This episode is your invitation to join me in the deer woods as I alter my hunting strategy in response to the weather conditions. Prepare to traverse the snow-cloaked grounds in search of fresh tracks, while learning about the intricacies of deer behavior during the breeding season. Back at the cabin, have a buck to process and a succulent moose steak dinner to prepare.
Adventure awaits as we trek through the oak groves heavily grazed by deer, all the while discussing strategies to effectively harvest meat over capturing footage. We'll navigate the challenges of strong southeast winds and getting ahead of the deer. Plus, we'll delve into my weekend experience of processing a small buck into deer sausage spiced up with a mouth-watering mix of pork, salt, pepper, sage, thyme, and maple sugar. We won’t stop there, though! Together, we'll explore other food sources like homemade sourdough bread and dairy products from our local milk supplier. So, grab your gear, and let's brave this unique hunting season together!
This episode is your invitation to join me in the deer woods as I alter my hunting strategy in response to the weather conditions. Prepare to traverse the snow-cloaked grounds in search of fresh tracks, while learning about the intricacies of deer behavior during the breeding season. Back at the cabin, have a buck to process and a succulent moose steak dinner to prepare.
Adventure awaits as we trek through the oak groves heavily grazed by deer, all the while discussing strategies to effectively harvest meat over capturing footage. We'll navigate the challenges of strong southeast winds and getting ahead of the deer. Plus, we'll delve into my weekend experience of processing a small buck into deer sausage spiced up with a mouth-watering mix of pork, salt, pepper, sage, thyme, and maple sugar. We won’t stop there, though! Together, we'll explore other food sources like homemade sourdough bread and dairy products from our local milk supplier. So, grab your gear, and let's brave this unique hunting season together!
Hey everybody, welcome back to the cabin. Date is date. Date. Date is what the 13th of November today Got a chilly morning out there. It's about zero Celsius, 32 Fahrenheit, but it's strong east wind, south by south east wind actually, which means I'm going to tackle today a little bit differently. When I go into the deer woods, I've still got six days left of the rifle season for 2023. I am going to I'm still trying to get a decent sized buck, have the one small buck that we processed over the weekend, actually fully cut it up, which it didn't go into the freezer and it ended up only being about 50 pounds of meat, which surprised me.
Speaker 1:
That's probably the smallest deer I've shot in years and it's, you know, 50 meals I would say, because that's a pound basically per day is what we allow for my wife and I. So I think what was it? 30 pounds of ground. Now, what I did do is that I had a bunch of ground pork left over from the pig that I bought last. Well, this past what was it? Spring, maybe I got that full pig. So I took the ground and I had the ground because I asked the butcher for it, instead of making sausage, because I don't like this sausage mixes that the butchers use Usually. It has some kind of preservatives in it, nitrites and things that we actually react to because we have a fairly clean diet otherwise. So I took that ground, thaw a bunch of pounds of it and then made deer sausage at a four to one ratio, so four pounds of venison from that spike buck and one pound of pork. Then I added salt, white pepper, sage, thyme and some maple sugar that I made to some of that probably half of that Is that it, I'm not sure if there's no nutmeg. So breakfast sausage basically turned out really good. It's really tasty. So the rest of that, because I only had four pounds of pork that I could find in the freezer I think there's some stuff buried under the moose but I have to pry that out of the freezer to get it out and get the rest of that butchered.
Speaker 1:
So that ended up with 20 pounds, 16 and four, 20 pounds of sausage and then the rest, just a package as one pound packages of ground and then ground all the trimmings from the about a quarter of the mousse still have to do three quarters of what I have on my portion. I still have to butcher that. So I'm going to pull that out of the freezer today and get it thawing so that I can cut into that. But it's amazing when you don't have the proper equipment for doing butchering full time takes a lot longer than I always think it's going to, so it took us almost all day yesterday to grinding especially that's what takes a lot of the time grinding it up and then separating it and packaging it. And my daughter and her boyfriend were up so I spent the evening with them cooked up some fresh mousse steaks which, surprisingly, because I came back from that trip the mousse went straight into a freezer where we were hunting and then came in quarters and then I brought it back, my three quarter portion back, and just put it straight into the freezer here, so I didn't actually eat any of it yet. So that was our first mousse steaks and I think it's my first or my wife's first mousse steaks in years. I don't think I've shot one. For ten years or more I haven't been really mousse hunting.
Speaker 1:
Anyway, that was awesome. Really really good steak Ended up. They're very lean, no fat on them, and I wasn't sure because they were just a leg portion, I wasn't sure if they were going to be tough. So I marinated it in a little bit of olive oil, salt pepper and something I like I've always done with wild game. I don't marinate it all the time, but when I am I like to use the vinegar from the hot pepper that we pickle. So we pickle hot banana peppers and then that vinegar has a spiciness to it. So I used that a little bit of that to break down the muscle and the muscle fibers in the wild game meat. So that was really really good with mushrooms and onions and potatoes from the garden of course, and squash from the garden of course. So that was great.
