On Woodcock

One of the most fascinating and endearing creatures that inhabits our Wisconsin property is the American woodcock, scolopax minor.  It's a migratory bird that makes epic, apparently solitary journeys from the northern U.S. and southern Canada to more temperate climes--notably the Louisiana bayou country--in autumn, and back again in spring.  Considering that woodcock use their elongated bills to probe soft soils for insects, they return to our region remarkably early, often when there is still snow on the ground, and only the south-facing slopes have melted.  It's a curious strategy, it would seem, that leaves them vulnerable to late snows and cold snaps.  We've sometimes seen the weak, dazed birds staggering along the shoulder of the road, too feeble to fly, after a March or April storm has swept through.  Well, there must be some wisdom in nature's plan, as the species does manage to survive.

Once we've observed the first returnees in  March, we look forward to a spectacle that makes these birds both endearing and thrilling, comic as well as marvelous.  It's the mating behavior of the male woodcock (if you break the name down etymologically, it seems odd that there would be female woodcock, but there you go; I don't think I've ever heard or read the term woodhen).  Almost immediately upon arriving in their northern breeding grounds, the males of the species stake out territory in an open space.  It is here that, each night through the spring--sometimes into early summer--Mr Woodcock does his mating dance.

It's a circular dance, somewhat arduously accomplished in the dry grasses in our fields, the moreso because a woodcock is a rather stout, short-legged creature.  That adds to the comic aspect.  Then there's the peenting.  I didn't make that word up.  Peent is the term that ornithologists have come up with to describe the sound the woodcock makes as he toodles along in his roundabout dance.  It's a nasal utterance somewhere between a quack and a croak--well, just say the word peent, and give it a good Dylanesque twang.  Before we were aware of the source of this odd sound, we often heard it coming from the field on moonlit nights, and invented a mythical Bide-A-Wee beast, the duck-frog, to explain it.

But now for the thrilling part.  At some point in his dancing, peenting frenzy, the woodcock decides it's time for a change of strategy.  He takes flight with the twittering wing-flitter sound familiar to upland bird hunters, and streaks into the dusk; he follows a circling path in his flight, as well, soaring out of sight far up into the darkening sky.  And then he stops; stops at the apex of this climb, almost directly over the spot from which he flew, and descends, fluttering back and forth like a falling leaf, producing yet another sort of sound--what to call it, a sort of undulating whistle, fwoot fweet fwoot fweet fwoot fweet.  And he lands where he started from, and begins again.

Last spring one woodcock established his dancing ground on the hill just above our cabin, and I was able to creep up on him and observe his tottering progress through the grass.  More exciting still, his flight path on his ascent took him directly past the cabin's deck, so we could sit out and see him go past, try to follow his progess up into the evening sky, wait for the sound of the return to earth.  Perhaps I'm easily amused, but I couldn't get enough of it.

This behavior is supposed to stop, I suppose, when the woodcock attracts a mate--that's the whole point of it, after all, unless woodcock enjoy this sort of virtuosity for its own sake; and you know, now having mentioned that, I really hope they do, unlikely though it seems.  Well, our Bide-A-Wee woodcock, it appeared that he was destined to remain a lonely bachelor, for his peenting and dancing, his nightly flights, went on for weeks, both in the evening, and then again in the morning--it's brought on by a certain quality of the dusk and dawn light.  On nights of bright moon, it sometimes continued through the night.  At some point it stopped; whether he did attract a mate, or just felt his chance had passed, we'll never know.

Through the summer we rarely encounter woodcock on our property.  I assume they're still there, hiding back in the impenetrable thickets.  We come across them again in the fall, when the leaves start to drop, the meadow grasses to dry and recede.  And then of course, in the fall, it's hunting season.

We don't hunt birds on our land, though we have woodcock, grouse, the occasional pheasant and transitory turkeys.  We prefer to think of our little plot, just 20 acres, as a gamebird refuge--the partridge and timberdoodles need only deal with their natural enemies, foxes, owls, hawks, and what-have-you.  The flesh of these birds is delectable, but the pleasure of encountering them throughout the year exceeds even the delights of an excellent meal.

But we do hunt them, of course, in the public hunting grounds with which western Wisconsin is amply endowed.  I believe that the birds we find, in much the same cover that ruffed grouse frequent, are migrants.  As the winds turn to the north and temperatures drop, they come through in waves, and though they travel singly, from what I've read, they tend to congregate in liminal terrain at the edges of woods and marshland, or creek bottoms where damp soil provides them the nutrition needed to fatten up for the long flight south.  For a bird whose behavior and movements are famously mysterious, you can come across quite a lot of them in a day of hunting, especially with a pointing dog to assist.

I did not come across a lot of them this year, however.  Various circumstances conspired against my spending much time in the woods before the woodcock season ended in early November.  I shot one woodcock, one.  We made a point to savor it.

I'm a firm believer in the concept of terroir; I believe that the food of a place carries the taste of that place (I almost called this blog Taste of the Place, before switching to the more esoteric title).  And I believe that foods that occupy the same space, even if, say, one is a bird, and one comes from a tree, have a certain simpatico, partake of a sort of sympathetic magic that can create great synergy in the pot and on the plate.  Hence:  grilled woodock glazed with birch syrup.

I'd been trying for a couple of years to make birch syrup, which is produced in exactly the same manner as maple syrup.  In outline, it's simple--tap a tree, gather sap, boil it down, voila, birch syrup.  But birch trees aren't as free with their sap as maples, in my experience, and they run later than maples, too.  The warmer weather can bring problems--bugs in the sap, or spoilage if you don't check the bags frequently.  Last spring I finally gathered enough sap--just a couple of gallons--to boil down for birch syrup.

The sugar in birch sap is less concentrated than maple sap, therefore, more boiling down.  More boiling down means more heat applied to the sugars.  The result is something nearly as dark as molasses, though not so thick.  My entire yield of birch syrup, in two boilings, was probably shy of a cup, but intense stuff it was, once I tasted it.  It's nearly as sweet as maple syrup, but with an appealing, very slight bitterness, as of caramel just starting to burn.  There are also vegetal notes, a slightly spicy tingle, and a hint of menthol. 

