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Scratchin' the itch . . .
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Booshway
Picture of Cado
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Sticks that was great, love reading about your adventures. Your right about the long gun no feeling like being in the woods with it.
 
Posts: 617 | Location: Republic of Texas | Registered: 19 November 2007Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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Thanks Cado. I'd like to read some more of yours as well.

Fiddlesticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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Got nary a one today, neither. Saw 2-3 grays, but way out of range in the thicket, and moving through to somewhere else. Looks like I'll have to make do with just two, minus a hind laig.

Now, how to fix'em? There's fry 'em (nope, too old). There's stew. There's dumplin's (original idee). There's limb-pasty. Then there's brown 'em and sink'em down into mushroom gravy (even if I get that all over my chin).

Swampedwithdecisions'Sticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Booshway
Picture of NWTF Longhunter
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It don't matter how ya fix em, ya can't ruin limb bacon. Just about the tastiest meat on four legs.. Big Grin
https://www.google.com/#q=image+of+fried+squirrel
 
Posts: 797 | Location: Michigan | Registered: 29 April 2006Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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Guess you know you've made my job much harder.

T'weren't planned, were it?

Bigeyein'thefriedsquirrel'Sticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Booshway
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quote:
It don't matter how ya fix em, ya can't ruin limb bacon. Just about the tastiest meat on four legs..


My uncle and I used to debate that issue for hours as we sat around a campfire. He liked squirrel. I've always preferred rabbit.

We spent many a pleasant nooning or evening roasting squirrel, rabbit, or whatever over an open fire. "Squirrel on a Stick" was a favorite of my Uncle Frank.


Know what you believe in. Fight for your beliefs. Never compromise away your rights.
 
Posts: 1296 | Location: Cherokee Land, Tenasi | Registered: 06 January 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
<mtnmike>
posted
Well Sticks,,after reading your post on figureing out how to fix em I went to the ol family recipe book,,if you need a new way for fixing,,I have close to 50 squirrel cooking ways Big Grin
 
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Factor
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Ranco', I know what you mean about rabbit. Thing is, rabbits are pretty well a thing of the past here. Been that way for years. Never would've thought there'd be a time when we had more deer than rabbits in these ol' hills. Doggies!---they're good eatin'!

'Mike? Fifty more squirrel recipes? You trying to run me nuts?

Hidin'amongsttheskillets'Sticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Booshway
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Hey Mike if you can find time email or PM me some of those recipes.....Smiler


The best thing about owning a dog is that someone is happy when you get home.
 
Posts: 959 | Location: Alabama | Registered: 09 December 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
<mtnmike>
posted
B Staley,, I will get you a list going here shortly Big Grin
 
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Booshway
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Mike got it thanks


The best thing about owning a dog is that someone is happy when you get home.
 
Posts: 959 | Location: Alabama | Registered: 09 December 2008Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Free Trapper
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This has been some great reading here guys! Thanks to Fiddlesticks and all! Speaking about rabbits, around here their population seems to go in cycles. When I was younger, we had a fair abundance of both cotton tails and snowshoe hare's with a very rare jack or two. Nowdays only have cottontails. My grandpa once told me that the rabbits life cycle goes around a 7 year pattern. The highs and the lows in population also correlates closely with the patterns of predatory animals. Growing up it seems that rabbit was on the menu at least once a week. In stews and just plain pan fried, it was a meal I really looked forward to. It was also the reason for my earliest hunting experiences with grand dad's ole single shot 410. Zooming forward to my stint in the USAF. I savor memories of shooting the big jacks out on the flight line in Texas. Then enjoyed em as fried fare in the chow hall. Those were the biggest bunnies I've ever encountered and put our lil Michigan cottontails to shame. Now days, I see a lot less rabbits around the place. Often out along the walking trails that I take my dog. Not the smartest animals on the planet mind you! We sometimes can get about the length of the leash away from a squatting bunny. Have about been ruptured by the dogs pull trying to restrain him! I figure the good Lord put rabbits upon this earth so NOBODY would ever go hungry!
 
Posts: 197 | Registered: 15 January 2015Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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Sad to say, but rabbits seem on a 40 year cycle here. We used to go out and jump shoot 'em from the clumps of brush and broom sedge, and from under old brush piles. Could count on always finding rabbits. Now you have to have beagles with hopes of striking the trail of one or two. But hardly anyone does that anymore; I don't even know any rabbit hunters nowadays. I surely miss'em. As far as flavor, the only thing better is a young grey squirrel---but it has to be a young'un. After that, fork over the rabbit!

Sigh . . . but they're long gone from my thinkin'. Sniff . . . thanks for rousting up memories . . . (sadly drooling over an empty plate).

Rabbitglum'Sticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
Picture of Hanshi
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Two words: habitat destruction. This is the main driving force behind extinctions. The earth can either support mega billions of humans or a lesser number of humans and more wildlife.


*Young guys should hang out with old guys; old guys know stuff.*
 
Posts: 3560 | Location: Maine (by way of Georgia then Va.) | Registered: 26 January 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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A lot to that. We still have much open ground around here, wooded hills and small prairies. One thing I've noticed over the years is so many clean fence lines. Back in the day, fence lines remained brushy, even trees grew to size in them. Lots of places for rabbits to raise their young. Still, there are blackberry, dewberry, sumac thickets, etc. that afford good cover. All I know is, I wish they'd come back!

Fiddlesticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Booshway
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I agree that habitat loss is a huge problem. However, I think there is also another thing that is beating up the small game. Coyotes.

It seems to me that small game numbers began to go down 40 or 50 years ago, right about the time that coyotes crossed the Mississippi River and began expanding all over the eastern US. Now they are found in every State.

I recently went on a squirrel hunt up in our local mountains. I ended up spending all day, and hiking a round trip of about 10 miles.
I did not see a squirrel!

What I did find plenty of was coyote scat. I poked around in one pile of it and found that it was full of squirrel hair.


Know what you believe in. Fight for your beliefs. Never compromise away your rights.
 
Posts: 1296 | Location: Cherokee Land, Tenasi | Registered: 06 January 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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The squirrels appear to have adjusted to Coyotes out west here.We've had coyotes forever,and plenty of squirrels too.Maybe we need to introduce some of our "smart" squirrels back East.... Wink


Beer is proof that God loves us,and wants us to be happy-B. Franklin
 
Posts: 2014 | Location: Oreegun Territory | Registered: 24 March 2013Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
Picture of Hanshi
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I've seen coyotes hunting in fields back when I lived in Ga. They subsist to a large extent on rats and mice. They reminded me of foxes in the way they jumped and pounced. There were plenty of rabbits in the area I hunted and there were also plenty of coyotes.

In the east the American Chestnut is long gone and was the most common and useful tree (for humans and animals) in the forest. The Ivory billed woodpecker is gone due to habitat loss, prairie chicken is in trouble just to name a few of the hundreds we're driving to extinction. Scientifically speaking, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event the Earth has gone through. This one, however will be the first, and probably only, extinction event caused by man.


*Young guys should hang out with old guys; old guys know stuff.*
 
Posts: 3560 | Location: Maine (by way of Georgia then Va.) | Registered: 26 January 2009Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Factor
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It had taken about an hour. I'd worked my way maybe 50 yards across the fairly-open through dry leaves to get into range of a grey squirrel I'd been watching for longer than that.

I'd patterned it's coming and going: you can do that (like deer), especially when they first begin stirring around the home-nest. They'll run to particular stumps, up particular trees, out particular limbs, stop and look about for danger at particular places. And make several cycles of the same thing. It's a good while before they go off foraging, and you can learn much of what they'll do when they return later on. This is particularly handy to know when the woods aren't alive in squirrels during your hunt, and much more patience is required to make meat.

The sun was lowering, the light shifting, changing, brightening this bough and that stump throughout the forest, bringing some things into clearer view, obscuring others with ever moving shadows. It was a delightful time---'cept I was being skunked again. And I wanted at least one more to go with the two already salted away. The last time I'd seen the grey I was almost in range.

Now, Ol' Bull-Stout was standing ever ready before me, butt to the ground (angled away from my face). It'd been a good while since the last sighting. I was beginning to think it had left out on it's foraging work when I looked high up into a post oak and there it was, drooping over a little branch. 'Yes . . . yes . . . there's its head, its ears . . . let's see, there's it's tail dangling. Look how still it is, just like always when they've spied me and think they're safe, hidden.' The head was in the shadows, but the tail dangled in opaque light, eve'-time light, when it softens, warmly penetrates, gladdens the soul. The squirrel's tail was filled with the glow, every hair absorbed, like springtime leaves yet tender, soaking in the slanting sun . . .

Ol' Bull-Stout crept up to my shoulder. Just like I figured, the squirrel didn't even twitch. The brass turtle settled on the noggin and the fowler let go a lusty bellow. Nothing. Unless you count chips of bark falling all around and the hillside echoing the blast. I craned my neck at my target. Unmoved as if untouched. No way could I have missed at that range. Then the light changed. Shadows took over. The was a devolution of life turning back into a former whatever-or-other. My prize morsel of limb bacon became nothing but the bitter end of a broken limb which had fallen from the treetop and lodged in a fork. Don't ask me why the tail had seemed so soft, living. Now I couldn't even make out where the tail had been or what it had really been made of. Light can indeed play tricks.

Folks, don't tell me God ain't got a sense of humor . . .

Fiddlesticks


As long as there's Limb Bacon a man'll eat! (But mebbe not his wife...)
 
Posts: 4816 | Location: Buffalo River Country | Registered: 23 October 2004Reply With QuoteReport This Post
Booshway
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The extensive forests of American chestnut must have been an impressive sight. Imagine huge chestnut trees as far as the eye can see, and imagine those trees full of uncounted millions of passenger pigeons. Wow. "Paradise lost."

I do know of a couple chestnuts growing wild here in the national forest. One is big enough to produce a few nuts. The are closely monitored by the forest service. However, it is expected that the blight will hit them soon.
Plenty of old chestnut stumps sprout new shoots, but the disease hits them before they get big.
The forest service and some others are experimenting with blight resistant strains, and crossbreeding with Chinese chestnuts in an attempt to bring back our chestnut trees.

Extinctions seem to be a part of the rhythm of the earth. Eventually we humans will probably become extinct also, and some other, new creatures will take over.


Know what you believe in. Fight for your beliefs. Never compromise away your rights.
 
Posts: 1296 | Location: Cherokee Land, Tenasi | Registered: 06 January 2011Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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