Blues

I love quail.

I like seeing them around, listening to them call in the spring, and seeing the little babies, that look like miniature adults, buzz off after their parents in the summer.

I love desert quail. Bobwhites are great, but big coveys of running, wild flushing, melting into the non-existent cover blues and Gambel's are more charismatic to my mind.

Deer hunting a month or so ago, I was easing down a wide draw, well over a mile from any road, when a big covey got up from the other side. Weeks before quail season and about a hundred yards away, they still flew over the far rim of the draw, doubtless hooking to the left or right once they got over the top, the better to confuse any pursuers.


I love chasing quail. Spot them, get after them, try to get a couple of flushes then kick up singles. Often, the country is very big, and, unless you focus on areas around water (which also tend to get more pressure from other hunters) it is hard to just walk for them. If you are going to get out on foot, try a sandy wash with some cover in and around it.

We've run into a few blues.

 I love shooting quail. Be quick, and point right at the bird you pick out, you'll probably hit that bird. It is the simplest of things and, at times, it is one of the hardest of things. 

Someone should title a blog after that sort of thing.



Of course, quail are very fine at the table, too. 

Myco hunting

A little while back, A and I got out for a morning to see if the late summer rains had done much for the mushrooms up in the nearest-by mountains. A reliable spot yielded no edibles; however, on the way out A spotted a nice flush of oyster mushrooms up on a poplar stump:

There was one drawback to their location:

wrong side of the creek! (click on the photo above to see the 'shrooms in the left side of the frame)

Fortunately, there was a relatively easy way across that didn't involve wet feet, leaving only head-high stinging nettles to contend with. Stinging nettles: one of the many reasons to wear long sleeves and canvas pants in summer time in the woods. There were thistles, too.

The mushrooms proved to be large,  fresh, and largely bug-free:

They were just a little high up there:

Requiring us to resort to Rescue Tape (tm) from the truck box.

I'm looking to patent the "Mora-on-stick" mushroom collection device:

 Failing to field the falling 'shroom meant hunting it out of the nettles, a real incentive not to miss your catch:

In the end, leaving a bit of the cluster to spread spores around, we had a couple of pounds of oysters, enough to provide a very generous pizza topping to a couple of large 'za.

That bridge would have been a lot better if the bark wasn't slipping. Mycophagy is way more exciting that bird watching.

First installment

Timeliness is inherent in the idea of blogging- it is, after all, a web log in concept and writing about things past, unless inspiring a current thought, is contrary to the idea of a "log". That's not working so well for me right now- here we are in duck season,  past our big game hunts and nearly to quail season, and I'm going to talk about September, when so many good things start. Regardless, and getting back to the last post, a while back A, Dad and I headed up to Alaska for another week of silver salmon fishing, as suggested in the post below.

If you hit the "fishing" label on this blog you'll see accounts of other trips or thoughts inspired by those trips, and I'm not sure I have too much new to say. The area is lovely, the air clean and crisp off the spruce forests, glaciers, and sea. The people are generally friendly, the town small and visiting fisherman apparently a welcome supplement to the income from commercial harvest. Traveling a couple thousand miles to catch fish is considered perfectly reasonable if one is so unfortunate as to not live a stone's throw from the ocean. This year we ran into a couple of groups from Sweden, who presumably live within a relative stone's throw of an ocean, just not one with silver salmon.

We arrived on the tail end of a big rain event. In a place where precipitation is measured in scores of inches (or multiples of feet), that means quite a bit of water. A few years ago, we saw seven or eight inches in twenty-four hours, but this was bigger. Fortunately, as we got there the streams were coming down and full of fish. The first couple of days saw rain, and sideways rain, but our last three days were nearly completely sunny, unprecedented in our ten or so years up there for the season. Further, the streams had dropped considerably and still had plenty of fish in them, so we did well.

One interesting thing about fishing for silvers is that there is a cycle in terms of the size of fish, apparently much like grouse or hares cycle in population. Last year, the fish ran the smallest we had seen them and it got me worried about things like the commercial herring harvest, and long term effects of oil spills and purse seines and all sorts of other things. All that bears watching, but this year the fish ran large, nearly the largest we've seen in twelve years.

A caught a limit, 3 fish, that totaled 38 pounds in the round- two thirteens and a twelve. In terms of sport, this translates into fish that can pull you around the river and that require some care in playing and handling.

That's my Dad with a fifteen pound silver, which is a conservative weight, as it bottomed out a fifteen pound certified Boga-grip, so there may be some change involved. Second biggest fish any of our parties have ever caught up there and Dad's only fish on that tough day. Still, a bright fifteen pound cock with sea lice on him goes a long way toward beating a skunk. Here's a closer look:

Damn big fish.