I'm so accustomed to the taste of maple syrup, I don't really taste the wildness in it anymore.  But the taste of the wild is pronounced in birch syrup, and that, along with the darkness of it, took my mind's palate to another season, the autumn, bird hunting season, and I imagined the woodcock riding the lashing north winds down from Canada and into our region, finding a respite in our charismatic coverts, the scrappy edges of woods and marsh, among the dogwood, prickly ash, alders and hazel, flanked by islands of tall white pine, oak savannah remnants.  And I thought, if a woodcock or two wound up in my game pouch, that a fitting seasoning would be a brushing of birch syrup, an appropriately northern condiment, and suitably wild, to match the dark, gamy meat of the woodcock.

I do love a recipe with a nicely conceptual, geographical and seasonal basis.  I rarely sit down to write about food without recalling Lévi-Strauss:  Food is not only good to eat, but good to think about, as well.

Getting on to the food, then: the remnants of the  previous night's grouse dinner provided a very nice starter to our woodcock delectation (I can't really call it a feast, since one woodcock provides but a few bites of meat).  I diced up the leftover grouse breast, combined it with what was left of the potatoes and cabbage, added stock: a delicious soup that tasted like anything but leftovers.

To accompany the woodcock I made chestnut mash.  These beautiful chestnuts from Iowa are available at local co-ops now, and I can't get enough of them.  For this dish I:

Roasted, peeled, and coarsely chopped 15 chestnuts;
Sautéed a chopped shallot and 2 tablespoons of finely diced celery root in 1 tablespoon butter until the shallot was translucent;
Added the chestnuts, along with 1 tablespoon dried apple minced, and 1 small potato peeled and diced;
Then 3/4 cup of unsalted chicken stock and a generous pinch of salt.

I simmered that, covered, for around 40 minutes, then removed the lid and cooked it gently until most of the liquid was gone.  I should have a food mill out at Bide-A-Wee--it's a great, non-electric kitchen tool.  But I don't have one there yet, so my "purée" was produced with the back of a fork, leaving an appropriately rustic texture.  You could use a blender or food processer, too.

Then on to the woodcock, which I halved, simply seasoned with salt and pepper, and put on the grill.  It took just a few minutes per side, little bird that it was, and on the final turns I brushed it a couple of times with the birch syrup, which gave the skin an appealing burnish.

And when it came to eating, did it live up to all the forethought and verbiage?  You couldn't taste the birch so much on the breast portion, though it did lend a subtle sweetness.  On the legs, my favorite part of a woodcock, the flavor was more pronouced, and it was wonderful--both sweet and a little bitter, melding wonderfully with the fatty skin and savory meat.  This is the definition of a delicacy, to me.  There's a book out recently detailing the last-dinner-on-earth requests of famous chefs; they didn't ask me, dang it, but this would be mine: a plate of grilled woodcock thighs with birch syrup glaze.

Next time, next year, if all goes well, I'll have another try at this dish.  I would do it pretty much the same way, although I think I would reduce the syrup a bit to make a stronger glaze.  It's nice to have something to look forward to.

Here's a pretty good overview of all things timberdoodle.

Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

The Birds of November

It’s been a while since I've written anything about hunting here. Simple reason: there has not been much to report. The last really notable outing afield occurred two years ago, when I shot a pheasant, grouse, and woodcock—the three main “upland game birds” of our region—on the same day, at a public hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. That was a remarkable hunt for a couple of reasons. One, I’d never accomplished that “triple crown” feat before, and it had been a goal of mine. Also, the grouse was pointed in absolutely classic fashion by our young dog, Lily. Previously she had mainly been known for flying heedlessly through woods and field, launching anything avian in her path into the air well out of shotgun range. We knew she could point; we did not know if she would.

She found the bird at least a hundred yards ahead of me and remained staunch in her point for the two minutes or so that it took me to make my way over to her through gnarly terrain. Just as I came up to her rigid,

quivering form, the bird got up, and I dropped it with the first shot. That was a notable achievement for me, too; grouse are very fast flyers, hard to shoot, and I’m frankly not that great a shot. I already had a pheasant in my vest, a bird that I had walked up, shot, and retrieved with no canine assistance whatsoever. The dogs were running around back in an alder swamp. They heard the shot and came running out to find me standing at the edge of the field with a pheasant in my hand. “Hey, look what I found,” I said. “What have you two been up to?” They wagged their tails and sniffed the bird. I think they looked a little shamefaced. It was a classic moment in the field, one I’ll never forget.

The final bird of the day was a woodcock, which I shot over Annabel’s point, again on the first shot. I don’t think we encountered any other birds that day, though my memory on that point is not completely clear. If it’s accurate, this would have been a hunt on which I killed three birds with three shots, and no misses. That’s something that’s unlikely to happen again.

It was an extremely satisfying day afield, and one I had really hoped to build on in 2010, but you know what they say about plans. October last year was ridiculously warm, dreadful hunting weather. I had to make an unexpected trip to deal with family matters at the end of that month, I blew out my shoulder, then it snowed. In all of 2010 I hunted twice, fired the gun four times at two grouse, missing badly on all shots. The one time I hunted alone with Lily, I’m not sure if she was in the same county with me for much of the outing. And Annabel, then 12 years old and game but a little gimpy, and largely deaf—well, I didn’t know if we would ever again put the bell on her orange collar and send her out with a “Hunt ‘em up. Where’s a bird?”

Based on that dismal year, I couldn’t see things going anywhere but up in 2011, but the season did not have a promising start. Another too-hot October, another unanticipated October trip taking a week out of the brief woodcock season. With no real training in the interim, but lots of self-directed “hunts” on our land—home to both grouse and woodcock, and the occasional pheasant—Lily had become an over-stimulated bundle of bad
habits. I didn’t know if we would be able to bring her back. One short outing with Annabel showed me that she could come along on hunts, but only with a chaperone. I was feeling glum about the season, to say the least. I was feeling even glummer about my future as a bird hunter.

