Cazadora's Top Tweets: Crap in the gene pool, a dead little stallion and dolphins cuddling a cat

Tweetweek in review:

A dumb ad: How about a nice big raspberry for Dodge for its really stupid ad on YouTube for the 2011 Ram Outdoorsman?

What's wrong with it?

It features a guy who's camping out under the stars. He's trying to sleep, but some crickety thing keeps chirping, keeping him awake. So he gets up, grabs a compound bow from the handy storage compartment in his truck, and shoots the chirping thing.

When he returns to his sleeping bag to enjoy the peace, a frog starts croaking, and the ad leaves us to believe he's going to get up and kill that, too. Get it? Bother a hunter and he will hunt you down and kill you.

This is not the worst image of hunters I've ever seen. I just hate it when people on "our side" project an image of hunters that makes us look like a bunch of 7-year-old boys who can't stop ourselves from shooting everything that moves. It's just not helpful.

Thanks to Peebs for bringing this one to my attention.

Please remove this person from the gene pool: Some moron videoed himself on a snowmobile chasing a moose. The moose runs and runs and runs and finally stops and nearly head-butts the idiot.

Almost all of the comments on the video are pretty caustic - deservedly so.

I don't own a snowmobile or an ATV and I doubt that I ever will, so I don't take personal umbrage at what this idjit has done to besmirch the reputation of snowmobilers.

I just think he's a jerk, and I hope he never procreates.

Thanks to Chas Clifton at the Southern Rockies Nature Blog for bringing this one to my attention.

Wolf-dog hybrids kill miniature stallion: Apparently, there are a bunch of wolf-dog hybrids running around Riverside County, and one of them killed and ate a miniature horse, maybe 30 inches high at the shoulders, right in front of a rancher.

See the problem here? The fearlessness of a domestic animal, the instincts of a wild one? Hide your kids, folks.

Of course, that fearlessness turned out to be a problem for one of the wolf-dogs, because one of the ranch hands promptly shot it. But a second wolf-dog got away after taking a few rounds himself.

According to the Riverside Press-Enterprise story, "Wolf-dog hybrids are dogs that have been bred with wolves or wolf mixes. Detractors describe them as being wild and unpredictable, but supporters say they are good around people."

Thanks to @alquackenbush at the SoCal Bowhunter for Tweeting this one first.

Good news: A win against HSUS! A federal judge rejected a lawsuit by the Humane Society of the United States that attempted to end hunting at more than 50 national wildlife refuges, according to a story in Ammoland.

If you're like me and like more than one source for your news, you'll find there wasn't much written about Wednesday's decision. The only other substantive piece I could find was this story by the Courthouse News Service.

Something to make you go "Awwwwwww!" You know how I love my kitties, so I couldn't resist this sweet little video of a cat engaging tenderly with some dolphins.



It's a really touching video, and I wasn't surprised to see the following comment on the YouTube page: "I believe Heaven is just what I saw, all the creatures getting along."

Apparently this person wasn't aware that dolphins - like humans - can be cute one moment, then hungry for meat the next:



Ah, life in all its glory!

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Archery: What was I thinking???

Apparently, the archery gods have a sense of humor, and I am a worthy target for them.

When I got my bow five weeks ago, I had a beautiful goal: Unlike hunting with a gun, which I began after literally one shooting lesson - one day at skeet - I was going to do archery right. I was going to take my time and try to get really good at it before I unleashed myself on the wildlife of Northern California.

Noble, eh? I would've told you it was totally freakin' brilliant, if you'd asked me.

Only problem is I forgot one thing: At least when I started duck hunting, I actually took a shooting lesson.

Mind you, I didn't go into archery blind: I got some basic starting advice from the guy who sold me the bow at Wilderness Archery, looked up some beginning archery instructions with diagrams and got to work in my back yard, paying utmost attention to form.

Me, paying utmost attention to form.

But deep down I knew I was probably developing bad habits.

So the last time I went to the shop to get sights (wow, huge help!), I inquired about lessons and signed up on the spot. And today was the big day.

The good news is that I long ago shed my juvenile dream of being declared a prodigy on occasions like this. (I blame Shirley Temple movies for this former affliction. That's all I can say.)