Wait- what's that? A moose by the side of the road? Must be up North!

We had a couple of good hikes, one of which came after I mis-remembered the trailhead necessary to take us into a particular stretch of stream.

We managed to get on the right trail and to get into some fish.

Mostly, though, this trip was sunny skies and fresh silvers just up from the salt water.

Weasel!

This curious little fellow came out of the alders to check us out at close range. With any luck at all, we'll head back up there next year. I still haven't caught enough silver salmon on the fly rod.

Bounty

Slow on blogging, but A and I have been getting out into the country a bit lately and I should try to catch up.

Firstly, a little while ago some friends tipped us off that the bolete mushrooms were flushing in Northern NM, so we headed up to our old stomping grounds for a quick overnighter in the back of the truck, hoping to replenish our supply. Success!

We found enough boletus barrowsii to fill our winter supply jar.

Soups, stews, and sauces will all benefit for the next year or so. We managed to dry a few more than fit in the jar, but didn't quite load up.

 Shortly thereafter, we made a day trip to our nearby mountains for elderberries, hitting it just a bit early. Nonetheless, we secured a good supply of this necessary component for a favorite jelly. We also found a couple of the largest examples of the cauliflower mushroom that we've yet come across. Sparassis radicata or Sparassis crispa, most sources relate that radicata is the western variant. Regardless, these were prime and delicious.

Our friend Jeff introduced us to a really nice technique for cauliflower mushroom, that being to saute it fairly slowly in butter until tender and then keep going until it browns a little and crisps up- an excellent side dish to almost anything, but particularly game meat.

Next, we went to our first organized mycological foray, this one by the NM Mycological Society- an interesting group of folks with a lot of expertise to share. This year's foray was based in Las Vegas, NM, and we stayed in the great old Plaza Hotel. A bit ragged around the edges after over a hundred years of operation, our room was quiet and very reasonably priced. Just around the town square we found a brew pub and a restaurant next door that served the hottest green chile I've had in a long time, some of the most typical northern New Mexican food we've found in years. Combined with lovely weather (cool and rainy) and some relatively new country to explore, it was a great weekend.

Last, for the Labor Day holiday weekend we headed back up north, to look for mushrooms again and perhaps take advantage of opening day of bird season. The first day was absolutely chilly at 9,000 feet of elevation, a welcome change after a long summer.

Since hunting didn't start until September 1st, we spent the first couple of days picking currants and mushrooms, checking out country and scouting around. Band Tailed Pigeons were loafing in some spruce and fir along one ridge each of those days, but strong winds apparently pushed them elsewhere once the season opened. Big birds, they'd come bombing out of the tops of the spruce on the steep hillside and, if we had gotten into them, the shooting would have been really tough. We also looked around for grouse, seeing them before the season but having no luck on opening day. Perhaps later in the year.

Mushrooming was more successful. The king boletes were pretty scarce, but we found nice stands of chanterelles, our first encounter with that prized edible in NM.

Back home, we tried a cream of mushroom soup as suggested by Hank Shaw. It was good, but we're still a bit ambiguous about the shrooms, not having found the best flavors to go with them and spoiled to the aforementioned king boletes and cauliflowers. Further experimentation is assured by several packages of chanterelles sauteed in butter and squirreled away in the freezer.

Also for later in the fall is the wild red currant jelly we put up from the prolific ribes encountered in the high country (A has keyed them out as ribes montigenum).

A couple of hours of picking (and pricking) resulted in a nice batch of currants.

Which in turn became a slightly tart jelly.

If our big game hunts go well, I foresee a Cumberland sauce in the future. Otherwise, it will just have to be buttermilk biscuits with red currant jelly.

Here's hoping the season is proceeding as well for all of you all!

Let's be careful out there

 If a picture is worth a thousand words, I figure this one has got at least a dozen expletives in it.

4 feet of Mr. Western Diamondback would like to remind you that it's still hot, and that he and his brethren are still active.


No snakes, photographers, or Chessies were harmed in the making of this photograph.

Ribes

Ribes comprise the genus of currants and gooseberries, of which a number of wild varieties grow in the southwest mountains (and other places as well, I'm sure). I've been calling all those plants "currants" for a while, which is wrong, but "gooseberry" doesn't fit them all, either, so I suppose "ribes" will be safe for now. A while back I posted about some plants that A and I thought were black currants or maybe wolf currants. After a friend suggested gooseberry, closer inspection and some taxanomic research has led us to conclude they are most likely orange gooseberries, (ribes pinetorum, if you will) with a couple of bushes of mescalero currants as well.

