uvAggravator2.0

I just got word from a producer of Deer & Deer Hunting TV that my interview is going to air on the Versus channel this Saturday, July 31st at 9 am ET.

Unfortunately I will not be able to watch, since I don't have cable or satellite at home.

This is an interesting moment to observe because as far as I know this will be the first time that the locavore hunting movement has been formally introduced to the traditional American deer hunting culture. These are two groups that seem very different, yet can be beneficial to each other. I am surprised that this is happening through a TV show rather than a piece in Field & Stream or a similar mainstream hunting publication.

There's no telling what the mainstream hunting culture is going to make of us. Some of them might be suspicious of us, others contemptuous of our odd methods. My hope is that we will be seen as complimentary to mainstream hunting. With our focus on meat-hunting, we tend to shoot does rather than bucks and we may take of some of the pressure off of trophy hunters to cull does while happily leaving the trophy bucks to them.

[The photo is me, speaking to a group of aspiring locavore hunters in NYC]

I know that a whole lot of people are waiting for me to announce new dates for the 'Deer Hunting for Locavores' classes. Right now the weather is just too hot for us to be confident of getting a fresh, intact deer to the field dressing site before the meat spoils. This is such an important part of the class that I'm not willing to teach without it.

When the weather cools down, I will schedule the next weekend class. Look towards October for that. Meanwhile, I'll probably have the details up in the next 24 hours on small game hunting instruction and outings for September.

Fergus Clare, primitive skills expert, skinned this fallow deer a few weekends ago with a piece of obsidian. It hadn't even been turned into a proper tool. Just a broken shard of rock. You could also do this with a knife but it wouldn't be nearly as awesome.

I have skinned more deer than I can even remember using the more common modern technique of cutting the hide off with a skinning knife. Yet after watching Fergus use this method a few times I am fully sold on it. The old-fashioned hunter-gatherer method that Fergus favors is quicker, easier, carries less risk of injury and results in a hide that is easier to scrape and tan.

Please be aware that this is an extremely graphic and honest portrayal of cutting and pulling the hide off of an animal that had been alive only about 15 minutes earlier. If this is going to disturb or offend you then please do not watch the video.

I'm the guy holding the camera and assisting. We were in a serious hurry on account of the hot summer weather that risked spoilage of the meat. There was no time to set up the perfect shot but I think that this video will still give you a good idea of how to use this technique on your next deer. The video is in 3 parts. I wish I could edit it down into 6 or 7 minutes to tell the story more succinctly, but I have no software, talent or time for video editing.

Nothing says 'Mauser' to me like those classic silver discs of metal on the stocks of early K-98s. That design element is so distinctive that Hayao Miyazaki used them in the first ten minutes of his animated film, 'Howl's Moving Castle.'

Several people have asked how we installed the original Mauser stock discs in the synthetic stock used for a .35 Whelen that I built in one of our classes a few weeks ago. The best answer is a video of the process.

This is another .35 Whelen that Michael, one of our students this past weekend, was building. I did the stock discs but he did the vast majority of the other work himself. The reason for heating up the discs with a blow torch is that the bottoms of the discs are flat while the side of the rifle stock is curved. We are recessing the discs into the plastic in order avoid a raised edge. Letting the disc melt its own recess guarantees a perfect fit, unlike trying to carve out a recess by other means.

I apologize for the terrible camera work in the first 30 seconds. That is what I get for trying to hold the camera myself while working. After that, Paul Fritz and Michael take turns holding the camera for me.

The parts that are not shown and are not self-explanatory are the flaring of the brass pipe and the clean-up of the area surrounding the discs. After the discs have been melted into the plastic it is still necessary to press something into either end of the pipe to seal it tight into the rings. We used a lathe in this case but any pair of conical pieces of metal pushed hard into either side should work, given enough pressure. The bubbles of melted plastic around the edges were cleaned up easily with a a couple of sharp blades.

The stock discs are fully functional with the strength of the brass tube. I still need to put a video up here that shows how to use those discs to fully disassemble a Mauser bolt.

This piece of news about New York state's plans to wantonly waste the lives and bodies of 170,000 resident Canada geese infuriates me.

Following many months of discussions between the FAA, the Dept. of Agriculture and various state agencies, the goose population is being deliberately reduced in order to prevent the plane crashes that can result from the geese being sucked into the engines. I'm ok with this and such an effort is past due. These large populations of resident geese do not behave and migrate the way that their species traditionally has and they are out of synch with the environments that they find themselves in. In some areas of the US, they are arguably an invasive species.

What I'm not ok with is the way that they are planning to do this. Quoth the New York Times:

“The captured geese are placed alive in commercial turkey crates. The geese would be brought to a secure location and euthanized with methods approved by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Euthanized geese would be buried.”

If a hunter like myself engaged in this behavior, I would (justly) be prosecuted for wanton waste. All 50 states, including New York, have laws against wanton waste. The point of such laws is to ensure that birds and animals are not killed in waste and that they are used as food or for some other legitimate purpose. New York's statute is less restrictive than that of some other states but I think that it makes the point well.

This is the wrong way of doing it. Poisoning the geese to death by gas or injection and burying the corpses is a despicable and unethical waste of food. I think that it is also unnecessary. Hunters could be taking far more Canada geese if New York would change their hunting regulations into a body of law focused on hunting geese rather than playing a game.

I suggest that they do the following:

1. Eliminate the 3 shell capacity limit for shotguns used to hunt Canada geese. Federal regulations now allow states to do this.

2. Allow the use of electronic calls. Again, federal regulations changed to allow states to do this.

3. Not only allow, but actively encourage geese to be hunted with archery equipment. Work with targeted municipalities around airports to create urban archery seasons for resident Canada geese.

4. Allow the use of bait.

5. Allow the use of nets in designated urban and suburban areas.

These regulations that I suggest changing are things that have added up to a game rather than a sensible regulatory framework for hunting. If a hunter chooses to limit herself to a particular weapon or tactic, so be it. But prohibiting these hunting tactics by law is not in the public interest and is not necessary to prevent over-harvest, given that harvest totals are already regulated by bag limits. None of these items are safety issues, either.

The government of New York can't be especially concerned with hunting ethics or fair chase of Canada geese, given the fact that they are going to round 170,000 of them up in order to gas and bury them. So how can they say, with a straight face, that hunters shouldn't be using nets, crossbows or electronic calls in order to eat the geese?

They should be using some of this budget instead to offer goose-hunting workshops to potential new hunters, complete with lessons on shotgunning and archery. There are legions of locavores in the state of New York who would jump on such an opportunity.

You will be hearing about this issue again and again over the next few years as the FAA and the DOA work to reduce goose populations near airports all over America. This is a broad enough issue that we need to find a more ethical way of reducing resident goose populations. Something that doesn't involve killing animals without at least having the decency to use them as food.

"Go with God now. Go with God."

Gail Rose closed her eyes and pressed her hand over the dying heart of a fallow deer which lay twitching on the bare dirt. I knelt behind her and watched a thick stream of dark, viscous arterial blood wind its way down the dusty slope and into a coagulating pool.

Cicadas trilled together in a rising and falling uniform drone. Chickens clucked and argued in the coop beside the deer enclosure. The 10 AM sun was already in my eyes, baking the ground and promising another day of drought.

The old woman was barefoot. She said we could take any of the deer except for the white one and except for the ones with orange tags. Fergus had steadied my rifle against his shoulder and chosen this one with a bullet through the head. It was as good a doe as any.

There was not the time for a long goodbye for the deer that was already dead even though its heart did not know it for a while. Tourists could come to the farm at any moment to pick their own beans and tomatoes and to buy eggs. We lifted the deer into the back of Fergus' truck and said goodbye to Gail.

In the heat of a Virginia summer we knew that the meat would spoil before the end of our 2 hour drive. Fergus knew of an old Confederate forge close by. Grant and Sherman couldn't find it so it kept making cannon balls and artillery pieces and it didn't get blown up or torn down. Grant's army couldn't find it but Fergus could.

We pulled off the road and parked the truck in front of a massive old chimney with a cracked lintel. I lifted the deer while Fergus tied it by the neck from the rafter tails of a spring house. Fergus produced a chip of obsidian and began skinning the deer as I filmed it. When he spoke I wasn't sure whether to film his face or his hands. I thought that people would probably like to watch a tall Irishman skinning a deer with a piece of stone so I had better get it all on camera.

I thought that every car that whizzed past would be a cop car. I imagined the sound of wheels crunching slowly on gravel and a car door slamming and then silence as the officer looked first at the blood and brains spattered in the back of Fergus' black Toyota pickup truck, then at the rifle on the back seat. Would he even question us before calling for backup?

A swarm of green flies grew. The temperature climbed and we worked more quickly, not bothering to gut it but desperate to quarter off the meat and put it in the cooler before it spoiled.

The square, spotted hide came off like a big wet sock and Fergus held it up in brief triumph. I handed him the camera and set to work at quartering the deer. Yellow jackets joined the flies. My knife grew dull and I stopped to sharpen it. The last rich, red backstrap finally fell off, leaving the absurd sight of a bare, upright spine suspended in mid-air with a teardrop-shaped sack of guts at the bottom of it. It looked as though H.R. Giger had been hired by Field and Stream.

I walked to the stream that trickled beside the forge and washed the blood and fat off of my hands and blades. A handful of wet sand to scour my skin. A bottle of water to rinse off the lid of the cooler.

The sloped stone walls of the forge beside the truck were enormous. Like a fortress. I could smell the horses that ignored us from across the street. Fergus strapped the cooler to the tailgate of the truck and we drove away.

[Photo used courtesy of Universal Pops under Creative Commons license]

Work and hunting for food were interfering with each another so one of them had to go.

As of September 1st, I am going full-time. I am ending 11 years of happy employment at my comfortable job as a wholesale insurance broker in order to travel to the most God-forsaken corners of America that I can find in order to hunt, fish and forage for invasive species that I will be eating in the interest of producing the best book on the subject that I possibly can.

There are other books and other projects on the horizon as well. I intend to continue teaching classes and workshops at, hopefully, a greater pace. I'm looking to do some 1 day squirrel hunting workshops in September (groups of no more than 4 students going out on actual hunts).

If I've been a little quiet here lately it is on account of needing to have the final, polished draft of 'A Locavore's Guide to Deer Hunting' in my editor's hands by August 1st. Any spare time in front of a keyboard has been spent plugging away at that and I apologize for the relative lack of classes, events and correspondence during this push.

