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Birdshot and backlashes - fish or hunt?

It is that awkward time of the year. You are out fishing and the fish aren’t biting. You think maybe if you were hunting you would be flushing a lot of grouse. Or you are out grouse hunting and can’t find any. You sit down on a log and figure maybe if you were fishing, the walleyes would be hitting. That is after the grouse season opens on Saturday, Sept. 18.And then it gets worse the following week when the duck season opens along with woodcock. Adding to the confusion is the early Youth Waterfowl Hunt on Sept. 18 for hunters age 15 or under, accompanied by a non-hunting adult. The idea there is to get kids out hunting without having to compete with adults, which may or may not make any sense. When we were kids, we couldn’t wait to go hunting with the men. It as a part of growing up, of being one of the adult hunters. What seems to be impelling some of this is the fact that hunting is becoming less popular among young people. The guns and ammo people are concerned that their population base may be shrinking. The DNR is concerned, too, because it could mean license sales shrinking in the future although this may not be so. The reasons why more kids don’t go hunting are probably numerous and diverse. For one thing, most kids grow up in town, not in the country any more. We rural kids grew up hunting. On reason was that we had handy places to hunt. City kids can’t always find hunting areas. Rural families ate wild game. It provided variety in the daily dinner fare. City kids don’t need to go hunting to eat. Most of them would probably rather have a double cheeseburger than a mallard duck. But then, farm women knew how to make mallard ducks into gourmet meals.With perhaps an exception or a two. We don’t know any wild game cooks, farm or urban, who can render a woodcock into anything except turtle bait. There maybe some super woodcock recipes we don’t know about and it would surely be a service to our readers and at least this writer, if some kind soul could send us in a really, workable woodcock recipe. If you do have a good woodcock recipe or two, forward them to me at the Echo. (Also see Angler page 4.)Grouse are fairly easy to cook and make a fine meal. About the only thing that can go wrong with cooking grouse is not cooking it long enough so that it comes out of the oven like a rubber ball. Same goes for wild duck. We are essentially eating the flying muscle of these birds, a muscle that gets plenty of exercise time in wild game. It takes a lot of cooking to soften it up. We like duck and grouse cooked until the meat is almost falling off the bones. BOOKLETS The little law books the DNR now hands out with the hunting licenses are better than they used to be. They are packed full of useful information, not just the shooting hours and game limits. The waterfowl booklet has some fine illustrations of ducks which can be an aid to identification. They are also filled with advertising which may or may not be a dandy idea. It is easy to understand that the DNR sells ads in their regulation handbooks in order to offset the cost of the books. On the other hand, it kind of gets the DNR on the hook for the people who sell fishing and hunting goods and services. So far, there appears to be no problem, but somewhere down the line it might be that DNR calculation on wildlife management could be influenced by advertising revenue. Also, when a product or service appears in a government publication, it seems that the government is endorsing that product or service. You get advertisers competing to be listed in the DNR manuals and the next thing, somebody is getting a senator or two to lean on the DNR to get a certain product in the book. Nothing like this appears to have happened, but you can bet your best 12 gauge duck gun that it will happen down the line. And anyone who thinks hunting and fishing is beyond the reach of politics just hasn’t lived long enough.

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