Spring Roundup

The spring of 2017 started off pretty slowly for me, hunting- and fishing-wise.  The winter was quite harsh, by Vancouver Island standards, and if my early-season rabbit hunting forays were any indication, there was some significant die-off for at least a couple game species.  Firstly, the cottontail rabbits.  Last year at this time, I could reliably go out on any given morning and expect to see maybe a dozen rabbits an hour, and shoot somewhere around 3-4 of them.  I quit hunting them for the year near the end of July 2016, because I do some deer hunting around the same area, and I wanted to stop shooting there well in advance of the deer season.  At that time, the rabbit population was thriving.  Fast-forward to this spring, when I delightedly resumed my cottontail hunting activities, and I found there to be a much-reduced density of animals.  I saw only one or two of them on average, per morning spent looking.  There was still snow on the ground well into May, so I figured that maybe things would pick up once it warmed a little, and the vegetation grew back more thickly.  As of right now, however, the rabbits' favorite grasses and flowers have all grown back into a dense mat of greenery, but the rabbits have not returned to their former abundance.  In at least a dozen trips out to the rabbit woods this spring and early summer, I have returned with a total of only five animals.  I've decided at this point to just leave them alone for the rest of the year, in the hopes that their famously robust reproductive drive leads to better luck next spring.  The few rabbits that I did manage to get, I carefully case-skinned in preparation to tan the fur.  This involves making a cut from back foot to back foot, then pulling the skin forward, and in so doing you eventually wind up with an inside-out tube of fur.  

I decided to start keeping the furs from any animals that I get as a way of making more use out of each one.  The more things you can make use of the better, if you're shooting a critter anyway.  I had decided to collect 10 furs before putting them through the tanning process, because they're all small game skins, and I wanted to get a decent amount before going to the trouble of mixing up all the chemicals.  I'm stuck at nine right now, because it looks like I'm not shooting any more rabbits, and there are only two other ways I have of getting furs.  One is by stopping to pick up rabbits or squirrels that I see getting hit on the road.  I drive for a living, so every once in a while I'll see one get hit, and I'll stop to check out if it's totally mangled or if it's salvageable.  If the fur is intact, I put it in a cooler that I keep in the trunk for this purpose, and I try to do so nonchalantly, as if there's nothing at all weird about it.  No sir.  You can only do this with rabbits and squirrels, because they're invasive here, and they don't have the same protections under the Wildlife Act as native animals do.  It's illegal to pick up and keep, say, a road-killed deer.  I've been trying to figure out a way to bag some of the suburban squirrels and rabbits that there are such an abundance of, other than just waiting for them to get run over.  Toward that end, I bought a suped-up slingshot, and I've been practicing with it regularly.  You can't even shoot an airgun inside most of the municipalities around here, so I figured a slingshot would be a good way around that restriction.  It looks pretty awesome; kind of like what batman would design if he were to make a slingshot.  It's a Saunders Archery Wrist Rocket Pro.  All told, between shotgun, slingshot, and the odd traffic fatality, I've put together six rabbits and three gray squirrels.  If I don't get a tenth fur from something soon, I'll probably just lose patience and do the nine that I have.  I ordered the tanning chemicals months ago, and after worrying that I might not ever get them when customs had them for weeks without releasing them, I'm just ready to see how well I can get a pelt to turn out.