But as my instructor, Tex, watched me take a shot, and then another, and then another - all while being shown up by an 11-year-old with a compound bow in the next lane - I knew it was coming. Yes, I was going to stop everything, drop everything and go back to zero.

I had hoped - modestly, I thought - that there might be perhaps one thing I was doing right. And maybe there was. I think he said something complimentary about me standing nice and straight. But pretty much everything else required a lot of correction.

In fact, as soon as the 11-year-old left and it was just me and Tex, we moved waaaaaaay down the lane, so I was standing about five feet from the target.

Fingers tucked.

Hand at proper angle.

Elbow out - just a bit.

Shoulder back - no back, not up.

Fingers on bowstring - no, don't squeeze the arrow!

Draw.

Finger touching corner of mouth.

Now, wipe that cake you're thinking about eating off the side of your mouth.

Or elbow the person with bad breath behind you. Whichever mental image works best.

Hmmmm.

OK, do it with your eyes closed.

Strangely enough, that eyes-closed thing was good. Got me thinking about all those body parts and where they needed to be, with no silly target distracting me.

And at the risk of sounding immodest, I have to say I shot AWESOME groups at five feet with my eyes closed. Like seriously, if I could get an elk to stand five feet from me while I'm blindfolded, that mofo is dead.

Now I just need to figure out where I can shoot with my eyes closed around our property for the next few weeks, because the kind of shooting I've been doing is off limits to me for a while. Oh, the mere thought of it fills me with mirth!

Don't get me wrong: Tex was awesome. I just hate being outwitted by my own cleverness.

Oh well. Onward!

©Holly A. Heyser 2011

Turkey hunting: The great escape from prison

Seventy-one days.

That's how long it had been since I'd gone hunting when Hank and I joined our friend Evan to go turkey hunting Sunday in the emerald hills of Amador County.

Evan had warned Hank that turkey sightings had been minimal at the oak-studded cattle ranches where he had permission to hunt. "I don't care," I told Hank. "I just want to go for a walk with a gun in my hand and know that if I see legal game, I can shoot at it."

That sounds way more bloodthirsty than it was.

I've just been feeling really hemmed-in by my city life. I mean, I love my weekly hikes at the lake. If I stick to the deer trails, I can avoid humans for most of the trek, and as a result, I tend to see a lot of wildlife. Very good for the soul.

More importantly, I'm getting to know that place. I know exactly where the fat jack rabbit will bolt at my approach, and what cover he'll run to. I know where the small herd of deer lives, shrinking by the week as its members get smashed by cars on the nearby busy street and left to bloat in the sun. I know where the hawk will fly, screeching, low over the tree line as I cross a normally-dry creek bed, now swollen with water that oozes from the hillside, soaked by the incredible rainfall we've had this year. I know where I'll see turkeys, and why - a homeowner adjacent to the park dumps seed to attract wildlife.

But of course, I can't hunt there.

Evan seemed as frustrated by city life on Sunday as I've been. He was born and raised in Amador County, but now spends most of his waking hours stuck in an office an hour away at the Capitol. For the first time since I met him, I heard him speak with bitter envy about the people who've made their life back home in the hills: They can finish work for the day and spend all their free time scouting for game, and just get up and go hunting, practically right out their back door, when the weekend comes.

Evan's career success - he's really good at what he does - doesn't allow him the same luxury. It strikes me as a prison, of a sort.

My prison is a different one. My job affords me plenty of freedom - I have almost complete autonomy, I love my students, and I get summers off. My prison is a house in the city - normally an excellent investment, but now worth about $100,000 less than we owe on it. Good lord, how will we ever move out to the country? How will I ever live in a place where I can get to know the land intimately, and hunt on it?

The turkey hunting was wretched on Sunday. I think we saw a grand total of four turkeys, none of them in range, and the sightings - and soundings - stopped not long after sunrise. But we kept jumping from ranch to ranch anyway, stalking absolutely nothing under the watchful eye of hundreds of cows.

"Wanna try another place?" Evan would ask.

I'd think about what I could be doing if I were at home: cleaning the house, weed-whacking the yard, working on a project. Then I'd weigh that against what we were doing: soaking up the spring sunshine, walking all over creation, pursuing food without the comfortable guarantees of the supermarket. This is how we're supposed to live.