Lily is still a couple months shy of her sixth birthday. She’s in her physical prime, and she’s an incredibly athletic dog. There’s no mistaking the sheer, unabashed joy she displays as she catapults up and down the Bide-A-Wee hills. She is also a very sweet girl, eager to please, devastated when she disappoints (our joke about Annabel is that she, too, is eager to please…herself). I had Lily’s temperament going for me when I decided I had to give her a few more tries before reaching any conclusions.

Some memorable hunting and fishing outings are memorable for reasons quite apart from fish in the creel or a bird in the game pouch. Our hunt at a small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee, just Lily and me, will stick with me for a long time. After several hunts where she seemed to be simply running around in the woods, no sense of purpose about her at all, she suddenly…started…to hunt. Some lightbulb went off for her. Maybe the “chats” we had had on previous outings impressed her. Maybe she just needed to encounter a few more birds in the proper context. The remarkable thing was how sudden the transformation was. From one hunt with absolutely no pointing, or intimation that she even knew how to do so, suddenly she was a pointing machine. Like someone flipped a switch, or switched dogs on me.

We went in to a stand of small aspen.  Lily was working ahead of me to the left. Even before the point I sensed something different in her manner. She was out of sight when her collar started a steady beeping (it’s an electronic collar that beeps every ten seconds or so when she’s running, then every second when she stops). As I came up behind her I could see from her body language that, yes, there was a bird, but maybe not right there. Close, not in front of her nose. I went in ahead of her, circled to right and left. No bird. I told her to hunt and she zipped past me, slalomed through a patch of dogwood. She drew up short, all four feet planted solidly on the ground, and swiveled her head sharply to the right. Then she did not move.

As I approached a woodcock flushed, mere feet from her quivering nose. It veered skyward, over the tops of the aspens, and I had to turn and get the gun up high, and I missed, and I missed again. I cursed, but I recovered from the disappointment quickly. Lily broke her point with the shots, but came to me when I whistled, and I praised her as few dogs have ever been praised in the history of bird hunting. Then we carried on, and in a few minutes she pointed another woodcock (or perhaps the same one), and again my shooting let us down. But again we were SO HAPPY! Finding and missing woodcock is the best game EVER! We had one more bird encounter that day. On the flank of a distinctive little piece of topography, a sort of rocky knoll covered with scrub oak, dogwood, and stunted jack pine, Lily stopped, her head directed downhill, a solid point. The grouse didn’t hold for long, though. It flushed within range of a shot, but entirely out of sight behind a patch of pines. That was it. Three birds found, pointed, nothing in the bag. A great day.

One thing that has been disconcerting this year has been a general scarcity of birds. Often in woodcock season, as the birds are migrating through, I’ll find eight to twelve birds in the best bits of cover. This season I think the most timberdoodles (woodcock have a lot of nicknames) encountered in a day was four. Lily and I hit a fresh piece of terrain on a cool gray morning, just a couple days from the end of woodcock season—pheasant stays open in Wisconsin through December, and grouse to the end of January, though it’s rare that conditions allow comfortable hunting much past the beginning of December. It was great looking cover—scrappy patches of dogwood and alder along a small creek, extensive stands of young aspen, or “popple” as it’s locally known. We didn’t flush a bird. Well, maybe a chickadee. Lily hunted well. She gave me a “false point” once, came to a dead halt and wouldn’t move even when I told her to hunt after I’d circled entirely around her. She was pretty sure there was something there, but there wasn’t. Could be a bird had flushed ahead of us, leaving a strong scent but no feathered evidence. We made our way back toward the car, and I was thinking it was going to be a lost day, but for a pleasant, if somewhat arduous, walk.

We came up out of a ditch and on to the dirt road that dead-ends farther back in the hunting ground. I could see the car in the parking area just ahead, and I broke open my gun—a side-by-side 20-gauge. I had Lily at a heel as we came up on the road, but when I saw the road deserted I let her go, and she immediately left my side and dropped down in the ditch on the other side of the road. I heard the collar start its steady beeping, and assumed she was stopped for a drink of delicious ditch water. But the beeping went on, and I heard no slurping. I realized she was on point.

I found her on a solid point beside a clump of alder. The cover was thick on the road side, more open farther in, and I was fortunate that the woodcock when it flushed did not veer for the road but rather followed the edge of the alders. The flush came as I was just even with Lily, so I didn’t have too much time to think—this is good—and I dropped the bird with the first shot. It fell in the center of another clump of alders, and was an easy find. I saw it before Lily did, but waited for her to come around and track it down. It had hit the ground dead—when I opened it I found that a pellet had gone right through the heart. Lily came up to the bird and sniffed at it, mouthed it a bit. Our dogs haven’t been trained to retrieve, and don’t seem to take to it naturally. I gave her a chance to bring it to me, but didn’t insist. I picked up the bird and put it in my vest with warm words of praise for my dog. First bird of 2011, first bird in two years.

We had another successful outing a couple of days later, the closing day of woodcock season, although we saw no woodcock. At the small hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee where Lily had had her turn-around day, we finally

started to see some grouse. I walked up one bird that Lily had run past, and missed my shot. Farther back in a mature woods with a boggy section I knew grouse frequented, Lily started to get “birdy”—that is, she broke out of her broad crossing runs and began working a smaller area in more detail, her nose close to the ground, her tail going like an airplane propeller. I turned to the left, she turned to the right—my instincts were better, and the grouse flushed in front of me. I took one errant shot before the bird curved out of view in a stand of pine. Lily came barreling back my way, and I told her “Whoa!” She didn’t seem to hear. I told her again, but it still didn’t sink in. Three times is too many times to have to tell a bird dog to freakin’ WHOA! Once I did get her attention, we had another of those “chats.” She promised she would try to do better, and almost immediately, she did.

