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Hunting yummy things


DaveW

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5 hours ago, Jim_Alaska said:

I also used to love to hunt ww. Emphasis on the words "used to"    I don't hunt any more. I hunted so much in Alaska that after a time the thrill of hunting goes out of it once you pull the trigger; after that it is just a lot of hard work. I now live in California and although deer  hunting here is popular, it doesn't interest me.

Of course age may also be a factor; at 75 years old I am content to leave the hunting to the young guys. I never trophy hunted, it was always meat hunting. Here is a picture taken when I was younger. This was caribou hunting on Alaska's North Slope. Notice the absence of any trees.

 

North Slope Caribou.jpg

I love the country but was brought up a city boy, so hunting has never really been on my radar.

My meat comes cold packed from a supermarket.

Never had Caribou ( have flown in one, but that is an entirely different subject!), but I do enjoy a bit of Bambi when I come across it.

I never understood the idea of trophy hunting or sport hunting.....

For food, absolutely ( even though I have never done it), but killing for fun or for bragging rights??????? Makes no sense to me.

If you want hunt for sport use a camera or find range with targets.

 

Oh yeah - it makes sense to me if it is me or the bear....... :laugh:

But the real point is getting yummy stuff for the cooktop.

Bambi ribs are yuuuuuumy. Roos is really nice.

Crocodile didn't impress me much, but Buffalo is alright.

Over here meat choices are limited to farmed stuff in the normal stores - beef, lamb, pork, chook....us sorry  chicken. 

And not a great deal of hunting here - wild pig, roos, wild goat....... can't think of too much else.

If you can find a place you might get an emu or camel - but who is gonna butcher a camel? Especially since you will be 500miles from anywhere and you will have to transport the meat......

Anyway - there's your thread Jim. :10_wink:

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I'd love to take a bull elk someday on a spot and stalk hunt.  Would make use of the cape, meat and antlers.  Enjoy eating a tasty alligator now and then.  Unseen in the shadows of my avatar are several fish taken while hunting underwater.  

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Thanks for making a separate thread for this subject Dave. What I wanted to say in the other thread regarding wild game was that in my forty years in Alaska we lived almost entirely on wild game meat. The only store bought meat we had was when we wanted something special or wanted a break from wild meat.

Of course we were limited to specific seasons so I had to make sure we had enough to last until the next season. I am pretty sure I got a moose each season I was in Alaska. Many times we got a share of meat from helping others either pack the meat out or cut it up. I was a butcher by trade for eight years in my younger life, so a lot of the meat cutting fell on me for friends from church. Most people are entirely lost when it comes to cutting meat.

I was also a trapper for all the time I was in Alaska. I don't talk much about it because many many people are anti trapping and see it as cruel. Not much meat is produced by trapping because most fur bearers are carnivores and their meat is not good at all. The one exception is Lynx, which has a very white and tasty meat if cared for and cooked right. Lynx is in the wild cat family and looks a lot like Bobcat, but much larger. Trapping is all about harvesting fur, rather than meat. Many people that live a homesteading lifestyle rely on trapping fur bearers for income. Here is a picture of a Lynx.

lynx1 copy.jpg

But I digress, back to wild meat. Our meat harvesting season usually began in late August with the beginning of moose season. But Alaska is such a big place that seasons opened earlier or later, depending on where you lived. As i said, Alaska is such a large place that access to anything you want to do is always a problem. My remote access was by boat, I started out with a jet boat and graduated to an air boat, because an air boat will go just about anywhere. The following two pictures show the air boat jumping a beaver dam and going through heavy brush.

airbt1.jpg       airforum3.jpg

So access to my hunting camp and cabin was by air boat. This was my moose hunting place, which was about two hours upriver from any road, or about twenty miles. Once at the hunting cabin the actual hunt consisted of waiting in camp for a moose to pass by. Of course they wouldn't come anywhere close to us at camp, so they passed by quite a way from us at the far end of the pond my cabin was situated on.

Here is an old photo that is quite blurry that depicted a moose being shot. The spray of water you see is from the bullet impacting the moose hide which is still wet from him swimming in the pond.

moose4.jpg     Moosejames.JPG

This post is getting too long so I will continue with more information later. I get quite windy in writing about this kind of stuff.