"Yeah, let's do it."

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Cazadora's Top Tweets: bald eaglets, bikinis, turkeys, ethics and Darth Vader

When I first started this blog, I used to write a lot more about interesting hunting- and nature-related stuff I found on the web, but once I started a Twitter account, I shifted a lot of those tidbits to the Twitterverse.

Twitter, with its 140-character limit, seemed like a great place to share something that's interesting, but not necessarily worth a whole blog post. That's still true, but I've found increasingly that I've wanted to share some of these things with blog readers who aren't on Twitter (or don't stay glued to it every waking moment).

So, behold, my first installment of Cazadora's Top Tweets: a sampling of some of the stuff I've been tweeting about in the past week. Here we go:

Decorah Eagles: My foodie friend @CarolBlymire turned me on to this one, which has been utterly consuming: There's a webcam trained on a bald eagle nest in Decorah, Iowa, and you can tune in day or night to see what's happening. Two of the three eaglets have hatched so far, so it's not too late to try to catch the final blessed moment.

The live footage, courtesy of the Raptor Resource Project, has been utterly fascinating to watch: the partnership of the parent eagles (they tend the nest in shifts), their odd little way of rocking when settling down on eggs and/or eaglets, the way the stronger eaglet bullies the weaker one, and the incredible collection of dead animals piling up on the nest to keep the little ones (and the eagle on nest shift) well-fed.

If you love nature, you'll love this. And if the live action is slow when you tune in, scroll down and it'll take you to replays on YouTube. The replays could stand to be edited down a bit - I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of viewer - but they do catch key moments.

A hunting television show we don't need? Steve Sarley, a columnist for the Northwest Herald in McHenry County, Illinois, tells us there's a new hunting TV show in the works: Bikini Buck Shot. It's about three Chicago city girls going out to the country and attempting to hunt.

Sarley planned to do an interview about it until he watched a video one of the participants had posted on Facebook. You should check out what he had to say about it, but the short version is it didn't seem terribly ... serious.

Of course, I could be wrong about this show - it could be an amazing way to get urbanites into hunting, which is something I'm actually quite interested in. But if that's the case, the word "Bikini" in the title really doesn't serve it well.

Yo producer, are you reading? If you can make a case for this show being serious, email me.

Mean old hunters: Newhampshire.com columnist Stacey Cole wrote a column this week about something that really bugged her, and the headline says it all: "Careless hunter left arrow in living turkey."

The arrow was sticking through the bird's chest, close to its neck (ow).

Cole, who says she's not anti-hunting, writes, "How a bow hunter could hit a turkey with such a direct body shot and then not follow the wounded game until it could be retrieved, is a bit beyond me. It certainly appeared to me that this was not the action of a hunter who was interested in a quick, clean, kill."

Sigh. It never ceases to amaze me that when people see a wounded animal, particularly one with an arrow stuck in it, they tend to assume that the hunter was mean, negligent or cruel.

Sadly, there is no comment function on that website (though, for some reason, the site lists Cole's address). If there were, I would happily point out that most hunters really want to kill what they shoot at, and when the animal doesn't die right away, they generally work really hard to get the animal and finish the job.

Unfortunately, most animals run faster than we do, and turkeys can actually fly away, which really makes it a challenge to give chase. Sheesh!

Field & Stream ethics column: Field & Stream announced Friday (yes, on April Fool's) that it's starting an ethics column. For real.

The editors are inviting readers to pose questions for the column to address, click here if you'd like to add to the pile.

Straight-up funny: Hank (@Hank_Shaw) turned me on to Darth Vader vs Hitler. Epic Rap Battles of History 2. Nothing to do with hunting or nature or food - it's just funny as hell. Be warned, though: There's a bit of inappropriate language, so if your kids' ears are pristine and you'd like to keep it that way, check this out after you've put them to bed for the evening.



Want to follow me on Twitter and get these updates as I tweet them? Go here, and if you already have a Twitter account, just click on the "Follow" button. If you don't have an account, it's easy to start one.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011

Guilty as charged: I love whole ducks, and there's a really good reason for that

I was accused the other day of being a snob because I am a proponent of using as much of the animals we kill as possible. This means, most importantly, that I don't breast out ducks.

