It is a heck of a good time to spend a day in the woods, with a pack and a lunch, shooting everything you come across – with a camera. Mushrooms are plentiful this fall, and some of them surpass the spring morels as far as flavor and edibility. And they are very photogenic. Colorful I reckon! There are so many different kinds, and there are few people confident in knowing the good ones from the bad ones.
Mushroom books show them all pretty well, but what is needed is a class in the early fall or late summer to show the best of edible mushrooms and teach folks how to find them. I am going to try to get my daughter to go out and collect specimens to freeze and use in such a class next year. Christy knows all the mushrooms like Audubon knew birds. She is a science and biology teacher and has worked many years as a park naturalist.
I can spend a day out in the woods with my camera now and enjoy myself more than I did when I once carried a gun all day. In Canada a couple of weeks ago, I got several extraordinary photos, one of a male ruffed grouse, just by easing along a Lake of the Woods trail. I will hunt deer some this fall, but only with the camera. What I know about Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy has ended the deer hunting for me.
News out of New York concerns that same disease in squirrels.
“A 61-year-old who experienced a severe cognitive decline before his death may have had squirrel brains to blame.”
Lots of old time squirrel hunters ate squirrel brains. My grandfather was one of them. About this time of year he and I and my dad would float the river and hunt ducks and squirrels together. Back then, in my boyhood, wild ducks came into the lower Midwest much earlier than they do now. In a future column I will talk about how we used a blind on a wooden johnboat to hunt ducks along the river, and what a tremendous change duck hunting has gone through – and how much wild ducks have changed as well.
But back to the squirrels. Along the river, fox squirrels were plentiful and that’s what dad and grandpa favored. Grays were good to eat too, but small. The meat on the lower back was what I favored but grandpa would crack open the skull of a fried squirrel or one baked whole with dumplings, and eat the cooked brains.
In recent years it has been said that such a practice is unwise, a possible way to get “encephalitis.” Now there is the knowledge that “cjd” (what they call cwd if humans get it) may sometimes be found as prions in the brains of squirrels. We can add squirrels to the list containing cattle, elk, sheep, goats, caribou and deer, as animals found to have those prions in the brain. And hundreds of humans have died from prions in the brain as well. Scientists and doctors are beginning to think that the number of misdiagnosed deaths in humans may also be due to those prions, wherever they may have come from. One study says that in examining the brain tissue of 230 Alzheimer’s deaths, more than 20 were found to contain those prions! That is scary.
If you would like to receive copies of that study and others, I have compiled an eight-page printing of them and will send you a copy if you want to mail two stamps to me with your address.
I’ll shoot lots of deer this fall – but only with that camera.
I do not recommend going out to enjoy the woods with a camera when the gun season opens for deer, at least during the carnival atmosphere of the first weekend. Do it now and you will be all by yourself.
My office phone is 417-777-5227. Email is lightninridge47@gmail.com, mailing address Box 2, Bolivar, Mo. 65613.