape regeneration specialist. Bamberger Ranch serves as a model of what is possible with good stewardship, despite the incredible insults to the land that have been perpetrated here over the last several hundred years.

We came home from the ranch with feral hog meat, and braised one of the hams a few nights ago. We were simply blown away by the quality of the meat. We’ve had wild hog before, and have enjoyed it, but not like this. These hogs have been living in an intact eco-community, with mineralized soil, clean spring water, and feeding on a diversity of healthy, wild foods. They’re simply healthier hogs, and their meat reflects that.

Jared’s living, working, and raising a family in this little slice of paradise. But the thing is, the whole earth is ready for this kind of regeneration. We just have to get to work.

We’ll leave it to Jared to tell you how.

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Today’s episode was a lot of fun to record, since it's rare that Grant Guiliano — co-producer of this podcast and co-creator of the WildFed television series — and Daniel sit down to just record a show together. There’s so many fun stories and interesting reflections on the things we learn and encounter during — and outside of — those productions — and we thought it would be fun to share some of that with you today!

If you’re just tuning in for the first time, this episode isn’t our typical content, since we’re usually interviewing wild food experts, wildlife biologists, ecologists, authors, chefs, or noteworthy hunters, anglers, and foragers. And we’ll be back to that content next week.

But for now, we hope you’ll enjoy this more candid, behind the scenes conversation between Daniel and Grant.

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Moose! They’re the largest member of the deer family, and no one knows them better than our guest today, Lee Kantar, Maine’s State Moose biologist and head of its Moose Management Program.

Here in Maine we have a thriving population — the largest in the lower 48 — but our tags are coveted, released each summer after a much-anticipated lottery drawing.

While moose are majestic, if not a bit goofy on those long spindly legs, they’re also facing several threats, not the least of which is the winter tick, an ectoparasite that’s literally been bleeding our moose population to death. Add to that the threat of brain worm and chronic wasting disease, and it soon becomes apparent why the work of Lee Kantar and his colleagues is so important.

It’s also important for us to understand what helps them thrive and what leads to their ultimate demise. That’s why Lee is flying around in helicopters counting moose, wrangling them for the tagging program, and racing to the scene when a collar shows a mortality to perform a necropsy on the spot. All that data is fed back into a management program that’s goal is ensuring moose have a future here with us. Not just for the hunt, but for their own intrinsic value on the landscape.

Tune in for a fascinating conversation on moose, their ecology and effective moose management.

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Never buy fish from a stranger. That’s the motto of our guests Tim and Kayla, AKA the New England Fish Mongers.

The Fishmongers of New England have created a model that is changing the way consumers get their fish. From the boat where it's well-cared for, to the Fishmongers who cut and package it, direct to you at the farmers market or restaurant. We're hopeful that this and similar models become the norm, not only bringing the fishermen and the retail buyer closer together, but shortening the supply chain, ensuring that less of the quality, and just as important, the story, is lost in the exchange.

Seafood is, in our opinion, one of the healthiest, most nutrient dense, and physiologically most important food sources we can access. But it can also be some of the most ecologically unsustainable and, frankly, bad tasting if it’s not done right.

If you don’t hunt or raise animals, you need a good butcher. If you don’t fish or get offshore you need a good fishmonger. Fish sticks be dammed!

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