January 2011 NewsletterJim Casada
Web site:
www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com The Enduring Joys of January
I greatly fear that coverage of the outdoors in today’s newspapers, especially dailies, is going the way of the passenger pigeon. There are lots of reasons for this—a general decline in newspapers, an increasingly urban readership, editorial bigwigs and bean counters who have no meaningful connection to the land, changing venues of advertising dollars, and more. To a lesser extent there are similar trends in magazines, and even books are now available, in many cases, on-line. Skeptic that I am, I sometimes even wonder if folks bother to read much of anything beyond U. S. A. Today-type tidbits. It’s all very troubling to me, because I greatly fear we are, as a nation, gradually seeing our love for hunting and fishing, and the place of those activities in the mainstream of American life, eroding away. The changes in print coverage are a symptom of this. As to what will happen with The Smoky Mountain Times, I cannot say. The column has never been primarily about money for me; rather, I have always seen it as a way of giving back to an area and a people I dearly love. Still, I do have some pride and it hurts, deeply, when you feel like you are heedlessly being tossed aside after years of devoted service. In this case, there is also the fact that the column is one of the most popular aspects of the little weekly newspaper, at least if dozens of comments I have received are indicators. Right now I’m thinking about the whole situation and hope to meet with the publisher sometime soon. I suspect he is being pushed by bean counters. Outside columnists, no matter how poorly paid, are the easiest of targets, no matter the quality of their contributions, when it comes to money tightening. After all, those in managerial positions don’t work side by side with columnists and stringers on a daily basis. Meanwhile, I know a number of you who receive this newsletter also subscribe to the Smoky Mountain Times, and I’d ask that you keep me in your thoughts and, perhaps more to the point, let me know if you enjoy the column. Your views mean a great deal to me and can affect both my decision and what I have to say when meeting with the publisher. Maybe I’m just blowing smoke down my own pie hole and there’s little interest in the piece. Your comments might even give me a bit of fodder to argue for continuation of the column, or, alternatively, give me reason to rethink my perspective. Let me know, either way! That’s enough of gloom and doom for now, but I thought it might be interesting to at least some of you to get a bit of an inside feel for what it is like to be a contemporary freelancer specializing in the outdoors. Suffice it to say it’s a far cry of the salad days I knew a quarter of a century ago, not to mention the golden age when the likes of Ruark, Buckingham, Babcock, O’Connor, and Annabel were in their prime. Now let’s turn to January and its enduring joys. For me, January will always be more a month for reflection than for resolutions. That hasn’t always been the case, but I find as my years grow longer and my hair thins and whitens, living in the past becomes increasingly pleasant. Some of that is nothing more than a reflection of age, because I’m convinced that a normal part of the aging experience is to look back with longing on the world we have lost. However, there’s also my firm belief that in many cases “the good old days” were indeed far better than what we have today. In that context I’ll largely resist political pronouncements other than to say I’ve never been anywhere near as troubled about the direction of our country as I am at the present. We’ve got a bunch of poltroons posing as politicians and leaders, and my disdain for folks in Washington spreads right across the political spectrum. There are exceptions (I think Jim DeMint from here in S.C. has solid intentions) but not many. I’m likewise troubled by the way I see wildlife management going in state after state across the country. Far too many of the young folks coming out of college and filling positions as wildlife biologists, game wardens, state wildlife magazine editors, and the like do not hunt or fish. In fact, I am left with the distinct impression that many of them are pantywaist tree-huggers and closet anti-hunters. There is certainly a pronounced tendency in state and federal wildlife circles to turn a blind eye to the folks who really have made things tick in the history of wildlife work in this country—sport hunters and fishermen. Then there are the many examples of blunders or, in some cases, sheer stupidity on the wildlife management front. Perhaps the most glaring of these comes with wolf reintroduction and protection in the West. These rapacious canines are wreaking havoc with elk and deer populations over portions of several states. Closer to home for me there are the problems connected with stocking and reintroduction of otters in the mountains of North Carolina. They have played holy hell with fish populations, a fact