Hi -

Welcome to Wild Bites #8 from Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, a brief biweekly newsletter designed to make you smarter about your wild food. We'll also tell you what we're up to right now - a taste of what's to come on our website, podcast, YouTube, or To The Bone.

 ~ Hank (the chef) and Holly (the photographer)

Left: Afternoon dove-hunt optimism. Right: Holy crap it's 107 degrees and nothing's flying in range!

1. What's Hot Now

2. Hanksperiments

In our house, there is almost always a random jar or five of weird food experiments in progress. (Well, mostly they're in progress; sometimes they've already flunked out, but Hank hasn't had the heart to pitch them yet.) This colorful array is all about fermentation, and several of these jars contain koji - a benevolent and amazing kind of mold - as an agent of transformation.

He's not ready to write about these yet, but if you're interested in learning more about koji, you can check out the book that's inspiring him: Koji Alchemy: Rediscovering the Magic of Mold-Based Fermentation.

He's also got some new toys at work here: widemouth jar airlocks to vent gases, and glass weights to keep the contents of the jars submerged. You can get them on Amazon here (and no, we're not making commission on these, or the book).

3. Smart Take: The Origins of Hostility Toward Dove Hunting

Illustration by Liz Cornaro

If you hunt doves, you've likely fielded some grief from non-hunters about it. And if you're someone who doesn't think people should hunt doves, it's likely rooted in a feeling that songbirds should be off limits.

But William Hornaday, a leading antagonist of dove hunting more than a century ago, made arguments against dove hunting laced with bigotry, attacking Italians for shooting “everything that wear feathers” and bemoaning that “in the South, the negroes and poor whites are killing song-birds, woodpeckers and doves for food.”

To which we say, um, yeah, food is a pretty solid reason to hunt. Let's not confuse subsistence hunting with the obscene overkill of market hunting.

Hornaday, a wealthy New Yorker, rightly fought market hunting as well, for which he deserves credit. But it's worth knowing that the origins of distaste for dove hunting might be more about the people who were hunting doves than about the appropriateness of the gamebirds themselves.

Hank writes more about this in a free post on To The Bone.

4. What We're Up To

Hank has been toggling between cleaning out the freezer to prepare for the onslaught of fall game (pressure-canning some chile verde, making some super yummy braunschweiger) and reveling in what's abundant now (making Hatch chiles rellenos and peppered dove). That delish dove dish - which is an unusual combination of classy and easy - will go up on the website on Thursday.

Top left: chile verde. Top right: braunschweiger. Bottom left: Hatch chiles rellenos. Bottom right: peppered dove.

Holly had a terrific dove opener last week with two girlfriends in the San Joaquin Valley Grasslands (no selfies because they are all too hard-core to stop for photos while birds are flying). She and Hank went out together on Saturday afternoon, too, but it was hot as blazes and nothing was flying where we could shoot (see photo at the top of this email).

And in the Nature is Gnarly Department, while Holly was on that opening-day dove hunt, she saw a pile of feathers in the field and decided to investigate. It took her a second to realize there was a face in that pile. Apparently, big owls (such as the great horned owl) prey on smaller owls (such as this barn owl), and their signature is decapitation. Nope, that isn't serial-killerish at all...

5. Take a Newbie Hunting!

Hunter numbers - despite increasing during the pandemic when everything you could do inside a building shut down - are generally on the decline. The trend tracks with the ever-growing portion of the population shifting from rural areas to urban areas.

The fascinating thing is that lots of adults who don't come from hunting backgrounds want to learn how to hunt, but are overwhelmed by how much they need to learn and do before they can step out with gun in hand. Simultaneously, people who are interested in helping new hunters also may not know where to start.

Holly has written a guide to mentoring new hunters that has some pointers to help bridge this gap. It's a free post on To The Bone.

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