Mescalero currant flowers- no fruit yet:

Orange gooseberry still with flower:

I've seen the prickly bushes in various ranges in NM over the years, but never bearing much in the way of fruit. This year, the orange gooseberries in our local mountains looked to put on a pretty heavy crop, and we've been keeping an eye on them. Recently, we stopped off on a mushroom expedition and took advantage of some bushes carry lots of ripe fruit.

Hank Shaw details dealing with them, a common sense sort of method- pick (wearing leather gloves), wash, boil briefly, mash, then strain. In our case, forty minutes of picking resulted in a few pounds of nice purple/black fruit, which resulted in enough juice for a recipe and a half of jelly. Straining the pulp of mashed ribes through a layer of old t-shirt set in a colander resulted in a nice clear juice.

For our ribes pinetorum jelly, we relied upon the Ball Blue Book's directions for "juice for jelly" as described for red currants:

6 1/2 c orange gooseberry juice, extracted by a washing, then briefly simmering the berries, mashing them with a potato masher and then straining them through a cloth.

7 csugar

1 package pectin. Cooked following the directions in the book (or on the back of the pectin package).

The resulting jelly came out pretty, but is pretty undistinguished. Surprisingly reminiscent of prickly pear jelly, it is sweet with some of the same watermelon note, if less pronounced and perhaps a bit of a similar green note underlying the fruit. Overall, the berry flavor is more pronounced than with prickly pear. Still not nearly as good as elderberry or rosehip, to my taste, for our next batch we'll probably add a little lemon juice to try to brighten things up and perhaps get a more firm set. Another thought would be to steep a couple of ripe Thai chiles in with the fruit, to make a sweet/hot jelly.  In the meantime, the elderberries look to make a crop, if not as heavily as last year, and we spotted some big rose hips up north if we can get to them. Of course, bird season opens in just three weeks, too. Things are looking to get busy.

and All That the Rain Promises

A recent trip to local mountains resulted in A spotting the first of what turned out to be three nice cauliflower mushrooms:

Cauliflower shrooms have a slightly citrus-y scent and a firm texture and, despite it being a pain to clean the dirt and duff out of the various little curls and cavities, one of my very favorites of the wild edibles we know and are comfortable harvesting. While this example appears pretty brown, which might indicate age, it was firm and bug-free. Once home, we sliced, cleaned, and sauteed one of the heads in a bit of butter and then simmered it with a little water until tender, finishing with both spices, salt and pepper, then a squeeze of lemon juice. Nothing more required.

We also found a few oyster mushrooms and apparently missed a large fruiting by a few days or a week. Most of the oysters were dried out and leathery. Still enough for topping a pizza came our way. So, a few edibles, some of the first that we've come across in these recent drought years.
The oysters weren't the only mushrooms that we found past edibility, we're pretty sure this is one of several lobster mushrooms we came by that had turned soft and buggy:

"Lobster mushrooms" are actually a fungus which colonizes and converts existing mushrooms to a different form. Here you can see some of the structure of the original 'shroom under the lumps and thickening:

These weren't white and crisp, but rather brown and buggy. A few years ago, we had an excellent dish of rabbit and lobster mushrooms at Local 360. If we'd have found these guys in time, the rabbits would have had to look out- we might have tried to re-create it. Perhaps later or next year.

As a last note on recent observations in the higher, wetter country, does a bear sit in the woods?

Of course- in this case, just like a big dog. I've also seen them in the very human-like pose of sitting with their legs straight out in front of them.  


By the way, "All that the Rain Promises and More" is the title of my favorite mushroom guide, a pocket book by David Aurora, who also wrote the seminal (but definitely not hip-pocket) "Mushrooms Demystified".

A bit of rain

As document at points north, and points north and east, drought hasn't broken but it has at least bent with some storms over the last few weeks. A slightly early monsoon summer that's trying to work up some decent moisture. I hold out faint hopes for quail this fall.

A and I got out and about a bit, heading over to our local mountains:

We found a couple of mushrooms, to wit- shaggymanes, but they were just off a well traveled road, so we admired but did not harvest:

More recently, we hit some of our old stomping grounds with some friends, checking out the fungi scene. A few shaggymanes, some puffballs, some others, but apart from this find:

(you must embiggen, once done, you're looking at a field expedient harvesting tool, a/k/a a knife taped to a stick, used to cut oyster mushrooms just too far up a dead aspen for the unassisted reach of man).


We also saw a couple of grouse, including a hen with chicks and a cock-bird unaccountably strutting back in the trees.

All in all, positive signs. A little more rain and things won't be nearly as grim come fall and winter.