Not two minutes later, in this same open area of mature oak, elm, and maple, she went on point again. Woods like this are not supposed to be good grouse habitat, but the grouse in these parts apparently didn’t know that (we have the same sort of joke about trout that don’t seem to know that they shouldn’t exist outside of “designated trout streams”). In dry years, and also in mid-winter, I think they seek out the spring seeps in this area for water and for the little green things growing there. This time Lily went on point along a big deadfall, an oak that had tipped over pulling its roots right out of the boggy ground. I came up near that tall root clump; Lily was on point around mid-tree. The grouse flushed, and flew straight away from me barely over head-high. I had to make a quick sidestep to clear the tree, get the gun up, and I would only have a single shot.

I took it; the bird did not drop, but it seemed to dip. I was pretty sure I had hit it. I stopped and quickly replaced the shell I had spent, then started walking briskly in the direction the grouse had gone. Lily passed me and I asked her if maybe it was possible there was a bird on the ground around here. Her answer was immediate: she went into tracking mode; she had found the scent of the running bird, and was following it avidly.

It didn’t take long to find the wing-shot bird. Lily subdued it, I came and took it from her, I broke its neck—not something I relish doing, but we who eat meat have to accept the fact that animals die for our pleasure; this was just a particularly intimate illustration of that fact.

Overall, in terms of the pointing, the adjustment, the shot, the tracking, that was one of the more remarkable bits of dog-and-hunter work I’ve been involved with in my brief hunting career. We had a quiet celebration over the bird that had given its life to make it possible, and made our way back to the car.

A lot of hunters wouldn’t see two birds in two outings as much to write home about. In spite of hopes and anticipation, my woodcock season ended with a single bird in the bag, an appetizer for two. But for me those

outings marked the beginning of my new hunting life with my “new” dog, Lily. It’s tough to leave Annabel behind—but it’s even tougher to hunt with her. I worry constantly that she’ll wander off in the woods, and with her deafness not hear us to find her way back. I worry that when her enthusiasm overcomes her physical limitations, as it always does, she’ll injure herself without even knowing she has done it. More than that, we’ve had a good run together. She brought me into this world which I find as compelling and challenging as anything I’ve ever done. It’s Lily’s turn now, and the education continues.

Next time, bird cookery at Bide-A-Wee.





Text and photos copyright 2011 by Brett Laidlaw

Yummy Bunny

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Alternate title, a la Updike: "Rabbit is Rich." Wild rabbit, like this one I shot out at Bide-A-Wee last week, is indeed rich. Tastes like chicken? Not a bit. But then I don't think a good farm-rasised rabbit, which I also relish, tastes like chicken, either. That said, the wild thing is in a class by itself.

One thing rabbit has in common with chicken, or any other fowl, is that some parts cook more quickly than others; some parts take to long cooking better than others. On a bird you have legs, which can take a lot of cooking, and the breast, which goes dry very easily. Rabbits don't fly (except in Monty Python...), so there's no breast meat to speak of. But like many another mammal, they have well-developed loin muscles, running right along the backbone. The loin from a wild rabbit is some of the finest meat you'll ever eat, in my opinion--tender, toothsome, savory, rich, just gamy enough. As to how to cook it, just think of how you'd prepare a pork loin, a good steak, a lamb loin chop--medium rare is best, to my taste, rare if you prefer; anything beyond medium is...too much cooking, I think (not to attribute moral imputations to one's preferred doneness of meat...!).

What I did with this bunny: Broke it down into its significant components: Separated the back legs(at the top) from the carcass , then the front legs (bottom). Trimmed up the sort of "flap meat" hanging down along the rib cage. Trimmed up the "saddle," the back of the rabbit, leaving the loin on the bone (middle).

All trimmings, including the head, I chopped up and browned in a bit of oil, added carrot, leek, onion, garlic, thyme, black pepper, celery root trimmings, white wine, water, and simmered for stock.

For garnish I rendered some cubes of homesmoked bacon. In that fat I browned cubes of parsnip, celery root, carrot, and squash. Set all that aside for later.

Browned the legs, tossed in a half an onion sliced, some cider, some of the rabbit stock. Cover and braise a good hour and a half.



Oh, those jowls, or cheeks, of which I have "tweeted"--I did indeed confit those, along with the heart, tossed them in some Sichuan five-spice salt to cure for a while, cooked them slowly in duck fat for a couple of hours, with a little chopped leek. It was just a rich couple of mouthfuls by the time it was done, served over a round of sourdough, but let me tell you, it nearly stole the show.

Toward serving time, brown the loin well in a bit of oil and butter, stick it in a 350 oven to finish, six to eight minutes. Let rest while we strain the braising liquid, add a little more stock to it, then the cubes of precooked bacon and vegetables to warm through.



Serve on soft polenta. We usually cook polenta in plain water. This time we used one-third each water, rabbit stock, and milk. It was excellent in its own right, but in the context a bit rich, like buttering the foie gras (a culinary version of gilding the lily...!).

If you hunt and like to eat, go get yourself a wild rabbit. If you don't hunt but know someone who does, implore him or her on your behalf. Invite the hunter to share the meal. Everyone wins (okay, everyone but the rabbit). Another good thing about rabbit: In Wisconsin, and I suspect it may be the same elsewhere, if you're hunting on private land, there's no closed season. You have to observe the daily bag limits and possession limits, and have a small-game license but that's it. Rabbits are plentiful, they get to be pests. Do your duty as a top-of-the-food-chain predator, and enjoy the perks.

Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw

Two Birds at Bide-A-Wee (Part Two: Pan-Roasted Grouse in Cider Cream Sauce)

Annabel, our senior griff', is eleven years old now, and though she has slowed down quite a bit, and gets up a little gimpy from her frequent naps--a touch of arthritis, most likely--she can still find and point grouse. She sort of moseys through the woods now, not looking particularly intent on anything, but when her nose detects the scent of a bird, everything changes. Very few pointing dogs actually assume the "classic" pointing pose, front leg lifted and cocked. In fact, when one of my dogs stops on a hunt with her foot in the air like that, I pretty much know it's not a serious point.

Instead, they will stop with all four feet planted, stop as soon as they catch the scent of a bird, and turn their heads toward the scent. Then it's my job to find them, frequently in thick cover (an electronic beeper collar helps here), figure out exactly where the bird is, maneuver to gain the best angle for a shot, walk in to put the bird up, and knock it down with my 20-gauge side-by-side shotgun.