 

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A friend of mine hunts bears. He told me that he almost got mauled once when the bear had chased after him. They can run almost 30 miles per hour at the most, and that's fast enough to catch up to any human on foot. He eventually killed the bear and ate its meat. He said the texture of the meat pulled apart like string cheese.  I didn't try it, but I did try some of the jerky he made out of it that was some of the best I've had.

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As I started to say before, moose is generally the first season to open. So in late August we hunt moose. Once we either get a moose or the season ends we move on to small game. I usually started harvesting grouse, of which there are several different kinds in Alaska. The several kinds are: 
1. Ruffed Grouse, which are small  and a white meat.
2, Spruce Grouse, which are small and a very dark meat.
3. Sharp tail Grouse, which are dark meat and large, like a chicken.
4. Ptarmigan, Which are dark meat. There are three different sub-species of Ptarmigan, all if which turn snowy white in winter.

Because I worked at a job I was limited to hunting grouse in the mornings before work and in the  evenings. I would be up and gone at the crack of dawn. Harvesting 10-15 grouse in a morning was not uncommon. Grouse hunting for me in Alaska was not done in the conventional manner it is done in the lower 48 states. There it is done by brush busting and hoping for a shot with a shotgun as a bird flushed, or hunting with a dog that would flush an occasional bird. This is usually done this way because the birds are few and far between.

Instead I used a .22 rifle with a scope. all shots were head shots so as not to damage the meat. I found that birds would congregate along unused dirt roads in the mornings to peck gravel for their craw. I simply drove along until I found some birds pecking and then get out and shoot what I could before they flew off.

In the evenings, just before dark I would drive the same roads looking for Ruffed Grouse sitting in the tops of the willows eating willow buds. They would be silhouetted against the still light sky, making them an easy target.

I was able to make Grouse a major source of meat for the family by hunting in this manner. One year I kept a record of how many grouse I harvested, it numbered 130 birds. Now there is not a lot of meat on a Grouse. The only real amount of meat is the breast, the rest of the bird holds very little meat, it is not even worth the effort to mess with. I simply split the breast skin and filleted the meat from the bone. What was left of the carcass was frozen and saved for bait for trapping.

I prepared it for eating by cutting the breast into strips and breading it with pancake flour. Heat a skillet with a small amount of cooking oil and fry until browned. After cooking there would always be some oil and juice left that made an excellent gravy. Grouse is without a doubt my favorite kind of meat. More to follow.  :15_yum:

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20 hours ago, BroMatt said:

I'm an inner city guy, but would love to try hunting sometime though.

I was also brought up as a city boy. But I had an early, insatiable interest and dream of hunting and fishing. I never had money enough as a kid to buy the hunting and fishing magazines, but would go to the store and read them while standing there. I got my first gun, a .22 rifle at age 20 and started hunting then. I was not very successful hunting in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont. But once relocating to Alaska in my 30's I became very proficient at it.

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A. You are making me hungry.......

B. Hunting is not on the Average Aussie's radar at all.

I know people who do hunt, (actually mostly bow hunting!) but you have to have a good place for it - hunting just in the bush is not really approved - I don't know that it is illegal, but everyone I know (not many) who does hunt, hunts on farm properties for feral goats, pigs etc and wild roos. The most common "hunting" is trapping bunnies with jaw traps - and I personally don't know anyone who still does that.

Right out bush people still do, but they are mostly farm or cattle station workers, and the hunting is often to reduce roo numbers, or get rid of feral pests - pigs, goats, camels, dogs. Most of that meat, if "harvested" goes into pet meat.

Personally, I am not interested in hunting animals - I have fired on ranges at different times, and enjoy it, but I don't need to hunt, don't want to do all the "after work" involved, and my wife would be hard pressed to cook and eat anything that I had hunted.

I have never butchered an animal (other than fish), and whilst I am sure I could if I had to, the very thought of it does not appeal to me.

I am happy to pretend that my meat comes wrapped in plastic.....:15_1_63::sorry:

(But I am glad that many of you enjoy harvesting your own food!)

 

 

 

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7 hours ago, DaveW said:

A. You are making me hungry.......

B. Hunting is not on the Average Aussie's radar at all.

I know people who do hunt, (actually mostly bow hunting!) but you have to have a good place for it - hunting just in the bush is not really approved - I don't know that it is illegal, but everyone I know (not many) who does hunt, hunts on farm properties for feral goats, pigs etc and wild roos. The most common "hunting" is trapping bunnies with jaw traps - and I personally don't know anyone who still does that.