The rabbits aren't the only animals that I fear had a big winter die-off.  The deer have also been conspicuous in their absence; in the past, I would see several of them incidentally each morning while looking for rabbits.  This year I've seen a total of about three.  Hopefully the upcoming archery deer season will see those numbers improve, but if the trend holds true for the deer as it has the cottontails, it could be a rough fall.  One animal that was not affected in the least by the ungodly snowfall over the winter is the black bear.  Bear hunting is where my spring efforts shifted from slow to super productive.  I embarked on my annual Victoria Day weekend bear hunting trip in May, and it lasted all of about 45 minutes.  After driving for about four-and-a-half hours to my mid-island west coast bear hunting spot, I had been out of the car for about five minutes before seeing the first bears of the trip.  It was a sow and her cub; I watched them for a couple minutes before the wind shifted and betrayed my presence.  The mother bear stood up on her hind legs and sniffed the air, then turned and faced directly at me and took a couple steps in my direction.  I took that as a good sign I should be on my way, and slowly backed down the deactivated spur road to go find a different area to check out.  Reaching the main logging road, I decided to just walk along it, checking out spurs as they came up.  That lasted only a few minutes, and I spotted another bear, this one by itself.  I watched it for a short time, creeping up on it bit by bit to get a better look and a better angle for a possible shot.  Finally, I decided this would be a good bear to take; but just as I settled my crosshairs on it, it stood up on its hind legs and suspiciously snorted and huffed in the wind.  It came back down onto all fours looking right in my direction, but before the bear could decide to beat it out of there, I refocused and shot.  That first shot entered the shoulder, deflected off the bear's shoulder blade and traveled backward, exiting near the opposite hip.  I had to follow the bear down a steep, thickly forested embankment and make a follow-up shot to put it down and avoid any prolonged suffering.  I had been out of the car for less than an hour at that point, and the great spring black bear hunt of 2017 was over.  I spent the rest of the day dragging the carcass back up the hill that the bear had inconsiderately fled down, and dressed it out and packed it in my cooler back at the car.  Another four-and-a-half hour drive, and a full day's butchering later, and I had a nice new bear in the freezer.  I've already eaten quite a few bear burgers from that particular critter.  I decided not to keep the hide from the bear for tanning, because unfortunately due to the multiple shots involved, and the size of the entry and exit holes, it was tore up pretty bad.  I only wanted one bear this year, because I still have a little meat left from the two bears I got last year, but hopefully in 2018 I'll get a one-hitter-quitter with less of a sewing job to fix holes, and I can finally get that bear rug I've been wanting to make forever.

I've been making some pulled bear meat lately, which is awesome, and really easy to do.  It just takes a long time to prepare.  You need a bear thigh or shoulder blade roast with the bone in, and a slow cooker.  First you rub on a generous amount of salt and pepper.  Then fill the cooker with an amount of soup stock ( I used beef stock) that will completely submerge the chunk of bear meat you're working with.  Then it's just a matter of dunking the meat into the cooker, setting it on low for 16 hours, and playing the waiting game.  I tried a few different cook times before settling on 16 hours.  That seems to be exactly the right amount of time to get bear meat to the fall-off-the-bone level of doneness that pulled meat requires.  Once it's had its extended hottub soak, take the meat out of the cooker, and it should literally fall off the bone.  Shred it up, store it in a container in the fridge or freezer, and you've got meat for sandwiches, fajitas, or whatever else you can think of.  I make deconstructed reubens with it, by laying down a bed of pulled bear meat, and layering on swiss cheese, grainy mustard, pickles, sauerkraut, and a little bit of hot sauce.  Put that in the microwave to melt the cheese a little, and you've got a meal that tastes delicious at the same time that it looks atrocious.

The rest of my spring involved a few trips to Saanich Inlet to do some fishing for rockfish, and to drop my prawn trap in an adorably feeble attempt to catch some prawns.  I did my trapping north of Gowlland Todd Park, just offshore at the end of Mark Lane.  After several attempts to find the right depth, I did finally succeed in catching exactly nine spot prawns.  Considering I'm using an inflatable rubber raft with plastic oars, the same one that I bought for my January duck hunt, and I have no depth finder to accurately assess where to drop my single trap, I'd say nine prawns is about what one could expect.  Also, hand-lining a trap and 330 feet of lead-core line from a rubber dinghy in a storm on the ocean is about as fun as it sounds.  i can see how Popeye acquired his phenomenal forearm strength.  I also managed a few limits of rockfish over a couple weekends' worth of fishing (unfortunately, the limit in the inlet is 1 per day).  They were all copper rockfish, and I got them all the same way; jigging a white and pink Buzz Bomb in about a hundred feet of water.  The highlight of these efforts was saving up two of my limits of rockfish (which is to say, two fish) and frying them, along with my nine prawns, in cajun Fish Crisp, and enjoying a fabulous seafood feast for one.  That meal probably represented one of my highest ratios of effort expended, compared to actual meat acquired, of all time.  With that experience in mind, I decided I've filled my quota of saltwater action for the time being, and in the last few weeks I've turned my attention to lake fishing.  I wanted to get some more meat coming in, and being that there aren't really any hunting seasons open in the summer, and rabbits are out, freshwater fish have become the order of the day.