Matters do not often unfold in exactly that fashion for me. I miss my share of birds, or they flush wild or fly low through the brush or disappear behind trees. Then Annabel will break her point and run in crazy circles, barking in excitement, or frustration, it's hard to tell which. This is by no means "classic" bird dog behavior, either. In fact, even if I do manage to hit the bird, she still runs around barking at the sound of the gun, and she is of almost no use in helping me find the down bird. Lily is much better. Every bird I've shot with her in the field, she has been right on it. She doesn't retrieve, but that's fine by me. Having a bird in a dog's mouth for any amount of time does nothing to improve the quality of the meat.


On a rare warm day in October, I went out with just Annabel to hunt a smallish state hunting ground near Bide-A-Wee. We started late morning with the temperature climbing toward 60. We hadn't gone far into a stand of young aspen before my moseying dog stopped at the edge of a clump of dogwood within the aspen, and as I approached her a grouse flushed and escaped low behind thick cover. As I watched it go without firing a shot, a second bird got up and disappeared into a grove of white pine before I could locate it.

That was encouraging, and as we worked our way through that patch of aspen we located a couple more grouse as well as two or three woodcock. I think I missed on one of each, and had no shot at the others.

As we left the aspen stand and started up a little knob of a hill covered in dogwood, small oaks, prickly ash and assorted scrappy cover, Annabel stopped--again at a juncture of aspen and dogwood. I moved around to her right, to try to get the bird between us, and just as I crossed an opening in the trees, the grouse flushed. I hadn't expected the bird to be that close to my pointing dog, but the opening in the trees gave me a perfect shot. I turned to my left as I raised the gun, and brought the bird down with the first shot.

Annabel began running around, barking.

I had shot the bird at quite close range, and thought I had seen where it fell, but these animals are extremely well camouflaged. It took me a couple of minutes to find the bird. Annabel was no help whatsoever, but I certainly would never have shot that bird without her point. When I found the bird I called her over, and we engaged in a sort of dog-and-hunter high fives. "Whatta you know, we got one," I said. "Good girl, good dog." But she was off already to look for more.

It was nearly noon then, and getting hot for hunting, so we called it quits shortly after. In just an hour we had moved at least eight ruffed grouse and four or five woodcock.



I gutted the bird as soon as we got back to the cabin, and plucked it a day or two later back in Saint Paul, let it air dry in the fridge, and took it back out to Bide-A-Wee to cook for dinner the following weekend. I had thought I might grill it, then finish it in a cider and cream sauce, but October had returned to its chill, wet, blustery ways, that sun-washed morning in the woods a distant dream, so we fired up the Haggis and got out the cast iron.

First, I want everyone to appreciate the superb job I did plucking that bird. I know that anyone who has ever tried to pluck a grouse will be impressed by how clean that bird is, how intact is the skin. The skin of a grouse is delicate, and often torn by shot or dog tooth. It's no mean feat to wind up with a bird that nice. It's a tedious process, but it's worth it to me, and then, I'm not usually burdened with dozens of grouse to pluck in a season. A lot of hunters don't bother with plucking. They'll usually skin the bird, a quick and simple process. Others will "breast out" their birds in the woods, leaving behind everything but the boneless breast meat. This is both illegal, for a variety of reasons, and a terrible waste of excellent meat and bones--the carcasses of grouse produce a spectacular stock, and there's a decent amount of meat on the legs, too.

In preparation for cooking, the well-plucked bird is cut in half, seasoned with salt and pepper, smeared with butter. It's a very lean meat which benefits from a little added richness. It also benefits from bacon, but then, what doesn't? I rendered off a couple of tablespoons of lardons from our home-smoked bacon, and in that fat I browned an apple, cored and cut into eighths, not peeled.


Some sliced red cabbage and onions, sautéed, then simmered with a bit of water and cider, cooked on the Coleman stove. A handful of fingerling potatoes I grew at Bide-A-Wee were boiled separately and kept warm on the side of the wood stove.


Then I browned the grouse. Threw in some chopped leeks.

Added a cup of chicken stock, a half cup each of Cedar Summit cream and our own apple cider, a few sprigs of thyme (we can reach out the window and snip it from our potted herb garden on the south side of the cabin!). I finished cooking the grouse in the slowly reducing sauce--it was barely bubbling--for ten or fifteen minutes. Towards the end I put in the precooked potatoes to warm up.



And we served it forth. A well-cooked grouse is among the most exquisite things you can eat. This bird, well, I'd say it produced some of the finest meat I have ever tasted, lean but moist and tender, with a flavor both pronounced and subtle (but I'm not going to say it tasted wild...).

Just a really fine thing to eat, and a celebration of the land and the season. That said, there's no reason you couldn't do the same thing with cornish hens, or chicken.




Thanks, Annabel.

Text and photos copyright 2009 by Brett Laidlaw

Big Fun(gi)

Having gone on at such length quite recently about the rigors of the foraging life, the sweat, the toil, the terrible encounters with thorn and bramble, etc., I feel just a little bit abashed to display this nearly effortless haul: close to twenty pounds of delectable wild fungi gathered in, oh, maybe, five minutes? Well, they came from two different spots, so there was some driving time involved. This is the joy of having a little foraging history, that I now know precisely where and when to look for some of my favorite wild mushrooms of the year.

What we're looking at here are two big hen-of-the-woods mushrooms, grifola frondosa, and one lovely specimen of a tooth mushroom, genus hericium. Whether it's the hericium commonly called a bear's head, lion's mane, old-man's-beard, or something else, I'm not sure. There's a lot of taxonomical confusion in the tooth mushroom world, I gather--and that's coming from sources far more knowledgable than I: David Arora author of the definitive (well, almost definitive, I guess I should say...) Mushrooms Demystified, for instance. It doesn't matter much, though, because all the hericiums are distinctive (as a group), edible, and, in my experience, delicious.

I've been finding these particular mushrooms for so many years now, they're like old friends. Old friends that you pluck, slice up or pull to pieces, saute, and eat.... Well, let's say they're like gifts from old friends, which is indeed what they are. The mushrooms you eat are the fruit of the fungus, which lives on after you've harvested said fruit, just as an apple tree doesn't mind if you gather its apples.