Right out bush people still do, but they are mostly farm or cattle station workers, and the hunting is often to reduce roo numbers, or get rid of feral pests - pigs, goats, camels, dogs. Most of that meat, if "harvested" goes into pet meat.

Personally, I am not interested in hunting animals - I have fired on ranges at different times, and enjoy it, but I don't need to hunt, don't want to do all the "after work" involved, and my wife would be hard pressed to cook and eat anything that I had hunted.

I have never butchered an animal (other than fish), and whilst I am sure I could if I had to, the very thought of it does not appeal to me.

I am happy to pretend that my meat comes wrapped in plastic.....:15_1_63::sorry:

(But I am glad that many of you enjoy harvesting your own food!)

 

 

 

Now see...I didn't know there were camels in Australia! I just searched for "Australian camel", and the first hit was "Australian feral camel"...just like you said. :laugh:

...and they're actual camels! :4_6_100:

I originally wondered if Australians used the word camel to describe an animal other than a camel. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL! 

I think being in water treatment and breathing in chlorine for 24 years has discombobulated my brain...:laugh:

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4 hours ago, No Nicolaitans said:

Now see...I didn't know there were camels in Australia! I just searched for "Australian camel", and the first hit was "Australian feral camel"...just like you said. :laugh:

...and they're actual camels! :4_6_100:

I originally wondered if Australians used the word camel to describe an animal other than a camel. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL! 

I think being in water treatment and breathing in chlorine for 24 years has discombobulated my brain...:laugh:

The Afgans brought camels with them to transport goods into the outback in the very early years - there is still a train that crosses Australia called "the Ghan".

When automotive transport became reliable and capable of the trip, the cameleers turned their camels loose because they couldn't afford to keep them.

They then went feral, bred outta sight and we now have pne of the largest wild camel populations on the planet.

In fact we export camels back to the middle east for racing........

Yes, really.

So camel are introduced, not native.

 

(Edit to add:) Oh yeah, the Middle east also like the taste of our camels - they have almost no wild camels now, and as with all other "domesticated" food animals, the farmed meat has a different flavour. As a result some of our camels go back for food - but very little camel is eaten in Aust. And as I mentioned elsewhere, camels are mostly in remote areas, so killing a camel for meat is a huge matter - where they are, there is basically no facilities of any kind, so storage of that amount of meat is nigh on impossible.

Edited by DaveW
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On 2/2/2018 at 12:47 PM, (Omega) said:

A friend of mine hunts bears. He told me that he almost got mauled once when the bear had chased after him. They can run almost 30 miles per hour at the most, and that's fast enough to catch up to any human on foot. He eventually killed the bear and ate its meat. He said the texture of the meat pulled apart like string cheese.  I didn't try it, but I did try some of the jerky he made out of it that was some of the best I've had.

Bear is one of my favorite game meats, IF it is black bear and taken during the right time of the year. And cleaned proper. I shot a grizzly once, (it was one of those sudden, surprise meetings that happen at times in the bush and I was forced to act) but it had been eating fish and turned out to be completely inedible. I wouldn't eat anyone's bear jerky, even if I knew them really well. Bear is related to pig, and can carry the same diseases, including trichinosis, and must be thoroughly cooked. That's why you never see commercial pork jerky at the store. I know some guys that do it, but I draw the line there.

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I agree completely WW. All your points are good ones. You did leave out one caveat regarding Grizzly, which is that, unlike Black bear, Grizzly does not keep well in the freezer. Grizzly meat has more and different fat content than Black bear and it tends to turn rancid even if frozen.

You are right about bears that have been eating fish, they are nasty. But on the other hand a late season bear that has been eating Blueberries is wonderful. We had a lady at church that slow cooked barbecued bear ribs in the oven, they came out tender and tasty.

I do agree that Black bear is very tasty, especially a well cooked rack of ribs. Bear hunting in Alaska's Interior is such a hit and miss thing that I didn't purposely do it. Most bear hunting in the Interior is done over bait, which is usually a 55 gallon drum full of used KFC oil, which turns to a lard like substance after its used. My bear hunting was most;y left to chance encounters or a bear that wandered into, or near hunting camp. Here is a picture of one that was attracted to a moose gut pile the day after I shot the moose.

bear1.JPG                       bear8.jpg

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