Come September, I am a free man on most days. Any readers who happen to have a population of invasive fish, birds, reptiles or mammals nearby that can be dependably hunted are invited to shoot me an email at jack.landers@gmail.com. I will be extra grateful to anyone who can accompany me in the field with their local knowledge. I'm willing to travel pretty much anywhere in the US for this, and potentially abroad if the opportunity is good enough and there is a couch to sleep on or field to camp in.

I really like New York City a lot. I visit regularly, I have friends and family there. I also really like the New York Times, which I read every day. But New York, we need to talk.

I understand that you guys find guns scary and don't want them around. Given your negative experience with them and lack of opportunities to have positive experiences, this makes sense. I'm not mad at you for the way that you feel. What makes less sense is the constant barrage of imagery on the streets of NYC and the pages of the Times that glorifies the violent presentation of guns.

Right now I'm looking at the main page of the NYT and seeing an ad right there next to the name of the paper. It is a promotion for a TV show called 'Covert Affairs,' depicting an attractive woman looking seductively over her shoulder towards the viewer while pointing a pistol at an unseen target which is apparently on the ground, given the angle. This is the front page of the same paper that runs anti-2nd Amendment editorials like clockwork.

Walking the streets of the city that has banned and seized privately-owned semi-automatic weapons from the hands of law-abiding citizens, I see posters everywhere promoting various entertainment involving pistols and assault rifles pointed menacingly at passersby. Invariably in the hands of someone selected and primped and airbrushed to be as sexually appealing as possible.

Make up your damn minds, people. For a society that so readily condemns the private ownership of firearms by people who mostly just want to mind their own business, you guys seem disturbingly willing to glamorize not only gun ownership but the violent presentation of firearms.

This doesn't make you horrible human beings. Your food, theater, bands, literature and journalism are all still great. Keep up the good work in those departments. Just stop and think about this hypocrisy at work in the city and the paper as a whole. If you guys really deplore gun-related violence so much, then perhaps you'd better stop airbrushing it and packaging it in push-up bras.

Our regional newspaper, The Daily Progress was kind enough to put us on the front page for the 4th of July. The story on our rifle building classes is well done and there is also video and an image gallery.

The reporter, Brian McNeill, was modest enough not to mention the fact that during his work on this article we discovered that he is a natural dead-eye. When he accompanied us to the shooting range to test the rifles we built, Paul Fritz offered to let him try out a 7mm Mauser. Brian had never fired a rifle before, yet the second time he ever pulled the trigger he nailed a 4" clay target at 150 yards.

He may even have been aiming for it.

The rifle in this photo is a custom K98 Mauser in .35 Whelen that was produced in our rifle-building class last weekend. This was built in a single weekend, with the exception of some additional painting that I did in the space of 45 minutes a few days later.

It wears 500 degree enamel engine paint that seems to be holding up pretty well. The distinctive black and tan color scheme blends well into the woods as camouflage.

The steel disks set into the synthetic stock are from the German K98 that also provided the donor action. Having seen some hundreds if not over a thousand sporterized Mausers in photographs and in person, this is the first time that I have ever seen the original stock disks used in a synthetic stock. They are completely functional, having been pressed by a lathe into a brass pipe running through the center of the stock which is strong enough to assist in take-down and reassembly of the bolt as originally intended.

Classes are limited to 2 students in order to provide one-on-one instruction. The cost is $800, which does not include the donor action (which we cannot legally sell or provide, since we are not firearms dealers). That cost includes all other parts, instruction and use of machinery necessary to build a custom deer rifle on a vintage Mauser action. Interested persons may contact me directly at jack.landers@gmail.com with any questions.

More photographs from a previous class can be found here.

WVTF, Central Virginia's NPR affiliate, did a two-part story recently on kudzu that I really should have posted here last week. In the spirit of my on-going 'Eating Aliens' project, I organized a small kudzu dinner and invited Sandy Hausman of WVTF.

Yeah, kudzu. The giant weed that is conquering the American south. We cooked it and ate it and it was good. Steve Friedman did the actual cooking while I prepped according to his instructions. We had kudzu pesto, kudzu quiche and several other courses that all turned out surprisingly well.

You can listen to part one and part two on WVTF's website.

My book in progress, 'Eating Aliens' is intended to be all hunting and fishing. But the kudzu thing still definitely fits into the spirit of the book and I could see doing a companion volume or sequel that focuses on invasive plants.

[Photo used courtesy of Martin LaBar under Creative Commons license]

It has come to my attention that the state fossil of my home commonwealth of Virginia is a scallop. No, it didn't have fangs or anything. It was just a scallop. Oh, but it was named after Thomas Jefferson so we're supposed to think this thing is really cool.

I have collected examples of this fossil at the bases of cliffs by the Chesapeake Bay. They don't really look very different from any other scallop shell. I find it embarrassing that this is our state fossil.

Surprisingly, we aren't quite at the bottom of the state fossil barrel, thanks in part to Arizona's embrace of petrified wood as their fossil mascot. That ties for 'most pathetic' with Louisiana and their petrified palm wood. At least our scallops could move.

Kentucky phoned it in big time with their designation in 1986 of the 'brachiopod' as the state fossil. Which brachiopod, out of the 5,000-odd extinct varieties? Oh, nothing in particular. The whole damned phylum, apparently. It reminds me of the story about Mikhail Gorbachev having a brother who is also named Mikhail Gorbachev on account of their father, Mikhail Gorbachev, being too drunk at the time of signing their birth certificates to remember any name except for his own.

I'm picturing the Kentucky state legislature being on a 12 month bender in 1986. It was time to name the state fossil and someone blurted out 'brachiopods!' and scrawled it onto a bourbon-stained napkin which was passed as legislation in a voice vote before anyone got sober enough to realize what they had done.

Georgia tried to get much more specific than Kentucky did. Their state fossil is the shark tooth. Not the whole shark, mind. The rest of the cartilaginous skeleton is apparently verboten. No particular species is named, which was half-assed of them but you have to at least give them credit for trying to come up with something cool.

Utah went balls-out and claimed the allosaurus. If I was Utah I would be putting that shit on the state quarters and the flag and pass a bill that requires the Utah Jazz to be re-named 'the Utah Allosaurus.'

There must have been a contest in special ed classrooms in Vermont to come up with their state fossil because they seem to think its the beluga whale. Which is not even extinct. This is like it might as well be 'hamsters' or 'peanut butter.' Try harder.

South Dakota has it under control with the triceratops. A solid choice which will also encourage investment and tourism from the important 5-year-old boy demographic.

North Dakota must have looked south and thought 'we cannot even compete with this.' They went with 'shipworm-bored petrified wood.' Its like they thought about Arizona and asked, 'how can we be even lamer than petrified wood? What if worms put holes in it?' Choosing 'ship-bored petrified wood' may well have been an act of what amounts to hipster irony.

Alaska, Michigan and Washington have each chosen the woolly mammoth, the American mastadon and the Columbian mammoth, respectively. Which I think we all can agree are practically the same thing for these purposes. Whoever did it first made a great choice. The other two need to go back to the textbooks and come up with their own damn fossils.

New Jersey picked a hadrosaur. These ones in the wikipedia entry look like they're maybe taking a dump. At least its a dinosaur instead of a scallop or pocket lint or whatever North Carolina and Iowa will finally come up with.

[Illustration by Charles R. Knight, public domain]

It would be a bad idea to hand a deer rifle to your typical kid these days. Weaned on toy guns and video games, the first instinct is so often to point anything gun-shaped at the nearest human target and pull the trigger. Yet for children who were raised in hunting households, this can be less of a problem. In my own home, toy guns are forbidden with a resolve matched only by our expectation that the children accompany me once a week or so for practice at shooting targets and stalking deer in the woods and fields.

Since the age of 3, my daughter has accompanied me on these types of outings and at the age of 6 she is more ready to hunt deer this fall than many people 3 times her age. Gun and hunter safety are first nature to her and she spots deer from the corner of her eye in places where most people only see grass and trees. Handy with both rifle and pistol and competent with a knife at skinning and butchering, she is entirely capable of hunting under my direct supervision.

The great difficulty is finding a hunting rifle that will properly fit a 6 year old. A 6 year old girl who is on the small side for her age, at that.

I have put a great deal of thought and research into this matter. There are two key issues: recoil and ergonomics.

My daughter, Ida, has shot her mother's 7mm-08 with no great concern for recoil. But the length of pull on that Remington 700 was too great for any accuracy finer than what was needed for blowing up shampoo bottles full of water at 10 yards (yes, it was fun).

'Length of pull' refers to the distance between the trigger and the top edge of the recoil pad at the butt of the rifle or shotgun. When the length of pull is too far you will find that not only is it difficult or impossible to align the eye properly with the sights or scope, but recoil will also feel more intense due to the improper fit against the shoulder.

Anyone shorter than about 5'5" is pretty well out of luck in the LOP department. For small children or adults of small stature it is very difficult to find a deer rifle with a stock that will properly fit. Even most 'youth' rifles are a bit too long for most kids under the age of 12.

This necessitates cutting down a stock in order to fit the hunter. Right away, this eliminates a huge swath of deer rifles currently on the market because of the impracticality of cutting down most synthetic stocks. Most of them are either hollow or filled with a sort of foam that will not hold a screw when you need to reattach a butt plate or pad. There are typically bulges on the inside of the material with pre-molded screw holes which will be wholly gone after you have cut 4 inches off of the end. Note that a majority of youth rifles on the market have synthetic stocks.

A wooden stock is essential if your hunter will not fit any of the synthetic stocks off the shelf. Its easy to shorten the length of pull yourself if you do the job carefully and follow Larry Potterfield's instructions in this video. Midway USA has many other videos available for free that explain how to do related tasks, such as installing a new recoil pad.

If you intend to buy a youth rifle with a synthetic stock and replace it with a cut-down wooden one until the kid grows into the synthetic one, do make certain that there is a source for such a wooden stock. I made the mistake of buying my daughter a Rossi 'Matched Pair' with barrels for .22 LR and .410 shotgun with that in mind. As it turned out, there is no source anywhere or anyhow for a wooden Rossi stock unless you buy the rifle with one in the first place. Rossi does not seem to answer their phone and none of my emails were ever returned. We've been stuck with an ill-fitting pink plastic stock ever since. A Crickett would probably have been a better choice for a .22 for that reason.