I see in my notes that I first located this tooth mushroom in 1998! It was growing in a scar in a maple tree near one of my favorite trout streams. It reoccured in that spot for several years, and then, two years ago, failed to appear. I figured that was the end of that but, hoping that it might have spread its spores to a receptive tree nearby, I checked back again last year, and found it fruiting again on the same tree, but in a different spot. It's now expressing its fungalness through another scar a couple of feet over my head, so I have to knock it off with a stick and catch it as it falls.

This year's specimen weighed just over two pounds. Those hens-of-the-woods, on the other hand, which I've been finding in the same spot for six years now, weighed in at over eleven pounds for the big one, more than five for the "small." Around here (Minnesota and Wisconsin), hens are almost always found at the base of white oak trees. They parasitize these trees, and after they've helped to kill them they'll often live on for years on the stump, which is where I found these two.

Though hens and tooth mushrooms aren't closely related, they're structurally similar, both put together a bit like a head of cauliflower, with lots of branches emanating from a solid central core. Here they are each in cross-section:

When you find mushrooms of this size, you get a lot of opportunities to experiment. We have sauteed, roasted, chopped into stuffing, grilled, used in pasta sauces. The simple saute, in good butter, with some onion or shallot and garlic, a sprig of thyme is still probably our favorite method, and we love to spoon that over a plain omelet, with of course a slice of toasted country bread alongside. These mushrooms are also fantastic when they soak up the fat and juices as they roast along with a chicken and chunks of autumn vegetables. Oh, and now I'm remembering a wild mushroom bechamel sauce made with hens, some tooth, and puffball mushrooms that contributed to the best lasagna ever.

In a cool autumn with enough rain, but not too much, you can find hens and tooth mushrooms over a period of weeks. We have finally had some decent rains here, and on a walk through the grouse woods with Annabel yesterday (seven flushes, two shots fired, zip in the game bag), I noticed more mushroom activity than I've seen all year, though nothing I knew to be edible save for a couple of water-logged oysters. It's a lovely time of year to be in the woods, anyway, even if no birds or mushrooms come home to the table. Take a walk, a pocket knife, a good field guide, and appropriate caution in approaching wild mushrooms. You're guaranteed a fine time.

Text & photos copyright 2008 by Brett Laidlaw

Something Wild

In searching out great local foods, a farmers’ market is a good place to start. Better still is your own garden—it doesn’t get much more local than your own backyard. But if you want to really get to the heart of the question, and bring to your table the most distinctive of local foods, you need to leave civilization behind altogether: you have to go out into the woods and forage.

Or take to the stream and fish, or go afield to hunt. Over the course of a year I partake of all three methods. I do so avidly, even a little obsessively, I’m afraid. For me there’s nothing like the satisfaction of putting a meal on the table composed entirely of things I've found or caught or shot myself—grilled trout on a bed of watercress with sautéed oyster mushrooms and ramps in spring, or roast grouse accompanied by hen-of-the-woods mushrooms and a wild black currant sauce in autumn.

In years of mild winters with little snow (of which this year is clearly not an example) we often manage to get food from the woods in every month of the year. A couple of years ago I shot a ruffed grouse over Annabel’s point with half an hour left in the last day of Wisconsin’s grouse season, on the last day of January. (It was an atypical point: the bird was hidden in the branches of a big white pine, and though Annabel wasn’t certain where the bird was, she knew one was nearby, and wasn’t budging. As I moved past her the bird took flight, dropping first before rising sharply, then arcing to my right, and I dropped it with my second shot at the limit of the gun’s range. A bird like that presents an extraordinarily difficult chance, and if I had a few more shots like that as precedent I would have said that was some damned good shooting. In all honesty, however, I must admit that it was pretty much a miracle.)

So in a good year, December and January might see game on our table. Come February, when the cabin fever is running high, I often go out to find the only green thing in the woods: watercress. Because cress grows in springs that bubble up from the earth at a fairly constant temperature year ‘round, the cress is protected in a sort of microclimate created by the 40-degree water. The plants dangle their fine white roots over the sandy bottom, but they take most of their nourishment from the water itself—it’s Mother Nature’s hydroponic salad garden.

Now, watercress isn’t exactly a meal, but if you’re able to top it with the last of the beets stored from market or garden, a dollop of local goat cheese, with some walnut bread on the side, it comes pretty close. More than that, the brilliant live green of it, its pungent bracing flavor, remind you that the earth is just napping, and she’ll be waking up soon, yes, very soon.

March: Well, March doesn’t really offer anything more than February, and even a dedicated forager can grow weary of a steady diet of cress. You might get a few early dandelion greens to add to the salad. But let’s move on to April.

April is as abundant as February and March are sparse. There’s wild meat on our table again, when Minnesota’s trout season opens in mid-month, and to go with it all the exuberant bounty of woods and fields springing forth again: ramps, fiddleheads, wild mint and nettles; oyster mushrooms and a few other wild fungi, including some early morels if you’re lucky enough to find them, which I never am. We forage in our garden for volunteer lettuce, mustard and fennel greens, reseeded dill and parsley. Last fall I made a note of several patches of wild asparagus gone to seed along Wisconsin country roads, and I’ll try to beat the local wild-food fanatics to them come spring.

The call of the wild is less pressing in full summer, when the domestic products are so attractive. What shall we have for dinner: Heirloom tomatoes warm from the sunny garden and sweet corn at the market still damp from morning dew? Or some dirty old weeds from the sweltering, itchy, bug-ridden woods? Civilization does have its rewards. But later in the summer I’ll go back to the woods to see how the mushrooms are coming along, and in the process gather raspberries and black currants, then blackberries, wild grapes, and plums. An abandoned orchard I discovered in the Whitewater area a couple of summers ago gave us bushels of “wild” apples.

September often means excellent trout fishing, and the opening of the grouse and woodcock seasons. At the same time, if conditions are right, the woods may erupt with wild mushrooms: hen-of-the-woods, sulfur shelf, giant puffballs, chanterelles, black trumpets, boletes, honey mushrooms, oysters, and more.

