Squirrels

To anyone troubled by the image, relax.  They’re sleeping.  They’re laying there, perfectly content, and are going to wake up soon to do cute little squirrel things.  They’re fine.  It’d be best though if you could just click away, moving onto something else.

Squirrel hunting’s a blast.  With a little more action and much lower stakes, it’s a lot less stressful than big game.  Outside of a survival situation, if you blow a squirrel hunt, it’s no big deal.  But you still get that thrill of hearing the leaves rustle, that quick shot of alertness, and that charge knowing game is afoot.  Kids enjoy it, and it’s probably one of the best introductions to hunting.

I’m saying that with the knowledge that the skills needed for squirrel hunting are directly applicable to deer.  If you can hunt squirrels, deer are next up.  Still hunting works in both contexts, tiptoeing from cover to cover, all the while thoroughly examining your surroundings.  The only difference is that you won’t look for deer in a tree.  Stand hunting is also productive, sitting quiet and motionless in an opportune place, patiently waiting in ambush for quarry to amble along.  Oak groves, apple orchards, and the edges of corn fields are ideal, all good habitats for both.  Summing it up, squirrels make excellent practice animals.  They’re great for building up toward bigger and better things.

My weapon of choice is usually a shotgun, a pump action 20 gauge using #6 shot.  While you mostly read about people sniping them, using either a .22 or a .17HMR, they’re mostly looking for the challenge.  Popping a squirrel’s head at a distance takes skill.  But I just want the meat.  The only drawback is that I have to spend some time while cleaning picking out the pellets.  You’ll never get them all, so be careful when you eat.

Through a technique called barking, it’s even apparently possible to hunt them with a large caliber rifle.  I’ve heard about it, but admittedly never seen it done.  As the squirrel climbs, the trick is to hit a spot on the tree within four inches of it’s heart.  You want a bullet that will produce some shock, and I’ve heard common .30-’06 works.  That shock will supposedly stop the squirrel’s heart.  It will fall to the ground, dead, dead, dead.  The obvious advantage being that you don’t obliterate a small animal with a large bullet.  This seems very applicable to a survival situation.  Perhaps you’re stuck out and you only have your deer gun.  In any event, it’s a thing to try on a slow day in your deer stand.  Some day, tell me if it works.

You may see a bunch of them at your local town center or park.  Most of them are pretty fat too.  There are specific laws against hunting them in populated areas, but to an anarchist, that shouldn’t matter.  Since parks are government land, illegitimately obtained through extortion and theft, the animals in them are morally unowned and are therefore ripe for homesteading.  Just don’t get caught.  And be sure to practice good wildlife management.  I would however caution that a city squirrel has likely eaten garbage, perhaps not tasting the best  While a squirrel of the woods may have a hint of apples or acorns, it’s urban cousin will be more akin to rotten meat, coffee grounds, and cheeto dust.  Personally, I’d have to be pretty hard up to eat one.  But it’s all entirely all up to your judgement.

I hear different things on cooking them, and my experience seems different.  Commonly, I see people either breaking them down to bread and pan fry, like chicken, or roasting them whole over a campfire.  It looks delicious, but every squirrel I’ve ever cooked as such has been tough and chewy, coming out like rubber.  Squirrels didn’t live life crammed in a cage.  They’re wild animals, and have muscle tone.  I’m told that you can tenderize them. An acidic marinade does a lot.  But I’ve never even found that to work real well.  The best results I get involve a slow braise in a dutch oven with either red or white wine.  A mirpoix adds some depth.  I thicken the juices for gravy.  I’ve also made a simple soup along the lines of a Vietnamese pho.  That turned out okay, but the flavor seemed lost, indistinguishable from common chicken.  On recipes, I’m happy to hear more thoughts.  Pass them along, if you would.

When you hunt, you are keenly aware of your interconnectedness to the world.  You shot it yourself, you watched it die, and you turned it into a meal.  There’s no getting around that fact that you live at another’s expense.  I therefore know very few hunters unaware of life’s value.  Every living thing evolved to live and pass on its genes, and everything that lives takes that away from something else.  There’s no getting out of that web.  The trick then is to honor all life, knowing that some things must die so that you can carry on.

 

A Critter On A Spit

A few years ago, a woodchuck started hanging around the yard.  For a while he was always one step ahead, disappearing as soon as one could catch a glimpse.  He was a phantom.  He was a shadow.  One day though, he must have been feeling particularly lazy.  For whatever reason, instead of scurrying into the brush as he’d always done, he hung around.  He seemed to have no care or concern.  He hung around long enough for me to go into the house, grab my .22, go back out, and shoot him.  I was defending my garden.  Later that night, I cooked him and I ate him.

While hunting seems to be declining, most people in my experience are at least aware of it.  Dining on venison isn’t unheard of, nor is grouse.  We call them partridge around here.  Rabbit is raised domestically, and most people wouldn’t see one caught wild as much different.  Those are normal.  Some would even say that they’re special, kind of a delicacy if cooked right. For some reason though, if you deviate outside that accepted norm, you’re just some kind of odd.

Euell Gibbons once observed that food prejudices are indeed just that, a prejudice.  They are an irrational fear, based on ignorance.  You’ve heard it a million times before, but the old argument, asking how you can say you don’t like something when you’ve never tried it, is absolutely sound.  I will allow that you may have indeed tried something and not liked it.  That’s fair enough.  But without that experience?  Nuh uh.

And the world is full of foods, perfectly nutritious and palatable, that for whatever reason aren’t on the menu.  Native Americans, for example, never made use of the cattail.  Any decent forager can serve it at least a dozen ways.  Tomatoes were seen in olden days as an ornamental.  Nature is full of foods that haven’t been discovered yet, or at least haven’t caught on.  The point being is that, just because you don’t see it in the supermarket, doesn’t mean that it’s not edible.

Now, I had never eaten woodchuck before, but it seemed a waste just to throw it in the bushes.  I skinned him just like one would any small game, hanging him by his hind legs, making a few cuts, and slipping off the hide like one would a sock.  Having no tutorials for reference, I decided to just take off the legs where most of the meat seemed to be.  I now know that I should have saved the carcass for broth.  There was also a whole lot of fat that I could have used for something.  Live and learn.  I did more than most.

Taking a cue from a rabbit recipe I’d seen from Andrew Zimmern, I decided on a slow braise in wine.  It was kind of a woodchuck au vin, if you will.  I sauted a mirpoix first, of course.  Then I put it and the four legs in a dutch oven, cooking it all in a cup or so of red wine at 250F for about four hours.  Having done that,  I finished it off by browning it on my gas grill.  Serving it with grilled zucchini and a rice pilaf, it all looked pretty on a plate.

How did it taste?  Grassy.  Oily.  There were some weird bones that were tricky to work around.  And had I to do it again, I think white wine would have been more appropriate.  The red I used was kind of overpowering.  Braising was definitely a good idea though.  Just throwing it on the grill and frying it up would have turned it out too tough.  Slow cooked in a dutch oven was just about right.  I’ve found this to be true of a lot of wild game.

If you are a vegetarian, entirely opposed to eating meat, I respect your position.  To anyone else who may balk at this, how disgusting is the other stuff you eat?  How is this any worse than meat from a factory farmed cow, standing ankle deep in its own crap, made fat from GMO corn made artificially cheap from government theft/subsidies.  Have you ever seen what goes on in a pig farm.  I won’t lie.  I eat commercial meat.  It’s a regular part of  my diet But I certainly don’t feel good about it and would like to one day distance myself from it.  This is an alternative.