Another major criterion is the cartridge. A .30-'06 is obviously out of the question, yet one doesn't want to go too light for risk of failing to kill the deer even with a good shot. Cartridges to consider would include the 7mm-08, 7.62x39, various 6mms and the more earnest revolver cartridges. Handgun cartridges like the .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum and .45 Long Colt can all be found as factory chamberings in certain single shot and lever action rifles. With the added length of a rifle barrel, those cartridges can achieve velocities higher than they do in handguns and with a stock against the shoulder their recoil is much milder than in the hand alone. They can all serve as reasonable whitetail cartridges provided that appropriate bullets are used and ranges are kept to no more than about 100 yards.

The short lengths of those handgun cartridges can allow for a shorter, lighter rifle that better fits a very small hunter than a full-length rifle cartridge. Recoil is mild and ammunition is inexpensive.

Unfortunately, there are few bolt action rifles available for any of those handgun chamberings. The Ruger model 77-44 comes in .44 Magnum and is the only bolt action option I am aware of. Marlin makes a lever action .357 that could answer very well as a youth rifle after being cut down to size and all of these cartridges can be found in single-shot offerings from Rossi and NEF at reasonable prices, or from Ruger if you care to spend about $1,000 on a Number One.

The Marlin Camp Carbine in .45 ACP seems like a possibility at first glance, but a look around for factory loads with whitetail-appropriate bullets will quickly rule this out as a serious option for all but the more gonzo reloaders. You will not find hunting ammunition for the .45 ACP.

If you want a bolt action for your young hunter, you are pretty much looking at the .308 family of cartridges. The .308 its self is not so heavy on recoil in the first place and can be lighter through the use of either Remington's Managed Recoil loads or judicious handloading. The 7mm-08 is lighter in recoil than the .308 by design and can be lightened even farther by the same line of reduced recoil ammunition.

If you insist on using the .243 then I certainly can't stop you but I will state that I have never been impressed by the tendency of those slight bullets travelling at such high speed to go absolutely to pieces. When impacting a deer at within 80 yards or so, even a high quality bullet can shatter into a shallow, ugly shoulder wound that does not penetrate into the lungs. The difference in recoil between the .243 and the 7mm-08 is minor while I've found that the performance of the bullets on deer is anecdotally very different.

Barrel length is another issue worth considering in a deer rifle for a child or a very small adult. Every given cartridge has a barrel length which is optimal for it. The reason is that a given volume of a particular type of smokeless gunpowder burns at a particular rate and if the barrel is too short then some of that powder is blasted out of the muzzle before it has finished igniting, which means a waste of potential velocity. Once all of the powder has burned, further barrel length is actually counter-productive since it becomes merely a source of friction against the bullet. Normally we want to choose a barrel length which is just enough for all of the powder to burn and no longer. In a 7mm Remington Magnum, this would be 26 inches while a .308 is probably closer to around 23 inches.

Its ok to throw this out of the window sometimes when choosing a rifle for a small person. Better to lose 150 feet per second of velocity than to have a rifle that is awkward, heavy, and prone to catching on every bit of brush. The minimum legal length for a rifle barrel without a special federal dispensation under a 'class 3' permit is 16 inches. I suggest always keeping it at least a quarter inch over that, in case you eventually need to re-crown the muzzle and find that you have gone a hair under the threshold for a visit from the party van.

Finally, the scope is worthy of special consideration. The ergonomics of most rifles, even youth rifles, are set up with the intent of putting the eye of someone with a 'normal' adult head and neck up to the center of a 40mm scope reticle. A very small person will find themselves craning their necks trying to get proper scope alignment. It will be a little easier to get comfortable and shoot accurately if the rifle wears a 32 mm scope rather than the more common 40 mm variety. Because a .32 mm objective is a smaller circle than a 40mm, the center of that circle is lower to the barrel and receiver. Combine this with a set of low rings and a child will have a much easier time seeing the target.

I wish that there was one rifle or list of rifles that I could recommend above all others for children and small adults, but there is really nothing perfect out there right now. Nobody seems to be making a centerfire, deer-capable equivalent of the Crickett .22 bolt action. A bolt action .357 magnum with a 16.5 inch barrel and a wooden stock with about 9 or 10 inches of pull wearing a 32 mm scope would be perfect. Sorry, nobody is making one. But if any rifle manufacturers would like to approach my 6 year old daughter about an endorsement for a new product then I am sure she will be most willing to discuss trigger weights, television and in-store appearances with you.

[The photo is my own. It's Ida.]

We are fortunate enough in Virginia to have a spring squirrel season that runs from June 5th-19th. I have hunted this brief spring season every year since it was first created only about 3 or 4 years ago. While the opportunity to hunt for food in June is a welcome one, this is a much harder season to hunt than the fall and winter.

The biggest difference is the amount of cover. Having leaves on the trees dramatically lowers visibility. The woods behind my house are such a jungle right now that I have completely given up hunting squirrels there this spring, save for an occasional patrol of the edge. Even in the more open deciduous hardwood forest around my brother's place down the road I find that visibility is poor. There is a decent view of the forest floor out to as far as 100 yards but 5 yards off the ground it gets pretty patchy.

This has forced a reassessment of tactics and equipment. I prefer to hunt squirrels with a scoped .22 but I find that under these circumstances there are few shot opportunities for a rifle. With so much cover in the trees, every glimpse of a squirrel is brief and there is a real need to get a shot off more quickly than I can bring the rifle to bear, find the target in my scope and get steady. Moving targets are the rule. Its not that they don't ever hold still; its just that the odds of having a clear view of the squirrel at that particular moment are low. When I go out to hunt again after work today I will be carrying a shotgun instead of a rifle.

Schedules in the forest are also a little different in mid June versus December. In cold weather I find that squirrels will be out of the nest as soon as there is some direct sunlight available to warm up in. They will be active on the ground all morning before taking a siesta between noon and around 3 or 4 pm. Then they will be back at it for a few hours.

I have observed very different timing in the spring season. They seem to mostly be concerned with staying out of the heat. The only time of day that I can absolutely count on activity is the last hour before dark. In the heat of the middle of the day, there may be the odd squirrel that finds an errand to run but those will be few. From between roughly 10 am to 7 pm most of the squirrels are out of sight when the temperature is 80 degrees Farenheit or higher.

Right about when I am starting to think that it is time to pack up and go home is when movement will pick up. This is when it gets frustrating. Squirrels can be heard all around but none of them are visible. It is tempting to pick up and move in order to get a better view of what I can hear but unless there has been a recent rain to silence the leaves, this is inadvisable. They will hear the crunching of leaves and will clear out by the time I get into position.

In the fall I sometimes like to walk around in the woods and look for shots of opportunity as the squirrels run from the sound of my approach. This only works when the trees are bare and you can see the squirrels on the trunks and branches. During the spring season I've found that the only consistently fruitful method is to find one good spot and keep still.

The necessary tactics are not unlike traditional turkey hunting. Sitting very still in a carefully chosen spot with a shotgun in hand and pretty much waiting for the food to come to you. Like turkey hunting, it is possible to call a squirrel in. I expect that a decoy would also be worth experimenting with.

Squirrels that live very close to humans exhibit different behavior compared to the truly wild ones. In a semi-suburban backyard you might be able to simply walk outside and pot them with a pellet gun. Set up an ambush by the bird feeder if you like. If the meat is there then you might as well eat it. If on the other hand you happen to be hunting in a truly rural situation then you will find that bagging squirrels in June is much more challenging than the fall season.

[Photo used courtesy of Aftab, licensed under Creative Commons]

This morning I had a commentary aired on public radio about elk reintroduction. Anyone interested can hear it through this link.

My commentary was in response to something I heard on the air a week previously. This was a commentary against elk reintroduction that really rubbed me the wrong way. While there are logical arguments to be made against elk reintroduction in Virginia, Andrea Brunais did not make them in her piece.

Specifically, there is a laundry list of facts that she got flat wrong.

1. The elk are or would become 'captive.' These are wild elk and nobody is proposing that they be domesticated. I have no idea why she would open her piece with such a false statement.

2. That Virginia is 'considering laying claim to the elk' that are currently in Virginia. Those animals are already unambiguously within the jurisdiction of our Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. We have already been regulating the hunting of those elk for most of the last decade.

3. That the plan is to start hunting them. The fact is that they are already being hunted. Hunting them is the status quo. The proposed plan is to stop hunting them in order to allow the population to grow to a self-sustaining level. If Ms. Brunais does not understand this fact then the entire issue went way over her head.

4. She stated that elk wandered over to Kentucky from the Rockies. That is false. Kentucky's elk were deliberately stocked by the state of Kentucky. That original stock was captured in the wild in Arizona.

5. That tax-payer dollars were used to pay for looking into this. DGIF is funded wholly by hunting, fishing and boating licenses. No tax money is involved. That is how wildlife protection and habitat restoration gets paid for in Virginia.

Those are just the things she said that were empirically wrong. I could spend all day railing against the stuff that was simply disingenuous, like pooh-poohing the idea that anyone would want to travel to Wise County to look at elk. Or pretending that anyone is claiming that this will solve our budget problems.

I don't have a problem with someone disagreeing with me on elk reintroduction or any other issue. And I am sure that Ms. Brunais is otherwise a very nice and intelligent person. But if you don't know anything about the history and practice of elk reintroduction in eastern states or how wildlife programs are funded in Virginia then kindly stop trying to lecture the rest of us about those issues.

The photos from the first Mauser class are up, thanks to John Athayde. Most of these photos were taken by me with his camera, although anything with me in it was taken by John.

Anyone paying very close attention will notice that there are a lot of photos of us re-working the original military barrels but then later we are rebarreling the rifles. This was because the original barrels did not shoot well at the range, prompting us to replace them. Barrel replacement is now a standard part of the class for every rifle built.

A majority of the work done on each rifle will be done by the student. You will go home with a deer rifle that you personally put together.

We still have one spot open for our next 2 day class on the weekend of June 26th. Other classes are being scheduled throughout the summer. Anyone interested can email me at jack.landers@gmail.com

The beauty of the fact that everything tastes like chicken is that you already know how to cook it. One would hope that this would encourage people to eat more readily outside of their usual repertoire. In practice, that stereotyped declaration, 'it tastes like chicken,' is never especially reassuring.

An omnivorous locavore will do well to overcome this natural resistance to the 'tastes like chicken' category of strange meat. You will probably find a lot of wild squirrels in your own immediate area and relatively few wild chickens. If you want to eat free-range, hormone-free and relatively cruelty-free meat then you ought to get comfortable with eating what is actually around you.

