London Locavore: Wood Pigeon

Five wood pigeons and a Rock dove

Lots being written and blogged about the Locavore diet recently, (food footsteps not food miles) but most of it is about growing vegetables or buying vegetables from someone near by.Where's the protein?
A by product of growing your own is crops in the suburbs is raiding by Pigeons and Squirrels, think of it as the Pigeons and Squirrels inviting themselves for a snack and staying to dinner. As the main course.

London's Grey Squirrel population seems to have been hammered by the recent cold  winter so they are off the menu for the time being. For the main course we'll be having  Wood Pigeon - these are the pigeons with a band of white around their necks.

In the UK you're allowed to shoot pests in your garden as long as the projectile doesn't leave the boundary of your property, so having ruled out the .50 sniper rifles, so with your air rifle over seedlings is probably your best bet.

As anyone who's been pigeon shooting with shotguns will tell you they are pretty much pellet proof unless you can entice them into close range, with an air rifle shooting roosting or bait eating birds head or spine shots at about 30 ft are the way to do it.

Pluck and refrigerate - pretty straight forward, if you want to eat the whole bird pluck the feathers in the direction in which they lie otherwise you'll get a lot of rips in the skin. I usually just eat the breasts pan fried but I'm on a nose-to-tail tip at the moment.  Pigeons really seem to benefit from being hung for a week or more, if that not an option, at least stood in the fridge for a couple of days.

While this post was in the making I saw a TV show mention that the manky Rock Doves from Trafalgar square that we think of as flying rats are actually NOT carriers of any diseases that are transferable to humans, then I saw that Jackson Landers AKA our friend The Locavore Hunter has been eating them in the US. You can see his film about it HERE. If I can get myself past the life long assumption that they are inherently unhealthy they represent an unlimited source of free local food. I tried the Rock Dove pictured; didn't die and wasn't able to tell the difference in a blindfold taste test.

If you can't safely shoot where you are, try calling your local pest controllers - once you convince them it's not a crank call - they're very likely to be able to help out as most of them are shooting gents themselves. One pest control guy I spoke to suggested traps and an air pistol are the way forward for the dedicated locavore. The Trapman sells traps for just about anything you'd want to eat trap.

Hardcore Preppers will tell you that as the oil crisis starts to bite this will be how we all get our inner city dinner. For more about the history of Urban hunting see HERE

More Soon
SBW

Locavore Escargot AKA Snails

It's that time of year again Helix aspersa or the common garden snail is out of hiding and on the move. Towards my dinner table.

The plateful in the picture were harvested (picked?) from a pile of unused border tiles in a wooded, but still inner-city (zone 2) London garden. I kept then in a lidded bucket and fed them on salad trimmings for two days which purged all the grit they had accumulated from their natural diet. Then they were fed for two days on white bread. The bread passing through the snails and staying white, tells you the purge is complete. A lot of recipes say you only need to purge them for twenty four hours but my 'white bread test' reveals that it's not quite long enough.

Boiled, rinsed and boiled again (approx. 5-10 changes of water) until the slime and froth were gone. Stuffed back into their shells with a dab of parsley, garlic and butter. I baked them until I could stand the deliciousness of the smell no longer. Served with rustic bread to mop up the melted butter. Yummy.

More soon
SBW

The Trophy Rats Of Bradford

Over the last few days the English papers have covered this story of giant rats seen on an estate in Bradford.

The story goes that a Mr Goddard - who says that he and his friends go rat hunting a couple of times a week - decided to see if he could bag one of the bigger ones. They took an air rifle and headed to the edge of the estate.The group had heard rustling and scratching near the wall before he got the shock of his life.

'The first went right past but we got the second one. Then three more got away."

Rats in Indonesia and South America can grow up to three feet long, and witnesses say the rats in Bradford are just as big 'I've never seen any as big as this. The one I shot was absolutely terrifying. I was shaking, Goodness knows where the others went. I'm glad I don't live there.'