Speaker 1:
But now I've got another month of season left. Basically 15th of December up here is when the season ends, and then down south and around Toronto, where I can get extra tags, where my buddies hunt, that season opens till December 30th. So I am trying to get along with my daughter and wife trying to get probably two more deer, I would say so we have three for this year, plus the moose, plus the bear, and that will be enough meat for the year, I believe, and then we'll add some small game and some fish to that. But right now I am going to head out this wind. It's different. I don't usually get a southeast wind, so what I need to do I'm going to go out to the west here, which is kind of counter to. The reason is that if I go west and then swing north and then get beyond the bedding area that most of the deer are headed to and then work back towards here, I'll be coming through a big oak grove. So I'll be coming from their bedding site bedding area main bedding area through this oak grove that they are feeding in heavily because there are a lot of acorns in there this year and back. That's all on crown land, and then back onto my own private land here and back towards the cabin. So if it's a big loop part of it, the wind will be poorer for me. It will be blowing towards them, but once I get beyond their bedding site and start coming back, I'll be nose into the wind. Now there is a slight skiff of snow and it's snowing slightly right now, so I probably can pick up some fresh tracks and that's what I'm hoping Cut a couple of fresh tracks and follow them Beep-rut. Right now what's happening is the deer are disappearing off my trail cameras over the last several days, where they normally are, and I'm seeing only fawns, which means the bucks are breeding doves. So they'll go off and kind of hide in a thicket or a spot that's sort of out of the way so they're not getting harassed by other deer, and they'll be breeding for, say, two or three days and then the bucks will separate from those doves and go looking for new ones so they could be cruising, but for the most part they're kind of locked down with these doves, and I've seen that on my trail cameras in several spots.
Speaker 1:
And when we're out for a drive, what are we doing? Well, picking up some sourdough starter which has got the oven here now. So and I baked that bread, but I just used yeast for that one and thought we should probably get back into making sourdough bread my wife ironically, the same day we got a call from our milk supplier that she had some. She's milking a new cow and she had an abundance of it again, so we can start making. My wife can start making cheese again and drinking raw milk and making a kefir and yogurt and butter and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:
So, as we were out on that drive, though, there's a dough out in the middle of the field in the middle of the day and a spot that she would never be in during the middle of the day and a buck was in the tree line. You can see them just standing there kind of watching, waiting for her to come back. So that another good indication of deer that are in kind of locked down, like in that breeding mode where they're just hiding out, standing in one spot. Those in the, the doughs that are in estrus and the bucks are inseparable. He'll follow her everywhere. So that's what I'm hoping. I'm going to cut into that kind of situation, find a dough that's in heat, maybe have several bucks kind of running around her or chasing her and hope to intercept that. Now it'll work my way back and then spend.
Speaker 1:
I still haven't finished the cellar. I've got a probably another day or maybe even two days down there to finish up, so I'll spend the midday doing that and then head out back hunting in the in the evening, likely, depending on the wind. All right, so Kelly doesn't like this phase where I take off for a couple hours and leave her in the cabin. But um, anyway, we've already been fetching her there in the dark this morning so we burnt off a little bit of energy, so hopefully she's fine. Anyway, you know you can rejoin me when I get back from the hunt. They'll probably take just a GoPro along with me, capture a little bit of footage not highest quality, and when I'm focused on hunting I'm really focused on just harvesting meat, not uncapturing footage for for an audience, not making hunting videos. So I tend to not get the greatest and I never end up getting a great footage or any footage, maybe, of the deer that I end up harvesting, or any of the game animals for that matter. Anyway, and I head out now and I'll take a look at it. I'll see you back here shortly in the cabin.
Speaker 1:
Well, I had a doe at 30 yards when I first got out, just 100 yards that way she came across the trail, stopped and I just uh, sat there and grunted because I was hoping that she was gonna have a buck following her.
Speaker 1:
But unless there was a buck in front of her, that I didn't see across. Before I go to that spot, forest was relatively open but there's lots of blind spots because it was still, you know, full timber, lots of balsam furs down low. So there's spots that I couldn't see and there was a steep ridge with rocky ridge, with her gut kind of going up through it. That's where she went so easily could have been a buck ahead of her. I don't know if I'm gonna go out this evening and go to that spot. The problem is that she couldn't smell me, which is why she wasn't that alarmed. But the wind is going to be going in to where she went this afternoon. So if she's coming out of there to go to the oak area for the acorns, she'd be coming straight into the wind with her nose and so with the buck, so it'd be really hard to get in front of them. But you see, I get some work done and figure out what I'm gonna do.