the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission has learned the hard way thanks to fish-killing invasions of their hatcheries. The situation in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is even worse, because there no trapping is allowed, and I’ve seen considerable first-hand evidence of otters doing significant damage to trout populations. But then the Park has a history of making mistakes even as it has wrought a natural wonder in the high country of the southern Appalachians. Those of you who have read my book, Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, know that I address some of these issues at various points in the work. Then there are coyotes, a plague which is with us all across the country that is not going away. Between natural expansion, a bunch of truck-bed biology which saw fox hunters illegally stock these canny canines, and far too little interest in trapping (not just of coyotes but in general), coyotes have gotten a foothold all across the country. They do damage to game—a bunch of it. They are really hard on deer, and here in South Carolina there is growing evidence that they are really working on our whitetail herd. They are likewise one more chapter in the massive volume of problems for the vanishing bobwhite (for those of you who are NRA members, I have a tribute to this wonderful little game bird in the current issue of American Hunter), and they also work hard on cottontail populations. I mention these subjects simply because I’ve seen, in my lifetime, major changes on the wildlife front both good and bad. On the plus side of the ledger is the great comeback story associated with the wild turkey and with whitetails. I never saw a wild turkey until I was in my late 20s, and I never shot a deer until I was somewhere around 30. It wasn’t that I didn’t hunt; rather, these animals simply didn’t exist in my world. Over the ensuing decades, deer and turkeys have brought me a world of sporting delight not to mention furnishing me material for countless articles and a number of books. Set against those comeback stories is the changing face of small game hunting. The noble quail and its hunting, at least in a wild setting involving wild birds, pretty much belongs to a world we have lost. This isn’t the place to get into an attempt to explain why this saucy little patrician of peafield corners, so plentiful in my youth and early manhood, has become so scarce. Suffice it to say that protection of raptors (you shot or shot at every hawk you saw when I was a boy, and if you failed to do so you had to answer to higher authorities who demanded that you deal, and deal severely, with “chicken” hawks), changed farming practices, decline in trapping of nest predators, creation of pine deserts with widespread monoculture (planted pines help wildlife for five or six years and then are useless), the aforementioned advent of coyotes, and other factors have ended a golden era. To a lesser degree, the same holds true for cottontails. Also, and I’ll probably step on some toes here, I think we are doing our youth anything but a favor by introducing them to big game at the very beginning of their hunting years. There’s a lot to be said for small game as a classroom for training and shaping a hunter, and I think I can make a solid case for an apprenticeship in squirrel hunting being about the finest education a budding hunter can receive. It is a sport which incorporates elements of woodsmanship, patience, ability to read sign, understanding habitat, marksmanship, stealth, persistence, and more. Those are precisely the characteristics which go into the making of a fine hunter. I feel blessed to have done a lot of squirrel hunting as a boy, and I know beyond any doubt that background has served me well as an adult hunting deer and, especially, turkeys. It is also perhaps worth noting that it has been squirrel hunters, from the Overmountain Men of the Revolution through that great citizen-soldier of World War I, Alvin York, on down to skilled snipers in Viet Nam and beyond, who have been cornerstones of a lot of American military endeavors. Incidentally, and this thought just occurred to me, reckon how many of those fat cats in Washington, D.C., could handle themselves in respectable fashion in the squirrel woods? I suspect most of them would get lost, scare the bejeebers out of any game in the area, or not even know how to load a rifle. That brings me, via a circuitous route typical of this newsletter, back to the word “joy” which appears in the title of this month’s offerings. I’d like to wrap up by sharing a couple of personal stories which are, at least to my way of thinking, exemplary of the joy associated with the month of January. One involves my paternal grandfather and the other my father-in-law, both of whom have long since passed on. Grandpa Joe loved to squirrel hunt with a passion that never dimmed despite the toll of advancing years. He harkened back to the time when the American chestnut reigned supreme in mountain forests and when squirrels were incredibly abundant (I guess you could say he looked back to the “good old days” in his own