Most of the Eastern United States is thick with squirrels of various species. They do in fact taste like chicken, though I would describe the texture as similar to snake. Three or four smallish squirrels will yield a volume of meat similar to 1 grocery store chicken. The meat is simple to make use of once the squirrels have been skinned and gutted.

If you are going for easy then they can be butterflied, slathered in whatever spices are handy, pan-seared and finished in the oven. Or a few minutes with a paring knife are all it takes to strip the meat completely off of the bone. Then you've got yourself a dish of shredded squirrel meat that you can use in a straight substitution for chicken in recipes that you are already comfortable with. Soak it in a lime juice marinade for a few hours to tenderize it and use it in tacos or chimichangas. Or fry it briefly in olive oil with minced garlic and carmelized onion and build it into a pasta sauce.

I've been meaning for ages to try frying the whole, battered quarters like fried chicken but keep ending up doing something easier with my squirrels.

Squirrel meat is at least as flexible as chicken. It is easy to butcher and easy to cook. It is also probably available for free some place close to where you are sitting right now. All you need is a hunting weapon and a hunting license.

If you already have a .22 rifle or handgun then that will probably work just fine. In very flat terrain a .22 may not be ideal, because squirrels are often to be found up in the branches of trees and one doesn't want to risk having a bullet go flying off in space to come down some place potentially dangerous. I prefer to hunt squirrels with a scoped .22 rifle, favoring ground in this mountainous area (the foothills of the Blue Ridge) where hillsides will act as safe backstops.

A shotgun will also work quite well. I find that I like to carry a 20 or 12 gauge when I intend to walk around a lot. Moving around, I tend to surprise a lot of squirrels that will run off right away as they hear me approach. A shotgun is a tool designed to hit a moving target and they will by definition be moving in this situation.

I like the .22 better if I'm expecting to sit in one place for a long while, listening and watching. In that situation the squirrels that I see will either be unaware that I am present or will have become comfortable with my presence. There should be opportunities for shots on stationary prey and the .22 will allow me to reach out to about 80 yards or so, which is farther than I would shoot with any shotgun.

Both a .22 and a 12 gauge shotgun are generalist tools that any locavore hunter should have at his or her disposal anyway. A .22 is essential for target practice and can also be used for rabbits, groundhogs, and the like. A 12 gauge is good for geese, ducks, doves, turkeys and pheasant. With solid slugs it can do double duty for deer or wild pigs if strange local regulations prohibit the use of a rifle.

The hunting will usually be a little harder than one would expect. Our ideas about squirrel behavior are typically based on the behavior of urban and suburban squirrels, which get comfortable with close proximity to humans and live their whole lives in the relative absence of predation. Rural, non-backyard squirrels are more wary and will be harder to get within range of.

Once it knows that something is there, squirrels have a maddening tendency to stick to the opposite side of a tree trunk from the position of the observer. Hunting with someone else can provide a simple counter-measure. Have your friend circle around to the other side of the tree and make some noise while you hang back a little ways and shoot the squirrel when it moves to your side. Do be careful not to shoot your hunting companion.

Processing the deceased into something edible is not complicated. Start by chopping off all four feet and then make a single incision through the hide across the backs of the legs, passing just underneath the tail. Starting at this opening you will find that you can peel the hide back like a banana peel from the back legs and then keep going until the whole thing is off. You can either cut the head off before beginning or pull really hard right at the end and it will come off with the hide. I advise gutting it after the hide has come off, rather than the other way around. Gutting is fairly self-explanatory and you will find that it is little different from gutting a fish.

With these things done, you will find yourself holding something not unlike a long, skinny chicken. Cook the squirrel with the chicken comparison in mind and you will be most satisfied with the results.

Yesterday afternoon I took my friend, Fergus Clare, on his first squirrel hunt. After a ridiculously involved ambush, a stalk to within range, and joint gunnery tactics, we succeeded in taking a single fox squirrel. The following is Fergus' excellent recipe for fox squirrel that he came up with on the fly.

Fergus Clare's Zombie Squirrel recipe
(serves one with one small squirrel).
All ingredients are organic unless noted otherwise.

Ingredients:
Six Cloves of Garlic
Half a stick of butter (unsalted)
One teaspoon of Salt (to taste)
One teaspoon of Pepper (to taste)
10 to 14 leaves of fresh Sage
One quarter Red Onion (diced)

Recipe:
-Clean squirrel thoroughly and cut into two halves lengthwise, removing the spinal cord.
-Turn on cooktop to med/high, add quarter cup of butter and quarter of diced red onions (for mirepois) to cast iron skillet & begin to brown butter (stir occasionally).
-Take three cloves of garlic and grind through planer.
-Rub half teaspoon of salt & pepper & 8-9 leaves of diced sage leaf onto squirrel halves
-Rub garlic all over squirrel halves (and spine if you want to eat backstraps)
-When butter has browned, place seasoned squirrel halves into skillet and sear both sides.
-Turn heat down to medium/low and let sit for 3-5 minutes or until done (turning occasionally: add dash of high heat safflower oil to prevent burning).
-Add remaining three cloves of diced garlic and diced sage.
-Take squirrel off of heat, plate and add salt/pepper to taste.

Alternates:
-Use white wine after searing and add small amount of chicken broth with sliced carrots and reduce to increase moisture of finished squirrel.
-Consider seasoning squirrel meat overnight in brine to soften.

[Photo used courtesy of John-Morgan under Creative Commons license.]

I would like to point out that 3 years since I wrote the initial blog entry, I continue to see new comments added to my discussion of what the best off-the-shelf zombie rifle would be.

Probably my opinions of the SKS have changed since I wrote that article (I kind of hate mine a little bit, following a few years of trunk gun duty), but the fact that people keep feeling the need to weigh in on this important issue warms my heart. My pledge to the good people of this planet is that at some time in the next month I will revisit this topic and provide yet another dead serious analysis of the zombie rifle issue with a dispassionate consideration of what off-the-shelf technology would best be suited to fighting your way to safety though the zombie hordes, according to the doctrine of World War Z.

I really and truly appreciate the seriousness with which readers have been willing to take this absurd premise. It is not clear to me what it was about this article that captured readers' imaginations as opposed to, say, my piece on preferred sasquatch guns. But whatever it was, thank you all so much for having this much fun with it.

Incidentally, if you are even slightly concerned about a possible zombie menace, I highly recommend World War Z as the book to read. No, I'm not getting a kick-back from Amazon to recommend it. The book is just that awesome.

For the past month or so I have been trying to get in touch with a human being at the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Their web site has been useless and nobody has responded to the emails I have sent to the email address supplied there. I have been hoping to enlist their help in identifying a qualified person to speak to a group of budding deer hunters in New York City about how to navigate the process of legally acquiring a hunting rifle in that city and how to go about finding a place to practice shooting.

Is there any kind reader of this blog who can put me in touch with someone at the NSSF? My overall mission of teaching a whole new demographic of people how to hunt should be very much in line with their goals.

Sent to me from Paul Fritz just a few minutes ago:

"I took the Mauser out to the range today. It took two, two shots to zero at 100 yards. Very nice.

"After my zero, I shot for groups and to break in the barrel. My position wasn't comfortable for some reason (I suspect the seat was the wrong height), which resulted in some errors in my shooting that expanded the groups to 1.5 MOA. The weird part was that after cleaning the barrel, the first three bullets would cluster around 1.5 MOA, then the last two would kiss each other in the middle of the cluster. I did this three times.

"After shooting four groups of 5 (one at 50 yards & three at 100 yards) and cleaning between groups, I stopped cleaning to see what it would do. The next five were tighter at less than 1MOA. Not bad.

"Since I had only ten rounds left, I walked down to the 300 yard range to see if I could hit the 4 inch gong at 300 yard. Since I was zeroed at 1.5 inches high at 100 yards, I held about 1 mil high and the first (and only) shot impacted dead center sending the gong flying off of its chain. Which meant I was done.

"I'm very pleased considering that this rifle is not fully floated and has not been bedded yet. I am shooting sub MOA out to 300 yards with a rifle that has had only 25 bullets through it. Very happy.

"Oh, the chamber is tight. I'm glad we sized it for the 8mm brass as the factory brass resisted slightly on insertion. The fired brass looked like it had no stretch at all. Superb. I also had several people comment on the rifle. It looks great and shoots great."

We are looking at a sub-MOA rifle here. With just a little more work, I have little doubt that Paul will be getting even better groups out of it. These are the exact same parts and methods that we will be using in the upcoming 'build your own deer rifle' classes.

For those reading this whose eyes glaze over at any detailed discussion of rifles, bear in mind that some amount of this is necessary in order to hunt for food. I'm getting a little geekier than most people really need to, but an understanding of and interest in the tools required to harvest wild meat is a good idea if you want to consistently put dinner on the table. Accuracy counts.

The memorial day weekend* Mauser challenge was a success. What you see here is a photo of one of the two hunting rifles that we built from stripped K-98 receivers. More and better pictures of the process, rifles and accuracy tests will be up as soon as they have been uploaded and sorted through.

We started with a pair of military K-98s with worn-out barrels and stripped them down to the bare receivers, which were thoroughly cleaned and worked over with a wire brush. Those receivers and their soon-to-be reforged bolts were the only original parts included in the final product.

When I say 'we,' I don't just mean myself and Paul Fritz. Our guinea pig student, John Athayde, participated in every step along the way. John had experience with basic tools and knew the fundamentals of riflery but had never done this type of gunsmithing before. He proved that an intelligent person with the right instruction and tools can quickly build their own custom hunting and target rifle.

The bolt of each rifle was placed into a heat sink and blasted with an acetylene torch until it was hot enough to re-shape into a new contour that would clear a scope. Paul and John took turns at holding the torch and shaping the bolt.

Because of the extreme throat erosion discovered in one of the rifles, we made the decision to re-barrel not only these rifles but all Mausers used in the class going forward. The rifle with the eroded throat would not produce groups of shots less than 2 feet wide at 100 yards. We simply cannot take the risk of finding that a surplus barrel will not hold a group and end up sending students home with useless rifles.

After careful consideration we decided to re-barrel both guns for the 7mm Mauser cartridge. This cartridge was chosen for several reasons:

1. 7mm cartridges in general tend to shoot quite flat and are easy to be accurate with.

2. The 7mm Mauser cartridge was one of the first cartridges that this action was designed to handle and as such the rest of the rifle requires zero alteration for perfect function.