Estate resident Rebecca Holmes, 38, was in no doubt that large rodents are in the area - after having cornered one in her house. The mother-of-five said her cat Marie had cornered one in the lounge, but the rodent stood its ground - because it was around the same size as the domestic cat.

Carol Beardmore, who represents the Eccleshill on Bradford Council, sounding just like your typically pompous local politician, played down suggestions that hundreds of giant rodents were plaguing the estate.

She said: "I live on the estate and while I'm not saying we don't have rats - everywhere has rats - I am not aware of an infestation of giant rats." She added: "I live close to a wood ... and we have not seen anything like that, and if we had I am sure my cat would have caught it."

Just what kind of super-cat does this woman own? As Miss Holmes testimony suggests, your average moggy would have more sense than to tangle with a 30 inch rodent!

As we saw before the 'culinary solution' awaits the brave locavore!

Your Pal

SBW

Picture credit

Blogging: Rule 303

Erhm, I wish to report an oversight. it has come to my attention that there is a blog that many of you aren't reading, or if you are reading it you're yet to comment. I'm just as bad, I intended to write this post weeks ago. Rule 303 The Locavore Hunter is on my must-read list of blogs.

'Hunting (literally) for local food, some geeking about rifles, conservation and a dose of civil politics' 

He runs a course for people who would like to get up close an personal with their dinner call "Deer Hunting for Beginners" which he's had some success with and it's been featured in the New York Times
and We Love DC (as ever the comments are worth a read).

There are a number of reasons to consider learning how to hunt for your own food. Many people reading this probably feel a little bit bad about eating meat but not quite bad enough to actually stop. If you feel that you've been somehow dodging the ethics of meat and animal cruelty in your own life, there is no more effective way of facing the matter head-on than by learning to hunt and butcher the food yourself. As a hunter, the experience of the animal that you eat is up to you. A whitetail deer in Virginia can live a good and natural life in the wild and then have one bad morning before becoming food. Which is an ethically better source of obtaining meat? From a wild deer or from a pig raised in a factory farm under Auschwitz-like conditions?

Commercial meat is typically filled with hormones and antibiotics and is fed on grain that required high amounts of petroleum to fertilize and transport. Wild venison is free-range and free of hormones, antibiotics and the cruelty of captivity. If you are concerned about 'food miles' and the impact that your own diet has on the environment, hunting is a very practical way of addressing this. There are wild deer in high numbers in nearly every area of the Eastern US. Many people reading this can either hunt literally in their own backyards or could be helped to find land within 25 miles on which they can hunt for deer. Literally, you could be measuring your food miles by looking at your odometer.

His commentary on firearms legislation is a welcome improvement on most of the blogosphere's cut 'n' paste rantings.  None of the boring indignation, asks more than he answers, pins a tail on the elephant in the room, worth a read. As is his coverage of Ebay's firearms policy

His 'rifle geeking' extends to running a weekend course where you can turn a vintage Mauser 98 into a modern hunting rifle which you get to take it home with you on Sunday afternoon. Have a look here.

This piece might have been written with The Northern monkey in mind, rifle choices from $60!
Bang For Your Buck: Comparing Surplus Rifles For Sporting Conversions

What will be, I imagine, of particular interest to regular readers is his interest in eating aliens, those non-native disrupters of the ecosystem, and how to bring about 'the culinary solution'to their invasion plans.

"Work and hunting for food were interfering with each other so one of them had to go".

See you over there, 

SBW

Pic credit to John Athayde

Ethical Hunters Blog

Over the last few weeks I've been doing a bit of reading, looking at other bloggers thoughts on the ethics of our place in the food chain, and so it seems has James. So much so that he's started Ethical Hunters a new blog to explore the subject. Hopefully you'll feel inspired to join the conversation.

This project was born out of a sense of frustration, that hunters in the UK are so often misunderstood and misrepresented. Hunting is not a 'hobby', nor is it 'killing for fun'. It is a way of life, with its own set of beliefs and ethics rooted deep in human nature and tracing its origins back to the dawn of mankind.

