Birdshot and backlashes - Fall is approaching

It’s caterpillar, mushroom and early bird hunting time. Caterpillars - little skinny ones, fat brightly painted ones, medium-sized fuzzy ones - are hiking to and fro, deciding where it is they will hang up or spin their cocoons for the winter. The moths and butterflies that fluttered and sailed around the woods this past summer, laid their eggs, hatched into worms of some sort and are now in the process of becoming winter dwellers. One thing that is hard to figure out: how can these insects live all winter in those thin little cocoons with a fraction of an inch of insulation, and survive 40 degrees below zero?All of nature is simply amazing and bugs are some of the most amazing. Some of the flying insects don’t hang around all winter, but migrate - like the monarch butterfly that heads off across the Gulf of Mexico for South America. Incredible. How little we really understand about the world around us.MUSHROOMSMushroom pickers are moving into their fall harvest. The woods around here are loaded with edible species and a few that aren’t. If possible, it is a good idea to go mushroom hunting with an experienced picker. If that is not possible, a good printed booklet is handy. We use Alexander Smith’s “Mushroom Hunter’s Guide” and “Mushrooms of North America” by Orson Miller Jr. Both of these authors are very good. They have to be. They are veteran mushroom pickers and eaters and they have lived long enough to write books about it.HUNTINGAmong the more numerous wild critters, which are open for hunting right now, are Virginia and sora rails. Not only numerous, but hardly anyone hunts them. The daily limit is 25. Rails are little birds, no bigger than a robin. They pad around aquatic vegetation on big feet. They also swim pretty well. Rails are found most often in patches of wild rice. They are very difficult to shoot because they jump out of the rice straw, feet dangling, flutter along a short distance and drop back into the grass. It is up, shoot and down. We used to take our shotguns along when we were ricing. After harvesting a couple bags of rice, we would go after rails, the shooter in the bow of the canoe, the pusher in back propelling the canoe with a ricing pole. Rails don’t amount to a whole lot in the pan which is probably why not many people hunt them. If they were as big as grouse, they would. Same with doves, which are now open for hunting. Doves are controversial because a large percentage of them nest in cities. Sort of backyard birds. They are all so awfully small. Hardly two bites. Dove hunters like to point out that doves are fast, erratic fliers and hard to hit. So are bats and bumblebees, but we don’t hunt them. It is probably how a person grows up. In our family, we didn’t have the money to waste on shells to shoot itty bitty birds. We went after bigger stuff like ducks, geese, pheasants, grouse and bobwhites… and bobwhites were sometimes iffy. In our family, if you spent 10 cents on a shotgun shell, you better produce at least a dime’s worth of meat with it.But that was just in our family and it may be that we weren’t exactly a typical family. I recall the first time I produced six doves that my mother roasted and served up for supper. My father looked at those little birds, rolled one around with his fork and said: “Just what the heck is this?”It was the end of my dove hunting.