3. Among the various 7mm cartridges, the 7mm Mauser has far less recoil than the 7mm Remington Magnum and a wider array of possible bullet weights than the 7mm-08. While the 7mm-08 is easier to find ammo for in stores, Paul is teaching the basics of hand-loading to every student. This way, the greater flexibility of the 7mm Mauser can be realized in practical terms. The 7mm-08 cartridge has such a short neck that one is limited to 140 grain bullets, making it ideal for whitetails but marginal for anything larger. Whereas the hand-loader can easily load up to 188 grain bullets in the 7mm Mauser and credibly use it to hunt elk-sized prey.

4. The 7mm Mauser has a fascinating history that I won't get into just now, but suffice to say that the sort of person who favors a 7mm Mauser will find approving nods from the right sort of people. Its like driving a car powered by a straight six engine or listening to Dave Brubeck albums on vinyl.

But back to the rifle. The replacement barrels have slightly different thread patterns than the originals did, so the threads on the receiver were re-cut on Paul's vintage 1898 metal lathe (built the same year that the K-98 Mauser was designed). We used short-chambered Adams and Bennett barrels and clamped them into wooden blocks in a 6 ton shop press. Paul demonstrated proper technique with a chamber reamer which shaved away precisely the right amount of metal to produce a chamber shaped like the 7mm Mauser cartridge. John reamed the chamber in his own rifle, checking it every few turns with a head space gauge to make sure he hadn't removed too much metal.

Holes were drilled and tapped for screws in the tops of the receivers so that scopes could be mounted. One receiver had a face that wasn't quite squared enough to meet the sporter barrel properly, so that one was chucked up on the lathe and re-faced.

At this point, the metal work was complete and it was time to protect the raw steel from the elements. As much as we all appreciate the look of blued steel, it is not practical to cram a decent bluing job into a course that has to be finished in two days. Nor does bluing hold up well to the elements in wet weather. For these reasons we opted to finished the metal with black, high-temperature paint and rub it with oil after curing. The paint is dry enough to handle within about 20 minutes and will have fully cured by the following morning. Trust me, it really does look good. The photos demonstrate that. I would say that it looks about the same as the finish on a brand new Remington Model 700 BDL (which I have bought one a few years ago and feel qualified to say this). If chipped or damaged, a spray can of this paint costs about $3 at any hardware store and it is very easy to touch up on your own.

The composite stocks, chosen for the relative speed of fitting them as opposed to working with wood, were inletted using a Dremel Moto-tool and various hand tools. Adjustable, sporting triggers with built-in safeties were installed on the receivers. The rifles were fully assembled, scopes, bases and rings were centered, leveled and installed. After cleaning out any remaining metal shavings from the chamber and barrel, they were ready to shoot.

Now that we've done the tests to prove to ourselves that we can take someone through this process in a single weekend, we are ready to begin offering the course on a limited basis. While we would like to work our way up to groups of 4 students, we are going to start with classes of only 2 at a time in order to have as much one-on-one supervision and instruction as possible. The class will cost $1,000 per student. This price includes all parts, tools, instruction, trip to a shooting range, a set of gunsmithing screwdrivers and a gun vise to keep, etc. You will go home with a cased rifle that you built and in which you will have pride of workmanship for the rest of your life. You will probably be able to take down a Mauser action in your sleep at that point; you will have the tools and knowledge to install and zero scopes and you will be capable of inletting stocks and doing some basic metal work.

Included in that figure is the estimated price of purchasing a donor rifle to begin with (we are not firearms dealers and therefore we can only direct you to a suggested source for a Mauser action and we cannot sell it to you per se).

If you already have a 98 action to use, we are happy to work with that assuming that it is in safe condition and is a K-98 variant which is compatible with the parts and tools that are a part of this program. While we are going to be re-barreling for 7mm Mauser at this price, other cartridge options may be available on request for an additional fee.

Because class sizes are limited to 2 students each, we will not be announcing a list of dates with rosters to fill. Rather, we encourage interested parties to contact us and we will work with you to set dates that are convenient for all concerned. I can be emailed at jack.landers@gmail.com.


*Note that while the bulk of the work was completed during memorial day weekend, the rebarreling was done in a few hours on the following Sunday since we hadn't determined going into it that new barrels would be required. I have streamlined my description of the process for the purpose of illustrating the order in which the work will be done during future classes.

[Photo used courtesy of Paul Fritz]

On Saturday morning, blacksmith Paul Fritz and myself are starting the dry run for our new Mauser class with John Athayde as our guinea pig. Can we teach someone with no previous gunsmithing experience how to build a custom Mauser deer rifle in only two days, and then scale it up for a class of 4 students? The clock starts ticking at 9 am with a stripped action, boxes of parts and Paul's welding rig ready to go. The rifle needs to be not only working but also shooting accurately at 150 yards by Sunday evening.

I think it is fitting that we are doing this on Memorial Day weekend, since the practice of building American deer rifles out of old Mauser military actions dates back to the end of WWI, when returning American GIs brought home German Mausers they had picked up off the battlefield and stuffed into their dufflebags. Bolt action rifles were new-ish technology at the time and few hunters could afford to buy one. But if they had a battlefield pick-up, a little work and ingenuity could turn that prize into a hunting rifle.

Over time, many people came to prefer the Mauser action over commercial bolt actions. Especially in the late 20th century as more parts of new rifles were stamped out of sheet metal or molded from plastic. The smooth, strong function of the traditional Mauser dating back to 1898 is unrivaled among all but the most expensive of modern rifles. You can now buy a perfectly good, new deer rifle for less than what it costs to convert a Mauser, but will it be as smooth and satisfying as working the bolt on a vintage European Mauser? I really don't think so.

It is in that spirit that we commence this dry run. If all goes well this weekend then we will be offering the course on a limited basis to 4 students per class and everyone will go home with a custom Mauser that they have the pride of having built.

Now that the contract is actually signed and done, I think that I am probably safe to announce the fact that I have signed as an author with Storey Publishing. They will be bringing my first book, 'A Locavore's Guide to Deer Hunting' to print in the near future. Its not clear yet as to exactly when the book will be launched, but I have high hopes of getting onto the fall schedule.

Actually, it might not even go to print with that title. They have the right to rename it anything they want, which is fine with me.

As we approach the launch date, I will be scheduling a series of workshops and butchering demonstrations in various cities. These will be more or less along the lines of the workshops I have recently done in support of Slow Food NYC. If anyone reading this is part of an organization with goals aligned somehow with what I'm doing, please feel free to get in touch with me about visiting your area as I approach the launch of the book. Slow Food convivia, locavore groups, etc. Shoot me an email at Jack dot Landers at gmail dot com.

Meanwhile, I've got all sorts of other cool stuff in the works that I can't wait to formally announce. This includes TV projects, new courses on advanced topics like rifle-building and hide-tanning, and a 150 acre property in the Blue Ridge Mountains where my co-instructors and I will be offering various fun weekends involving primitive skills, a 150 yard shooting range that we are hacking out of a mountain side, waterfalls, and a unique retreat that sleeps 10.

Fun stuff is in the works.

With my 3 year-old son clinging to my back, I crawled slowly to the crest of a grassy hill. My 6 year old daughter crept beside me. When we approached the ruff of brush along a barbed wire fence and peered over, our stealth was rewarded. Two deer stood broadside to us as they grazed about 100 yards away.

We watched them for a few minutes. Harry whispered to me that the one nearest to the telephone pole was stopping and looking around more than the other deer. This was true. Soon the first pair was joined by three more deer. All five does grazed and all of them looked around regularly but the one that my 3 year old had pointed out was clearly more alert.

This wasn't a real hunt, since it is May as I write this and deer are not in season. But it was good practice for autumn. What my son had picked up on was deer behavior that is very much worth the attention of a meat hunter.

While moving in a group, deer tend to take their cues from one dominant animal within the group. The deer in charge decides when to run and which way to go. If you shoot a deer from among a small herd then the leader will usually make the smart decision to run away instantly at the sound of the shot and the rest of the group follows. When you are only after a single deer I suppose that it doesn't matter much. But if you want to double up and take more than one deer during the hunt then it pays to identify the leader and make that deer your first target. Assuming that you are able to drop it in its tracks, the rest of the herd will stand or mill around for 5 to 10 seconds without being sure of what to do. That is plenty of time to get steady and identify another target.

They key to doing this is being able to consistently identify which deer among a group is most likely the leader. Don't be fooled by size. The oldest or highest ranking deer is not necessarily the biggest one. Whatever skeletal size a deer has achieved by 6 months of age represents the lifetime maximum. The volume of muscle and fat attached to that skeleton can change, but if the deer's diet early in life was inadequate then it will be stunted for life. A deer that was born into a season of drought 5 years ago will tend to be the leader if it is in a group surrounded by yearlings that started out with all the food they could desire. Size says nothing in this respect, especially among does rather than bucks.

When a group of deer moves into a clearing, the leader is usually the first one to enter. The others wait until she expresses confidence in the situation being relatively safe. She will walk out first, look around, put her head down as if to feed for a few seconds. Then she lifts her head and looks around. When she decides that it is safe then she will start swishing her tail sideways and the other deer will follow.

In the case of the deer that my kids and I saw yesterday, we didn't see them all enter the clearing. Two were there to begin with, which narrowed it down a bit. The behavior of one deer confirmed that she was probably the leader. The deer that acts the most wary and alert is probably the one that the other deer will look to for guidance. The one that has its head up more often.

Note that the leader in this sense is not necessarily the deer that wins the most fights. Among many herd animals there are individuals who are not dominant in the pecking order per se but whose cues for where and when to go are followed most often by the rest of the herd.

Certainly before pulling the trigger on a second deer, you must be quite certain that the first one is either dead or definitely down for the count. Having two wounded deer to track at the same time, probably in different directions, would be a mess not worth risking.

Whether or not you actually want to deal with the reality of having two dead deer to work on is another matter altogether. It is twice the work and I cannot suggest that a beginner try it. Assuming that your goal is to stock the freezer with as much food as possible for the coming year then I think doubling up is worth the extra work. I have passed on opportunities to take a second deer in a single hunt and later regretted it when the rut ended and deer were harder to catch up with and I was behind in my goals for food security. This past season I finally went for it and have no regrets. It also happened that I had two students from one of my deer hunting classes who lived close by and were happy to come over and learn how to field dress and quarter. Dividing up the labor made things go a little faster.