Pheasant season opens in October, and for a couple of weeks the seasons for grouse, woodcock and pheasant overlap. Their habitats coincide, too, in some of the covers we hunt, and I look forward to the day when all three birds find their way into my game pocket on the same hunt. Maybe next year.

Woodcock season closes in early November, generally, and pheasant runs through December, while in Wisconsin grouse hunting is open through January. Our hunting ended abruptly last year with the cold and snow of late November.

Our corner of the world is uniquely blessed in our abundance of wild food, and our access to it. Our trout streams are open for all to wade, and Minnesota and Wisconsin offer vast areas of county, state, and national forests in which to forage and hunt.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty shooting a lovely little bird like a woodcock. But any woodcock, grouse, or pheasant I kill has lived natural and free up to the moment it falls to the gun. It has never seen a cage or crowded pen. Also: The biggest threat to many species of game birds and animals is loss of habitat, and the hunting population lobbies tirelessly to preserve those wild lands. The income from hunting licenses provides the resources to manage them.

Ironically, no one cares more about a woodcock than someone who goes out to kill it.

Yet another part of me settles a lot of qualms with anticipation of a uniquely delicious meal. Handling game has made me a much better cook, because I always want to do justice to those rare creatures.

That’s the overview of fish, hunt, and forage 2007, and here are the highlights of last year’s wild feasts and finds:

"Trout Caviar" is the title of this journal, and here's how that came to be: I’m a fly fisherman. I fish for trout in the spring creeks of western Wisconsin and southeastern Minnesota. A lot of fly fisherman are catch-and-release advocates who like to quote the not-unreasonable axiom that “a game fish is too precious to be caught only once.” My feeling is that a trout is too precious not to be appreciated to its fullest—recreationally, gastronomically, aesthetically, communally.



As a result, I have opened up a lot of fish in the past two decades. One of the things you find when you open up a trout is evidence of how trout make more trout. In the males it’s not that conspicuous, just a slick strip of white milt you could easily overlook if you weren’t paying attention. In the females, especially late in summer and early fall, it’s impossible to miss the fat, yellow-orange egg sacks composed of hundreds of glistening jewels, each the size of, say, a peppercorn. Over the years I’m certain that I’ve discarded hundreds of them—not without considering them, but I didn’t know what you could do with them; I’d never heard of anyone eating them.



It was through a Russian, appropriately enough, that I discovered how to make trout caviar, though not directly. I’ve never been to Russia, but I know a few Russians here in Minnesota, and I’ve read enough to conclude that if there’s any group of people more devoted to wild foods than Russians, well, you wouldn’t be able to tell it to a Russian. See Turgenev, "A Sportsman's Notebook," etc. The Russian appetite for wild mushrooms is unmatched even by the French or Italian. And can you think of salted fish eggs—caviar—without imagining blini, iced vodka? I can’t. I believe I even hear a balalaika….



We don’t tend to think of caviar as wild food, but it is. The classic sturgeon caviars—beluga, ossetra, sevruga—came traditionally from wild fish in the Caspian Sea (now drastically overfished, and either banned or soon-to-be banned in this country, I believe). Those luxury versions are what usually come to mind when “caviar” is mentioned, but the eggs of any fish, salted, can bear that name—salmon, lumpfish, flying fish, even herring (a Midwestern locavore delicacy from Lake Superior, available at the Dockside Fish Market in Grand Marais—quite tasty).



Last spring Mary was working with a Russian woman, Irina, at a contract job out in the suburbs. In that fluorescent-lit, piped-in-music, dull beige cubicle world, when Mary and Irina got together they bonded over talk of food and travel. Mary mentioned the joy we take in foraging, and learned that Irina and her husband still keep a house in Russia, which they visit a couple of times a year, and particularly in the late summer or early fall, when they go into the woods with family and friends to gather mushrooms. Somehow the topic of caviar came up, and Irina told Mary that they used to make their own out of all kinds of fish roe, and that her favorite, which she preferred even to the renowned sturgeon caviars, was salted trout roe.



You can well imagine that this fact caught my interest. I got on the Internet to search out recipes for trout caviar, and though I only found one, and a slightly dubious one at that, that was all it took. I knew it could be done, and I was eager to try.



When it came right down to it, I abandoned recipes, fears and preconceptions, and just followed experience and common sense. I liken it to how I finally overcame my fear of smoking food, when the epiphany one day stuck me: “Hey, cavemen did this, maybe I can, too!” Making caviar, it turns out, is even simpler than smoking food.

I came home from the stream one night in September with a couple nice fat female brown trout. It was late, I was tired, but I had told myself I was going to do this. I set aside the egg sacks as I cleaned the fish, and then considered. The eggs were all held together by a membrane that surrounded the sack and others that ran through it. You were supposed to separate the eggs. This was not easy. It was tedious work using fingers and a couple of paring knives to carefully scrape the eggs free of the membrane without breaking too many.

When I finally finished, I had a half-a-ramekin full—a quarter cup or a little more. I considered the wet brine method, the one I’d found on the Internet, and rejected it. The way they make caviar, I told myself, is they put salt on fish eggs. So that’s what I did. I rinsed the eggs and drained them well, then I sprinkled on some fine sea salt, then a bit more, till they were pretty salty. This was, originally, a method of preservation, I imagined, like smoking, curing, or storing in fat a la confit. I covered the ramekin with plastic wrap, put it in the fridge, took a shower and went to bed.



It was a couple of days before I pulled them out again. I was worried they’d have gone all rotten-fishy. I turned back the plastic wrap with some trepidation and took a sniff. Nothing fishy there. I just dipped a pinkie finger in and tasted the ambient juices. Pleasantly salty, that was all. I got a little spoon and dipped out just three or four eggs. The color had intensified, the eggs held a lovely golden light in their centers. I closed my eyes as I raised the spoon, and I told myself that if this wasn’t delicious—not, “not too bad,” or “okay,” or “hmm, that’s interesting…,” or even “pretty good”—if this wasn’t flat out delicious, straight in the trash it went. I wasn’t going to try to convince myself or anyone else that this was really good if I wasn’t instantly convinced of it.