way). Even thought bushytails numbers weren’t what they had once been in his life, he still hunted them with a will and reckoned a mess of squirrel flanked by a platter of cathead biscuits, a bunch of baked sweet taters, and some of Grandma Minnie’s squirrel gravy, was about as near to culinary heaven as a man was likely to get. It was on an early January day, bitterly cold and with a skiff of snow on the ground, that the urge for such a meal “laid holt” of Grandpa. He set out from the house with his trusty little .22, never mind the bitter temperatures or the snow. Alas, the trip went bad in a big way. Grandpa slipped and fell, perhaps a mile from the nearest road, and shattered his hip. Somehow he managed to slide and crawl through the snow until he got to a road. He yelled and waved for help as cars passed by for at least half an hour, but since he was high atop a bank where the road had cut through a ridge, no one noticed him. Finally, realizing that something had to be done, Grandpa gritted his teeth, turned on his side to his good hip, and slid down the steep bank to the roadside. There a passing pickup truck saw him, and he was loaded in the bed of the truck for transport to the hospital. Somehow this tough old man survived the ordeal, and folks at the hospital told my father they had never seen “anyone tougher or who could stand more pain.” Grandpa refused any and all pain medication once he came out of anesthesia when the hip was treated, and eventually he was able to walk again and get about quite well. Predictably, given a stubborn mindset which those who know me well will realize was passed down to at least one of his grandchildren, come the following autumn he once again took to the squirrel woods. Indeed, late fall and winter bushytails jaunts were a part of his life almost until he died. My other tale relates to quail. My wife, Ann, was an only child, and as is often the case in such situations, no husband was worthy of her. That was certainly the view her mother held of yours truly (no doubt with considerable justification), and some of her rather low opinions transferred to her husband, Earnest Fox. Indeed, for the first couple of years of our marriage I was just sort of tolerated as an unavoidable embarrassment. The first hint of a thaw came on a day in May in the late 1960s when I took a fly rod out to a family pond to see what I could do with bedding bream. The result was a whopping mess of “titty bream” (and if you don’t know what a “titty bream” is you’ve missed a bit in your upbringing). That duly impressed my father-in-law, who had expressed serious reservations about the effectiveness of my fly rod, and we enjoyed a fine fish fry that evening. The real breakthrough came, however, when we visited my in-laws in early January (having spent Christmas with my family and thereby already being somewhat in the dog house). Somehow a bird hunt was arranged on a nearby farm, and my father-in-law borrowed a rangy pointer belonging to a friend for the outing. Even though this was a time period when the bobwhite was already beginning a long decline in numbers, that was a day of magic. My father-in-law handled his old humpback 12 gauge with the sort of wizardry which can only come through long experience. For my part, I was severely handicapped in two ways—being a less proficient wing shot than him under any circumstances and also having nothing but a full-choked 20 gauge with me. It was my first shotgun and performed perfectly well on squirrels, was barely adequate for rabbits, and came close to being useless for birds. Still, I managed to kill four or five quail, he took a limit, and by day’s end most of the existing barriers between us had vanished in a wondrous way. I think that through sport he realized, for the first time, that there were acceptable sides to my character. The outing ended with a sumptuous mess of quail and all the fixin’s, a meal which formed a fitting capstone to a January day of rare joy. That memory lives with me, and let’s conclude with a brace of quail recipes. Maybe you are fortunate to live in country where the noble bobwhite still exists in huntable number or, much more likely, you might have a mess of birds thanks to a foray on a shooting preserve. Both recipes come from Wild Fare and Wise Words, which is for sale on my Web site. GRILLED QUAIL
6 to 8 dressed quail Combine the quail and other ingredients in a large bowl or plastic zip-top bag. Marinate in the refrigerator for two hours. Heat the grill to hot. Drain the quail and grill for three minutes on each side. Do not overcook. Serve on green salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing. FRIED QUAIL
1 cup red wine Mix the wine, olive oil, and garlic. Add the quail and marinate, refrigerated, for four to six hours. Combine the flour and seasoned salt. Coat the quail, after removing them from the marinade and draining, in the mixture and deep fry in 350 degree oil for 15 to 20 minutes. Serve immediately. Makes eight servings (quantities in recipe can be reduced). Thank you for subscribing to the
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