[Photo used courtesy of The Crow Hand under Creative Commons License]

Paleo diet evangelist John Durant has a nice photo essay up on his blog right now of our deer hunting and butchering class from this past weekend. John is the guy in the red shirt whom you see here slurping the raw marrow directly from the bones (I am shamelessly grabbing his photo since it is for a link to his blog after all).

Right when I thought I'd seen everything. I feel like there was something along those lines in a short story by Jack London that I read when I was a kid, only the bones weren't exactly from a deer.

This particular group last weekend, comprised mostly of people from the NYC Paleo Diet Meetup Group, was especially thorough in their use of the deer that we worked on. As his photos show, you can always literally see the ground through the rib cage when one of my classes gets through with a deer. But these guys made a point of eating the heart, liver, marrow and anything else in sight. Eating the raw flesh carved straight off of the warm carcass on the ground seems to be turning into an unexpected class tradition.

After we'd finished quartering the deer, Fergus Clare (who was also our instructor for skinning and basic hide preparation) successfully demonstrated how to make fire by literally rubbing sticks together. Next time we really need to budget in time to cook some of the meat over the fire made from scratch. If anyone reading this has a photo that I can post of the sublime moment of flame bursting out in Fergus' hands, I would appreciate it.

Meanwhile, I am headed back to New York City tomorrow to teach another workshop benefiting Slow Food NYC on Saturday at Jimmy's 43. Details can be found here and tickets might still be available.

[Photo used courtesy of John Durant]

I do not personally consider hunting to be a sport in the sense which the word 'sport' is now most commonly used. It is far more serious than a game of basketball. Hunting is not a contest among human beings any more than growing vegetables is. There is some small percentage of gardeners who will get really into growing massive pumpkins or other vegetables that they take around to county fairs in order to compete against other gardeners, but those are the exception. So it is with hunting. Some people are obsessed with chasing after huge bucks and scoring them against one another (and I'm ok with that), but that is not the goal of most hunters who are out there pulling the trigger.

The hunt is a very personal thing. It is you, the hunter, trying to outwit your prey and bring home food to eat. The tools and techniques that you use are between you and the deer and have nothing to do with any other hunter. So why is it that we must have these constant expressions of snobbery regarding hunting weapons?

It goes like this: Hunters who use very modern, AR-style deer rifles are looked down on by hunters who prefer a bolt or lever action. People who like single-shot rifles, such as the Ruger #1, like to get uppity about it and insist that anyone who needs more than one shot has no business hunting.*

Then you've got the archery crowd with its own silly layers of snottiness. Many archers in general are fond of dismissing anyone who hunts with a firearm as 'cheating,' as if this was a contest in which it was even possible to cheat. Lots of archers hunt with a modern compound bow that uses some very clever physics to propel arrows at higher velocities than one would otherwise be capable of. But then there are archers who use a more traditionally styled recurve bow. They like to accuse the compound bow hunters of hardly counting as archers at all.

But wait, it gets worse. Within the recurve subset there are some who use recurve bows made of modern materials. They are looked down on by the people who use recurve bows made of wood.

Hold on a minute there: are you using store-bought arrows or are you fletching your own? Using modern steel points or knapping your own out of obsidian? Hey -- that isn't a proper folsom arrowhead that you chipped out of flint. That's a new-fangled clovis point! You damned slob of an excuse for a hunter.

This is about as far as it goes among actual hunters, but I've seen it get even more ridiculous when non-hunters jump into the fray. Many is the time that I have been told that hunting with anything but a knife is 'cheating.' One otherwise intelligent woman whom I met insisted that it is 'wrong' to hunt with any weapon at all, since the deer has no weapons. In her book, the only way to hunt for food is by choking the deer to death or poking out its eyes or something. I don't imagine that she would last too long in the wild.

All of this is completely idiotic. Each of these methods (bare hands aside) is a perfectly reasonable way for someone to choose to hunt for food. I've got nothing against either recurve fans or the hunters who came back from 3 tours of duty in Iraq and find that their handling of an AR-type weapon is now more instinctive than a bolt action will ever be.

The deer has no idea what the difference is between an AR-10 and a spear. I can assure you that while that deer is laying on the ground and bleeding to death through a hole in its lungs created by one projectile or another, the finer points of your arguments for the purity of one tool versus another are completely lost on it.

Hunt your own hunt. This isn't a contest. It is no more possible to 'cheat' among hunters than it is among gardeners. If I like to grow organic tomatoes in my backyard, that doesn't make it any of my business whether you buy a bag of fertilizer for yours. And if I go around accusing you of being a cheat for growing tomatoes with fertilizer then that wouldn't prove that I'm a better gardener than you are. It would prove that I'm an asshole.

My advice to new hunters is to please not fall into this trap. Its ok to take pride in your choice to bow-hunt or use a flintlock or whatever you are going to hunt with. But your pride should be rooted in your ability to bring home food that was killed cleanly and safely with as little suffering to the deer as possible. You don't need to carve out some special status by turning up your nose at people who hunt with something more technologically advanced. There are more than enough deer to go around for all of us. Hunt your own hunt.

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*Many of these people are braggarts who are never going to tell you about the animal that they lost because they couldn't get a quick enough follow-up shot. They can claim 100% success when they are boasting on the internet because the rest of the forum users weren't there to see the failures. Always take the 'I-only-need-to-carry-one-cartridge-into-the-field' guys (and they are inevitably men - female hunters seem to know better) with a grain of salt.

[Photo used courtesy of Nedrai under Creative Commons license]

I've got a new type of course in the works that I think is ready to start talking about here. Working with Paul Fritz, who co-teaches the range sessions for our Deer Hunting for Locavores classes, we are going to offer a 2 day class on building your own deer rifle.

Because hunting, field dressing, butchering and cooking your own food isn't quite DIY enough.

We are going to be starting with surplus military Mauser bolt actions from the early twentieth century. Taking that basic barreled action, students will learn how to forge a bolt handle, fit and glass-bed a stock, install an after-market trigger, mount and zero a scope, etc. Range time will be included. Each student will take their finished deer rifle home in a case along with a cleaning kit, set of basic gunsmithing tools and a gun vice. You will go home with a complete package as well as a body of knowledge and experience that most people never have the opportunity to acquire. Hunting and butchering your own food is pretty satisfying as it stands; obtaining that food with a tool that you built yourself takes you to a whole new level.

No previous experience with firearms is required and all types of people are welcome, but students must be 18 or older for this class and must pass the standard state and federal background checks for the purchase of the rifle. Class sizes will be limited to 4 students each, due to the necessity of very close supervision. All tools, parts and materials will be supplied by Paul and myself.

We are still figuring out the exact dates. The price will be $900, donor rifle included. For those who wish to bring their own Mauser, the price drops to $725. Please note that there are scads of Mauser variants out there and not all of them will be suitable for what we are doing.

The class will be conducted in Paul's workshop near Charlottesville, Virginia. Paul was trained as a blacksmith and holds a degree in Applied History. He spent several years as a historical interpreter working at Harper's Ferry making and fitting parts for muzzleloading rifles and can do pretty much anything with metal and wood.

Any interested persons can contact me directly at jack dot landers at gmail dot com.

[Photo used courtesy of John Athayde under Creative Commons License.]

I am a big cryptozoology geek. While I don't buy the idea of a chupacabra for a second, I do believe that there are many species of both vertebrates and invertebrates out there which have not yet been encountered by science. I also think that the Earth has a few more Lazarus taxa waiting to be found.

Whether or not you want to call the giant Palouse earthworm a Lazarus taxon per se, it has long been one of the most promising candidates for discovery among cryptozoology's darlings. The Palouse earthworm was native to a big stretch of the North American great plains and was described many times by early settlers. Supposedly, it was white, grew up to 3 feet long, and had an odor similar to that of lilies.

Most of the common earthworms that we find in nearly every square foot of soil in most of North America are invasive species that showed up in potted plants, were deliberately introduced for agricultural/horticultural purposes or were released from bait containers by fishermen.

No, I will not being eating them for my new book.

My point is that at long last several giant Palouse earthworms have been found alive by scientists. Two of them were found in an area of native prairie near Moscow, Idaho. The only two known to science. Guess what they did with them. Go on, guess.

They killed one to dissect it. Supposedly they could only be 100% certain of the species by inspecting its digestive organs. What I don't understand is why they couldn't give it an MRI or something instead. Or if not, then just don't kill it. Go ahead and be less that sure that you've got what you hope you've got, and meanwhile wait for the juvenile to mature. When it did they could have tried to recreate whatever conditions in the lab would be probably be ideal for breeding. Then let the offspring get big enough to dissect one.

I confess to having impaled my fair share of common earthworms on fishing hooks. But when you are talking about the only 2 known examples of a species that had been thought to be extinct, I cannot understand how these people could possibly think that it would be a good idea to kill 1 of them.


[Photo used courtesy of the University of Idaho]

The NY Times has an interesting article up right now about attempts to rehabilitate wild Sumatran tigers that have killed people in Indonesia.

Only around 400 Sumatran tigers remain in the wild, so I can certainly understand why there is this effort not to waste a single one. Among all subspecies there are probably less than 3,000 wild tigers left on Earth. Far too few.

That said, I think that this program is a bad idea in terms of a future for the species. Big cats that become man-eaters are a danger to others of their own species as well as to the humans they threaten. This is because the humans that are being attacked, quite understandably, will try to kill the man-eater at the first opportunity. The problem is that the odds of them killing the right cat the first time aren't very good. If they are putting man-eaters back out into the wild in the vicinity of humans, then aside from the risk to human life you've got the potential for a bunch of innocent tigers to be killed by the locals before they finally hit on the right one and the attacks stop.

I am unimpressed with the basic theory of rehabilitation in this case. The Times describes it thus:

In Balimbing, workers try to recondition the tigers, mostly through isolation from people, so they grow to fear human beings again. Tigers instinctively stay away from people, but conflict tigers have lost that fear to varying degrees, said Tony Sumampau, who is spearheading the rehabilitation program here.

“Once tigers kill human beings,” Mr. Sumampau said, “they realize that we’re nothing.”

These are not stupid animals. No matter how long you keep the animal in isolation it isn't going to forget the experience and methods of hunting and killing humans any more than it is going to forget the experience and methods of hunting any of its other prey. If this worked at all, then it stands to reason that the tigers would also forget how to hunt for food and wouldn't make it in the wild again. The description in the article of the tigers running in circles in their cages and lunging at a human outside doesn't sound paint an especially compelling picture of success.