It didn’t go in the trash. Unctuous is certainly one word to describe it. Also both briny and fresh, from the marriage of salt sea and fresh stream. It was a pleasure to burst the eggs between tongue and roof of mouth, and feel and taste the unctuous liquid run out. I only had a couple more opportunities to make more before the trout season ended. We made caviar from both brown and brook trout roe, and both were delicious. We served them on brioche toast points spread with a little crème fraiche. This year I’m looking forward to growing totally bored with trout caviar.



With the usual caveat about eating raw foods, I would recommend homemade caviar to anyone. I imagine other kinds of fish eggs would work, though I only fish for trout, so I don’t know if I’ll find out for sure. I see from a quick search of how commercial caviar is made that it ranges in salt content from four to seven percent, the better caviar containing less salt, malossol in Russian. I wish I’d paid more attention last fall, weighed the eggs and measured the salt. To a quarter-cup of eggs I think I added about a quarter- to a half-teaspoon salt. The last batch kept for over two weeks in the fridge.



I’ve recovered from the remorse I felt over having obliviously discarded such an amazing delicacy for so many years. Sometimes it takes that long to figure out even something so simple, then once you’ve got it, you’ve got it for good. If the coming year brings a discovery half as delightful, I’ll consider myself lucky.



You can purchase trout caviar from Petrossian for around $100 a pound, minimum order half a pound. But I recommend that you string up a fly rod and go get your own. It’s the sort of humble, local luxury that’s worth going to some trouble for.



The drought of early and mid-summer, followed by the deluges of August and September made 2007 a poor year for mushrooming. When the late fruitings finally did come they were reduced by the early dry weather, and didn’t last in the sodden woods once they emerged. But like the bumper sticker that opines that a bad day fishing is better than a great day at the office, a lousy foraging outing beats a stellar trip to Cub, any day.



Foraging is not only about food on the table, any more than a fishing trip is ruined by an empty creel. I go to the woods to be in the woods, and if I bring home wild food, it’s a bonus. I’m going to be 50 this year, a time of one’s life when one starts to assess things, a bit. When I look back over those five decades, I see that one constant has been the joy I take in being out in nature. Now I may go out to the trout stream with a fine bamboo fly rod strung with a French silk line (I really do, no kidding), and walk the grouse woods with a modest 20-gauge side-by-side to hunt over two pedigreed pointing dogs, and know the Latin names of more fungi than I’d care to admit—but really I’m just a kid running around in the woods, just like when I was eight years old in Eden Prairie. The impulse is the same, the joy in the freedom, the beauty, the sense of discovery in every trip afield.



Which means that I am either admirably constant in my passions, or a case of arrested development. It could go either way, honestly….



Whichever way it goes, it suits me. While the foraging didn’t yield bushels of mushrooms last year, there were other remarkable finds in the woods.

On a Monday night in early August a series of storms passed through the Twin Cities and western Wisconsin. One line of thunderstorms produced straight-line winds that dismantled houses and flattened barns and disposed of mature trees as if they were toothpicks. It was a narrow swath of destruction that hit the outskirts of New Richmond, Wisconsin, and just happened to take dead aim on a smallish patch of woods where I hunt and forage.

There’s an open field on the north side of these woods, and I could see a few poplars down along the edge as I drove up. I still had hopes that the heart of the woods had escaped the destruction I’d seen along the highway—corrugated barn roof panels contorted like origami, huge oaks splintered in the yards of farmhouses. It wasn’t until I walked across the fields and into the woods that I saw the extent of the damage. There were ancient oaks, four feet and more across the trunk, snapped off a few feet from the ground, and maples similarly shattered, and tall white pines lying flat, uprooted. Whole stands of poplar lay down in parallel lines as if they’d been arranged that way. A big beehive had been ejected from one demolished oak, and the pieces of honeycomb were scattered on the ground. The air was thick with the scent of honey, and the remaining bees were still going about their now hopeless work.



There were large sections where so many trees were felled, it was impossible to walk. A lot of those tree had held sulfur shelf or hen-of-the-woods mushrooms. The previous year I had found more hen-of-the-woods than I could carry. This time around, I was happy to find a couple of decent clusters. But a toppled poplar covered with vines gave me a nice sack full of wild grapes.


I called the photo series I took there “Exploded Woods.” I don’t know what it will look like next year. In my lifetime it will never again be the woods that it was. Looking at those pictures now, I remember thinking about the astounding contrast between that calm, clear day in the aftermath, and the utter chaos and almost unimaginable violence that had descended on those woods just two nights previous. I'm also struck by all the sunshine in these pictures: Before the storm that forest floor never saw the sky.

Sometimes when you go out looking for mushrooms, you come back with jam. Or the makings of jam, at any rate. I'm not sure why I hadn't found more wild fruit in the past. It could be that, distracted by more abundant crops of fungi, I just hadn't bothered to notice. This year, when the shady woods were more often than not empty of mushrooms, I spent more time in the sunshine, gathering black cap raspberries, blackberries, grapes, and plums. Some of the fruit made it to the market as plum tarts on Mary's puff pastry.





I could go on (obviously, I do). As a "blogger," I clearly have a few things to learn about restraint. On a topic like wild foods, I have a particular enthusiasm, hard to rein in.







But I couldn't end this chapter without mention of scolopax minor, the American woodcock, a small, migratory gamebird much prized in Europe and generally scorned by American hunters, who dismiss it by saying the dark, savory meat "tastes like liver." Well, maybe it does, but it also tastes like woodcock, which is to say that, to me, anyway, it tastes of the wild woods, the scrappy, brambly margins of forest and marsh where it is found; it tastes of autumn, and it tastes of this place. When it is grilled with a bit of home-smoked bacon and a few sprigs of thyme, and served with grilled apples, hen-of-the-woods mushrooms in a cloak of cream, and braised garden leeks, it tastes very good, indeed.

Brett Laidlaw
copyright Brett Laidlaw 2008