Not only does this position risk offending established hunters who grew up breasting out their ducks, I was told, but it risks alienating hunting newbies by holding them up to a standard that, basically, only the stupendous and amazing Hank could meet.

Well, Hank is a freak, and he'd be the first to admit that. He makes wild boar liver creme caramel, goose gizzard carpaccio and duck liver ravioli. And it's all good. I know, because I eat everything he cooks.

But, seriously, duck hunters, I don't expect you to cook like he does (though it would be nice if you ordered his upcoming book, Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast, which comes out in late May).

And I'm not going to start telling Yo' Mama jokes if your mama raised you to breast out your ducks.

I will, however, strongly encourage you to use more than just the breasts of the ducks you kill, because 1) there's a ton of tasty meat on the rest of the duck, and 2) you don't have to be a great chef to make it taste good.

Let's address Point 2 first. I do very little cooking in our house, because Hank is just way better at it. But I do roast my own whole ducks, because it's super easy.

The short version is that you salt the duck, brown it all over in a cast iron pan, pop it in a 450-degree oven, cook it until the breast meat hits 135 degrees, let it rest under a tent of foil for five minutes, then serve. (Here are the detailed duck roasting instructions.)

Though teal and ruddy ducks are single-serving critters, I can usually get at least two meals out of a medium-sized duck (wigeon, gadwall) and three out of a large duck (mallard, pintail).

This is where we get to Point 1.

The first meal is slicing off the breasts. I did this for lunch just this Thursday with a fat little wigeon I killed in December, and here's how much meat I got from the breasts:


So, that's what you would've gotten off this bird if you'd breasted him out. That scale reads 4 3/8 ounces. And yes, these were like crack cocaine - after I finished eating the breasts, I wanted to go eat the rest of the bird, bones and all.

But I was saving it for this blog post, so I threw the rest of the carcass into the fridge to chill overnight. Then this morning, I picked off all the meat, fat and skin that I could get - this would be a lunch I could take to take to work.

Now, this wigeon was particularly obese, so I got a lot of fat. But apparently Hank really wrecked his wings when he shot him, because this pato gordito came out of the package looking like Venus de Milo - no wing meat for me!

(I know duck wings seem pretty insubstantial and are a total pain in the ass to eat on the bone. But when you're picking the carcass, there's definitely enough meat on the wings to make them worth the effort.)

When it was all picked, I diced up the meat so I could throw it into a quick fried-rice concoction: Duck bits (no added fat needed), chili flakes, garlic, salt, rice.

Here's what I got:


Yep, that's 5 1/4 ounces.

Now, if you're concerned about all that Fatty McFat Wigeon's fat clogging my arteries, don't be - I saved the fat from the frying pan, and it was still liquid at room temperature this morning - a sign it's good-for-you fat. (And if you'd like to read my smug blog post on my latest cholesterol test, click here.)

Now, people like my buddy Charlie would need two of those wigeons to make a satisfying meal (though he'd really prefer if they were two pintails). That's not the point here. The point is that if you think there's not enough meat on a duck to make it worth eating more than the breasts, you might want to reconsider.

What if you hate plucking whole ducks? I sure understand that - plucking is a pain in the butt, and it's the last thing I want to do with my stupid arthritic hands after a day in a wet and windy marsh (I prefer wrapping them around a glass of bourbon).

There is an easier alternative: pluck the breasts and legs and take them out together, each breast attached to a leg. My friend Brent, who hunts up at Lower Klamath, processes his ducks like this, then marinates and grills them. They taste outstanding every time.

The upshot? You worked hard to bring those ducks home. You might as well get all the meat out of them that you can. It sure can't hurt to try, right?

UPDATE: Since writing this blog post, I've produced three videos on how to handle whole ducks:

How to Skin a Duck: For sea ducks or other ducks with off flavors. Removing the skin and fat removes the bad flavors.

How to Pluck a Duck: For all ducks that always taste good (where we live, that's generally pintail, greenwing teal, mallard and wigeon; spoonies and gadwalls can be iffy).

How to Gut a Duck: Part two of the process you begin with plucking.

© Holly A. Heyser 2011