If a man-eating tiger can be captured rather than killed then I am all for it. But they should be kept in captivity to be used as part of a carefully controlled breeding program to preserve genetic diversity and should never be released back into the wild in any place where they could come into contact with humans again.


[Photo used courtesy of EssjayNZ under Creative Commons license]

The message is getting out there. The Times has a neat, if short, article up today about fishing for invasive Asian carp for food.

I'm making a trip to the Missouri river this summer to fish for Asian carp in order to give them a full chapter in 'Eating Aliens.' I think that the problem most American fishermen have had with carp is that they've usually tried to cook it just as they would bass or trout. We're going to be looking at traditional Chinese recipes as a starting point for learning get the most out of this food.

Rhys Southan has a lengthy interview with me posted today on his blog, 'Let Them eat Meat.' Since Rhys' blog is read by rather a lot of vegans (Rhys is an ex-vegan who writes frequently about veganism), I expect this to turn into a big, entertaining explosion of debate and outrage.

To all of the vegans who will inevitably end up clicking through Rhys' link and finding this blog, welcome. I honestly have nothing against whatever diet you care to practice. You and I probably agree on 90% of animal rights issues and I hope that you will consider that someone who agrees with you 90% of the time is probably your ally, not your enemy.

While my approach to obtaining meat by hunting still requires that living things die, I do sincerely believe that this is ethically the next best thing to being a vegetarian. Unless maybe you want to start butchering roadkill, which I have actually done and should probably write up an entire article about it.

[Photoshopped image courtesy of C_kick, licensed under Creative Commons]

Before I'd even started working, I knew that there was a copperhead in the well house. The 'well house' is a 5'x5' concrete box over which I built a workshop, turning the well house effectively into a sort of tiny cellar. It contains the pressure tank and other equipment for my household water supply and this pressure tank recently ruptured, requiring replacement.

When I first had a look at the problem I saw the snake slither away from the daylight and hide itself behind the very tank that I needed to replace. Nevertheless, the job had to be done. We needed water.

At first I considered strapping my Ruger Mk. III .22 pistol on my hip. I needed something that I could bring to bear on a target in the confined space of the well house. But I didn't dare use regular bullets for fear of putting one through the wiring and plumbing. Ricochets off of the concrete were also a danger. CCI .22 shot shells were the natural choice of ammunition, being enough to penetrate a few millimeters of snake but unlikely to puncture a plastic pipe or a sheet metal control box. The problem is that these types of shot shells do not tend to cycle well in a semi-automatic action, because the plastic capsules surrounding the shot pellets tend to split open as they are fed from the magazine.

The .22 caliber weapon in the house with the next shortest barrel happened to be my daughter's pink, single-shot Rossi rifle. I stuck a few shells in my pocket and brought the pink rifle out with me.

I kept this rifle loaded within arm's reach throughout the entire project. Surprisingly, I saw no trace of the snake for several hours. I drained the tank, disconnected the pressure switch, removed the tank and installed the new one. Then the copperhead appeared. It was about 2 and a half feet away from me. The head was not visible and I hoped that it wasn't able to see me at the moment. My hand went out to the rifle and I thumbed the hammer down as I brought it up to my shoulder.

I was ready to shoot, but had no real target. Shooting a snake anywhere but the head doesn't tend to get you anywhere in the short run. I considered the exposed anatomy and decided that I was pretty sure that I had a clear shot at the base of the neck. Good enough. I squeezed the trigger.

Whoops. My shot was about half an inch off, which meant hitting completely the wrong coil of snake. Now it was pissed and turned around to see what had bit it. I broke the action of the rifle open and loaded again. Bang. With the snake now in motion, I missed it clean. I frantically pulled a third cartridge from my pocket, loaded it, and hit the wriggling snake in the wrong spot yet again.

That was it. I was all out of ammunition, stuck in a 5'x5' concrete box with an angry copperhead. For lack of any other options, I turned the pink rifle around and began furiously clubbing the thing with the stock.

Success. My enemy was vanquished and I climbed out of the well house. Unfortunately, Rossi's pink plastic stocks do not seem to be designed to withstand this sort of thing. My daughter, Ida, was not pleased with the state of her target rifle. The photo here really doesn't do justice to the degree of ruin that resulted. The stock is twisted nearly off.

If I was going to do it all over again, (which I probably will sooner or later, because I seem to find myself in these sorts of situations with alarming regularity) I would have ordered some CCI shotshells for my .38 revolver and gone in with that on my hip. I really can't think of an intelligent way of resolving that situation without the use of a firearm.

I have nothing against snakes generally. They are a useful part of the ecosystem and have a right to exist. However, I draw the line at sharing a 5'x5' concrete box with anything that is both poisonous and fanged unless it has at least bought me a drink first.

As Stella Gibbons wrote in Cold Comfort Farm: "Nature is all very well in her place but she must not be allowed to make things untidy."

It has come to my attention that I have tomorrow (Friday, April 2nd) off from work and I can do pretty much anything I want to. What I'm considering doing with this free day of perfect weather is going fishing for snakeheads in Northern Virginia.

Most readers of this blog are probably aware of the northern snakehead's status as a serious ecological problem in the United States. Imported as food by Asian immigrants and as pets by the aquarium trade, the fish adapted very quickly to fresh water after some idiot dumped them into the wild.

The whole country seemed to go into a panic over these fish in 2002 when they were first found in the wild. Jay Leno made them a staple of his monologues for a while. Demonized for their strange appearance and ability to wriggle over land for short distances (like American eels), several low-budget horror movies were made about the snakehead. Personally, I try not to blame or despise the fish, which never asked to be put here and are only doing what comes naturally. Nonetheless I would like to catch and eat as many of them as I possibly can.

As apex predators these fish could slowly push native species like striped bass out of their habitat. Let us be rid of them.

If any readers of this blog in the Northern Virginia area can direct me towards a hot spot for catching snakeheads then I would appreciate it. I will be either on foot or in a canoe, so the open water of the Potomac is probably not a smart destination for me.

[Photo used courtesy of Brian Gratwicke under Creative Commons license]

I've largely moved away from blogging about this sort of thing, but I can't resist pointing out the sheer absurdity of this group of pirates opening fire on an American frigate today. Not only did we immediately capture the pirates and sink their skiff, but our guys also caught up with the pirates' mothership and captured that as well. I believe that this capture of a mothership is a first in the international fight against modern piracy.

Can anyone tell me what exactly these pirates could possibly have been thinking would result from this?

Award-winning food writer Betty Fussell has a fantastic essay in the most recent New York Times magazine about going hunting for deer for the first time at the age of 82.

I met Betty last month in New York City when she showed up for my Slow Food NYC workshop on deer hunting. She took a lot of notes, asked intelligent questions and said very kind things to me afterward. I can also recommend her recent book, 'Raising Steaks,' which is an excellent history of the beef steak in American cuisine. Betty knows meat in and out.

There is no reason why people can't learn how to hunt at any age, no matter how advanced. My first deer hunting class had a student in his mid 70's who turned out to be as keen a shot and as quick a learner as anyone else in the group.
[Photo by Norman Jean Roy]

I get a lot of questions about what people should purchase as a first deer rifle. There is no one answer that is right for everyone. During the classes that I teach, we take everyone to a shooting range and let them try a variety of rifles. Bolt actions, lever actions, sometimes some single-shots and semi-automatics as well. All chambered for different cartridges, some with youth-sized stocks and others with extra length. Any given person will find that some of these fit and shoot quite well, while others are a bad ergonomic fit or hit them with too much recoil.

These individual variations mean that I can't cite one rifle that will be perfect for everyone, but I can at least express some of the general conclusions I've come to while helping rather a lot of people go through this process. The first thing which I think needs to be examined is the cartridge that the rifle shoots.

A beginner should hunt deer with a rifle chambered for the most powerful cartridge that she can shoot comfortably (without getting into the serious dangerous game tools). I consider the lighter centerfire cartridges to be more appropriate for advanced hunters. The reason why I say this is that a heavier bullet of larger caliber will tend to do more damage and penetrate farther than a lighter bullet of lesser caliber. With a high-quality bullet designed for deer, the hydrostatic shock of a .30-'06 will destroy more tissue surrounding the actual path of the bullet than, say, a .243 will.

Now I'm not going to say that there are magic bullets that will correct bad aim for you, but I have done enough post-mortems on deer to say with real certainty that a good bullet from a .30-'06 or a hot-loaded 8mm Mauser within 150 yards or so can literally turn the heart into jelly through hydrostatic shock even when it missed by a couple of inches. This is one of the things that sending a bigger piece of lead downrange can do for you. For a beginning deer hunter who may not have either the degree of precision in his aim or the instinctive grasp of precise anatomy that a more experienced hunter has gained, that can be the difference between a dead deer and a wounded deer that runs half a mile before dying and may never be found.

Cartridges such as the 7mm-08 and the .243 can kill deer. No question there. I have carried a 7mm-08 into the field many times, although I have also passed up shots with that 7mm-08 that I would have taken with a more powerful rifle on account of a difficult angle requiring deeper penetration to reach the heart and lungs than I thought the 7mm bullet capable of reliably accomplishing.

I believe that deer cartridges up to the .30-'06 in caliber and power generally increase in versatility as you go up. A 7mm-08 can do more things than a .243 can, and a .308 can do a little more than a 7mm-08. The .30-'06 trumps them all.

Beyond the power of the .30-'06, I think that for most people the increase in recoil and muzzle blast begins to adversely affect them enough that its best to avoid such things unless one is also going to be hunting much larger prey with the same rifle. The .300 Winchester Magnum and the other fast or magnum .30s and .33s are arguably part of a whole other class.

Many expert hunters and marksmen trumpet light deer cartridges like the 7mm-08 or the various 6mm options as ideal for whitetails. They often say that they really don't need anything heavier than that to kill something the size of a whitetail deer quickly and as humanely as possible. And you know what? They are right. They don't need anything heavier. A beginner might.

I am not suggesting that new hunters should grit their teeth and shoot whitetails through punishing recoil that affects their shooting skill. What I am saying is that they will do best to shoot a bunch of different rifles and cartridges and find out how heavy they can go before that discomfort appears.

There is far more that I could write about picking out a rifle. Stock fit, action type, barrel length, etc. The cartridge that the rifle shoots is only part of that overall decision. I'll leave it right here for now and at some point we'll pick this up again and look at some of these other issues in future articles.