It is worth clarifying here that we are talking about hunting in its broadest sense, of catching and killing wild animals and birds (usually for food), and not the narrow definition of hunting foxes with packs of hounds.

I hope that through these pages we can begin to define what makes an 'Ethical Hunter', help to promote the highest standards of ethics among hunters in the UK, and perhaps explain to non-hunters something of what Ethical Hunting is all about.

James Marchington

In the meantime here's some food for thought:

I was fascinated by Jeff Simmermon's ' Roo shooter' post with it's no holds barred descriptions of the realities of culling in the Australian outback, I've bigged it up before - it's worth a read.

For the Australians, the kangaroo is both a boon and pest, a national icon and creature to despise. The country is overrun with them—58 million, according to the latest census, making the species amongst the most common wild land mammal on earth. This, ironically, is mostly thanks to a sheep and cattle industry that have created an abundance of man-made pasture grasses and watering holes, and have driven dingoes—the kangaroos only predators, but “vermin” to sheep farmers—into the center of the country. These cute, fuzzy hoppers now pose a serious environmental threat to the rangelands. Travelling in packs of several hundred, they can easily cover up to 500 kilometers. A pod can bisect a farm on one of these journeys and cause thousands of dollars’ worth of damage to valuable crops in a single night, wrecking fences and outgrazing cattle for rare desert grass...........

Female kangaroos, however, pose their own problems. Although easier to lift than male ‘roos or “boomers,” the does are often pregnant. And in those cases, the only humane thing to do for the joeys that can’t survive outside the pouch is to kill them on the spot, quickly and decisively. It can be an emotional challenge. Even for Craig, who accepted this part of the job decades ago.........“Mate, I’ve been doin’ this for fifty years, and this part always makes me feel like such a cunt.”

Let the record show that I didn’t participate in this part of the job. The one time that I did, I made a horrible mistake. I was dragging a doe up to the Ute and could see something wriggling in the pouch. All of a sudden two legs stuck out. I grabbed them, pulling the joey free. I meant to hold it up and shout to Craig, “Hey, what should I do with this one,” but it leaped out of my hand and hopped into the distance with a chirping scream.

“You stupid fucking fuckwit, that joey’s not big enough to survive on its own out here! E’s gonna go off and get eaten or starve to death all alone all because you think you’re such a fucking animal lover!...."

Blunt as a spoon, hard as nails and underneath it all, soft as shite. Gotta love the Aussies init!

Another blog I've been reading is Rule .303 written by Jack Landers, author of the forthcoming book 'Deer Hunting for Locavores' were he argues the case for a sustainable diet hunted and gathered from the locale. As he lives in VA his major sustainable protein source comes in the form of Whitetail deer. He's quite an accomplished hunter and has been leading a class where he takes other foodies and turns them into hunters. He's been featured in the New York Times and my guess is we'll hear a lot more from him over the next few years.

There are a number of reasons to consider learning how to hunt for your own food. Many people reading this probably feel a little bit bad about eating meat but not quite bad enough to actually stop. If you feel that you've been somehow dodging the ethics of meat and animal cruelty in your own life, there is no more effective way of facing the matter head-on than by learning to hunt and butcher the food yourself. As a hunter, the experience of the animal that you eat is up to you. A whitetail deer in Virginia can live a good and natural life in the wild and then have one bad morning before becoming food. Which is an ethically better source of obtaining meat? From a wild deer or from a pig raised in a factory farm under Auschwitz-like conditions?

Commercial meat is typically filled with hormones and antibiotics and is fed on grain that required high amounts of petroleum to fertilize and transport. Wild venison is free-range and free of hormones, antibiotics and the cruelty of captivity. If you are concerned about 'food miles' and the impact that your own diet has on the environment, hunting is a very practical way of addressing this. There are wild deer in high numbers in nearly every area of the Eastern US. Many people reading this can either hunt literally in their own backyards or could be helped to find land within 25 miles on which they can hunt for deer. Literally, you could be measuring your food miles by looking at your odometer.

See you over there?

SBW