[Photo used courtesy of John Athayde under Creative Commons license. This photo shows Paul Fritz and myself introducing a class to various hunting rifles]

This morning I was thinking about some of the things I've learned in the course of the starling project thus far. The different ways that starlings respond to structure versus doves and other birds, and techniques I've discovered like running over to get under the trajectory of a flock that passed by out of range in order to wait for the inevitable stragglers spread out over several miles.

Then I started thinking about how this same learning curve is going to play out with most of the other species that I'm going to hunt for 'Eating Aliens.' I suddenly realized something really, really awesome.

I get to write articles and chapters over this next year about things that no outdoor writer has ever covered before. I have read more articles than I can even remember about getting ready for dove season or how to place a tree stand in mixed hardwoods and pines for whitetails. Don't get me wrong - I keep reading it all. But when I go back and read such articles from 10 years ago, 20 years ago and 50 years ago I find that not all that much has changed.

The great challenge of outdoors and gun writers today is writing about more or less the same damn things that Peter Capstick and Elmer Keith did, without it being too obvious that you're re-treading the same ground over and over again. The 'Eating Aliens' project is a means of breaking out of that situation. When I publish that chapter about how to hunt starlings, it will probably be the first time that anyone has written a serious and studied piece about shotgunning for starlings. New ground at last!

This is where I think that outdoor writing should go for a while in order to remain interesting. I'm not saying that Field & Stream should stop printing articles about deer and turkeys. I just think that both in terms of good ecology and in terms of coming up with some fresh material it is time to start looking at 'trash fish' and invasive species as potential prey that are worthy of serious examination and development of new hunting and fishing techniques.

I would like to announce what is probably my final 'deer hunting for locavores' class that will be open to the general public until this fall and perhaps indefinitely (depending on how my various obligations shape up). This is a two day course running on April 10th & 11th.

After April I will still be continuing to offer the course most likely through group bookings only. For example, a New York City paleo diet group is coming down for a class in May. I will also be doing a series of 3 hour workshops to benefit Slow Food chapters in cities around the US and Canada. Anyone representing such a group or Slow Food chapter is encouraged to email me.

As covered by the New York Times in their print edition, documented in a video on their web edition, and recently reviewed by We Love DC. The class will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia with field trips to points nearby. If you're on the East coast, note that Amtrak runs straight from all of the major cities into Charlottesville with no changing trains.

On Saturday morning we will start out in the classroom covering natural history, anatomy, deer evolution and gun safety. That afternoon a shuttle van will take everyone out to a shooting range. At the range you'll all have the opportunity to try out a variety of deer rifles and cartridges in order to make an educated decision about what you'd want to hunt with. Another experienced hunter and marksman will assist me in teaching basic riflery skills to those with zero to minimal experience and our goal will be to help everyone find out what is the longest shot that they can safely manage on a target the size of a deer's vitals. A catered lunch will be provided at the range.

Sunday will be a similar mixture of classroom time and field trips. I've secured a deer for us from a farm about 2 hours away and arranged for someone to drive there to shoot it, load it into a truck on ice, and bring it to our field dressing location about 15 minutes outside of Charlottesville (a shuttle is provided). Everyone will have the opportunity to try their hand at helping with gutting, skinning and quartering.

Final butchering and some cooking will take place at a commercial kitchen only a few blocks from our classroom. You'll learn how to turn the deer that we dressed that day into meal-sized packages like something that would come from a grocery store. We'll be cooking as we go, making dinner and drinking wines that pair well with venison. The remaining meat will be donated to a local homeless shelter.

Enrollment is limited to 10 students. The fee for the complete course is $380. I regret that I've had to raise the price since the first course, but obtaining a fresh deer and transporting it immediately to our site has added significant cost and logistical complexity. There's just no other way to guarantee a deer for the class to work on.

The fine print:

A 25% deposit is required in order to reserve a spot ($95). This can be made via Paypal, or if you give me your word that you have put a check in the mail then I'll hold the space for you. That deposit is fully refundable for cancellations up to a week before the course starts. After Feb. 13th I will refund the deposit if the vacant spot is filled by someone else. Payment of the balance is due by the start of class on February 20th and can be made through Paypal or mailing a check, or you are welcome to bring the payment with you to the class in person. If an insufficient number of people have signed up by April 3rd then I reserve the right to cancel the class with full refunds given.

If interested, please contact me at jack.landers@gmail.com

Photos used courtesy of John Athayde via Creative Commons.

Like so many other things, it turns out that my best place to hunt starlings is literally in my own yard. Regular readers of this blog are of course familiar with my desire to develop recipes for invasive European starlings in order to encourage people to hunt and eat them, with the side effect of helping to protect our indigenous songbirds.

I've been having my best luck during the last 2 hours before dusk. This starling hunting business is like dove hunting on speed. I might be sitting there for 20 minutes with nothing whatsoever going on and then suddenly a squadron of 40 or 50 birds will zoom in. This can happen with doves, but with the starlings you can have a whole string of these groups of between 4 and 400 all spread out along a few miles and coming in right after each other in spurts.

The birds come in very fast and usually a bit high. 20 yards is the closest passing shot I've had presented thus far. When I say 'fast,' I mean really, really fast. I've watched a group of starlings overtake a dove that happened to be going the same direction. They also seem to meander in their flight path more often than doves do. Sudden shifts of the whole group to the right or left are frequent.

As in many other types of bird hunting, choosing one and keeping track of it is essential. In these large flocks with their sudden shifts I find that it is harder to swing on and lead a single bird than it is with geese or doves.

Altogether, I am finding that this is very challenging and interesting shooting. Yesterday was especially interesting due to the high winds that we experienced. And by 'interesting' I mean 'damned near impossible to figure out my lead on passing shots.'

Thus far I have been using plain-Jane Remington 12 gauge field loads loaded with # 7.5 shot. However, I believe that as soon as I scrape up the cash to buy some more ammunition I will switch to something along the lines of Federal magnums in either #6 or 7.5 shot. I find that the inexpensive field loads do well enough on doves but these starlings usually seem to be moving a bit higher and a bit faster and that bit of extra oomph from a higher velocity round would be worth the additional recoil to me.

As to an appropriate choke for starlings, I haven't the faintest idea. My only 12 gauge (and I really don't see a 20 gauges being the right tool for this job) has a fixed modified choke, meaning that its up to me to find a way of getting just about everything done with a modified choke.

Meanwhile, the occupants of the sole neighboring house that has a good view of my meadow must think I am out of my gourd. Day after day, there I am standing around in the middle of this field with a shotgun my hands at a time when nothing anyone thinks of as a game bird is in season. They pull up in their white minivan and get out of the vehicle and give me a good long stare before hustling inside and away from the gun-wielding lunatic in the meadow.

Last Saturday, the gentleman from next door got close enough to possibly inquire as to what was going on. I was sitting on a log with a shotgun in my hands and had the new issue of Saveur on my lap, alternating between scanning the sky and reading about a recipe for Northern fried chicken and wondering whether it could be used with geese; when my wife walked out to ask me to entertain our 3 year old.

"Not now - I'm working," I called out to her.

The gentleman from next door turned around immediately.

I'd go knock on their door and generously offer them a few starlings for dinner, but somehow I don't think that would help things.


[Photo used courtesy of Goingslo via Flickr under Creative Commons license.]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goingslo/ / CC BY 2.0

Tomorrow is Saint Patrick's Day and many of us will be gorging ourselves on green beer, cabbage and potatoes. This is all well and good but I would like to suggest a meal more appropriate to the experience of Irish immigrants in America.

A large wave of Irish immigrants came to the United States to escape the great famine in the middle of the 1800's. About a million people died during the famine while another million or so left Ireland. The famine was caused by several things. Best known is the potato blight, which ravaged the primary source of food for about a third of the Irish. But the problem was primarily a social one.

Irish Catholics had been forced by British law through two centuries to live only in rural areas. Until the early 1800's they were, literally, slaves. Prohibited by law from being educated, living within 5 miles of a town, or entering any profession other than farming. The land that they farmed was, almost entirely, owned by the English and managed according to the priorities of landlords rather than the people doing the work.

By the 1840's pretty much all of the agricultural land in Ireland was doing one of two things. The good land was used as pasture to raise beef and some grain for export to England. The cost of this beef and grain was out of reach for Irish Catholics. The poor land with bad soil, being good for nothing else, was being used to grow potatoes for food. When the blight hit the potatoes the Irish had nothing else to eat. The sensible thing would have been to immediately start using some of the grazing land to plant other crops. But no, Britain essentially just let the Irish starve.

People died of malnutrition even as they were surrounded by plenty. Food was still being exported from Ireland. Streams and ponds were full of fish and forests and fields full of deer, but Irish Catholics had no legal right to hunt or fish. Anyone who did so was called a poacher. Poaching 'the King's deer' technically earned the poacher a death sentence, although in practice the sentence would often be commuted to either a long prison term or transportation to Australia.

For the million or so Irish who came to America, a whole new set of opportunities was available. At the time and today, any law-abiding man or woman may obtain a hunting license for a small fee and legally hunt on good public land made available for this purpose. This is one of the truly remarkable distinctions between America and most of Europe. Hunting is not the exclusive province of the wealthy. It seems like it should be a no-brainer that poor, starving, rural people should be able to hunt for food but somehow America is one of the very few western countries that so readily extends this right.

My ancestor, Henry Cassidy, was born in County Donegal, Ireland towards the end of the great famine and immigrated to Woburn, Massachusetts. He did not have the right to to feed himself off of the land in the country of his birth. But I do and I have. Many is the time when I literally did not have enough money to both pay the mortgage and buy groceries. I would have had to choose between keeping a roof over my head and feeding my family. The way that I have survived these periodic crises is by hunting for food. Once the deer is on the ground, I know for certain that no matter what else goes wrong in life, we will not starve.

This is a magnificent right that I enjoy. I have a right to hunt and I have a Constitutional right to possess the arms that are needed to do so. These legal rights have been the difference between the experience of my ancestors starving in Ireland and my own family eating well even when we're out of heating oil and the car won't start.

For this reason, I will eat venison on Saint Patrick's Day. I will revel in my lawfully killed wild meat. I am contemplating a large, covered roast cooked slowly in a broth of root vegetables for 4 or 5 hours. Certainly this will be paired with a pint of stout porter, Guiness or otherwise. I suspect that Henry Cassidy would be pleased to see the damned potatoes and cabbage left off of the menu.