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As a child, when it was nice outside, I wasn’t allowed to stay inside or sit in front of a screen. My Mother would “MAKE’ me go outside and find something to do, and if I couldn’t find something to do, she would find me something to do. Often times it was weeding the “rock garden.” The only rule I had was to be home for dinner.

Back then, the mid 1970’s, we didn’t have cell phones or any real technologies to stay in contact, I like to refer to those as the days of freedom, and having a watch was a luxury for a kid. If I was late for dinner, which was most of the time, a concentric ring of hollers from the neighborhood moms would echo through the neighborhood. Not unlike the calls of birds and squirrels calling out through the forest when a human enters the forest, a hawk flies by, or some other form of danger presents itself.

Our house was in a small neighborhood consisting of about 40 homes built in 1970. The neighborhood was surrounded by forests and farms. So as you can imagine, when I was tasked with going outside to find something to do, all I had was my imagination and curiosity of being a kid to guide me because there wasn’t much to do in a rural PG County neighborhood, there were no neighborhood playgrounds or parks back then. My days consisted of me trying to find a friend to come out and play with or me just sitting on the curb watching ants. As I got a little older eventually I was naturally drawn into the forest.

The attraction to the forest was powerful for me, at a certain point, probably around the age of 8 I started to venture into the forest, often finding myself turned around and lost. I remember the first time of having to overcome the fear and panic and figure out how to find my way back out. With each journey came adventure, and each adventure lead me deeper into the forests as I began to naturally learn the landscape and become more comfortable going deeper. I eventually found myself trying to make arrowheads out of rocks i found, and sharpening sticks into spears, at the edge of the forest, by rubbing them on the concrete curb at the end of our street.

Directly across the street from my house was a very small patch of woods where you could often find me laying in the bushes on my belly holding a string that was connected to a stick propping up a box with a carrot under it. I lay in wait for the elusive rabbit to come in for a snack… I figured it worked in the cartoons so why not for me.

I experienced some very “weird” things while wandering the forest, things that made absolutely no logical sense, things best told around a campfire. One thing I never experienced out there was wildlife. I never saw any deer, fox, raccoons, etc… i saw birds and I recall the sound of the Bob White filling the airwaves until i was 16 at which point the suburban sprawl took away their habitat.

I was a squeamish spindly kid, I never thought about hunting or fishing and I really hated putting live bait on hooks. My dad took me fishing a bunch as a kid, and i remember him coming home with lots of fish and some geese from hunting with his friends. I didn’t like gutting fish, or waterfowl I thought it was gross.

My dad came back from a trip one time and brought me home a wooden bow and some arrows, I was probably 8 and I was hooked. I thought it was so cool and I shot it immediately not knowing it could shoot far and launched all my arrows over the fence into the woods on the first day. I remember being very sad about it because it came from Colorado and I wasn’t getting any replacement arrows. It was my first lesson in “no attachment.” At one point i must have attended a camp because I remember doing archery in Cheverly somewhere with the big round targets with the colored circles. Archery was the only memorable thing about that camp.

I eventually joined cub scouts and boy scouts and that was fun, but it was missing something, it seemed manufactured, “canned” if you will. All the badges like basket weaving, pottery, and fire making were in kits. none of them taught me how to do it naturally. I recall the first time having that feeling about the merit badge skills, I was at Goshen scout camp, making a basket and a small stool that came out of a plastic bag. I felt it deep down inside that this wasn’t real, that there was more to it. After being in the scouts, I didn’t go into the woods much during my teens, I got into skateboarding, surfing, and at the age of 19 I started followed the Grateful Dead selling t-shirts and traveling the country until Jerry died in 1995.

Between 1987 and 1996 the forest started calling to me back and It became undeniable over the years. On three occasions in the nine years it was suggested to me that I read Tom Brown Jr’s books on survival; once by some girls I met on dead tour, again years later by a couple friends who went to Tom Brown Jr’s school, I laughed in their faces, scoffing “why the hell would i want to learn survival? I’m not interested in the military” their response was always, “it’s not like that at all.”

Years later I was sitting on my next door neighbors couch drinking one of his home brewed beers when I noticed that he had all of Toms field guides on his shelf, and he said, “everyone should have these books.” That is when I went and bought and read Toms first book, The Tracker, I was 24 years old.

A couple years went by and after work I went to a party in Riverdale MD where I ran into a friend of mine, Shawn Brown, a local legend in the DC Hardcore punk scene. I hadn’t seen Shawn for a few years so we had some catching up to do. In our conversation he revealed to me that he was reading TBJr’s books and going to take a class in the upcoming months. I immediately said, I’m going with you, ill drive! Unknowingly this is when my life changed forever. I finally I found a mentor to teach me everything that I was searching for in my childhood scouting and forest explorations.

I was a vegetarian when took my first class at the Tom Brown Jr School of Tracking, Awareness, and Wilderness Survival. Upon finishing my the standard class with Tom, I was determined to provide for myself. I decided that if I was going to eat meat again I’d have to be able to hunt it myself and my childhood fascination of the bow and arrow was the route I was going to take. That meant that I had to learn how to knap arrowheads, make arrows, make a bow, move silently, and learn how to track deer. I made a promise to myself that I would put in the “dirt time” for 4 years before I would ever take a shot at a deer, I harvested my first deer November 5th of my 5th year of hunting.

I spent a lot of time with Tom at the Tracker School and one thing remained consistent, every morning and every evening during his classes he would send us out into the forest for about an hour to do what he called a “sit spot.” You go out and pick a spot in the forest, away from everyone, and sit there silently and listen to the birds, observe animals, take note of the plants and trees surrounding you, and more importantly, in the morning set your intentions for the day and in the evening reflect on your day. The sit spot is a powerful tool and opens up the world in a way that is undeniable.

The sit spot practice naturally carries over into modern hunting, sitting in a blind or tree stand for 4+ hours is the ultimate sit spot. When you do it enough and with the right intent the animals just accept you as part of the landscape but when you enter the woods angry, frustrated, or impatient the disturbance and alarm calls you create are undeniable. Over the past 30 years I have spent nearly 800 days hunting, and well over 3600 hours in a sit spot while hunting. Needless to say I have experienced some very cool things and one of them was the interaction between a red fox and a grey squirrel.

One day I was hunting this ridge top point along a chain link fence that runs through the woods. The fence had a large downed section from a tree falling across it that the deer would funnel through. While I was sitting there I heard something coming from behind me, moving at a quick pace, light on its feet, this red fox came walking along the fence line. This fox was mostly black and very rare and it was about to walk right into my shooting lane. As it entered the lane I made a kissing sound making it stop. It was at that moment I thought how it would make a great quiver, but as drew back on my bow I was hit with a loud thought and the overwhelming feeling that it was not the right thing to do and the fox walked on as I let my bow down.

A few weeks later I was walking into one of my stand spots along the same ridge, it was a ladder stand about 100 yards in from the road on south east corner of the woods. It was around 5:30am, pitch black, and I was stalking through the woods. I don’t generally use a flashlight as it really ruins my orientation and my ability to see the silhouettes of my landmark trees and tends to make me more clumsy if I do use one. I also find it much easier to move slowly with intention without a light.

I was about 30 yards into the woods heading north when I heard the sound of some light foot steps in the leaves. The sound was to the west of me and I stopped to listen and try to identify what it was and hopefully not cause any alarms. The foot steps sounded close and were steadily getting closer, obviously the animal wasn’t spooked by my presence or maybe it didn’t hear me. As I stood there listening, they kept coming closer, so I pulled out a headlamp from my hip pouch and shinned it in the direction of the sounds. In doing so these two orange-yellow eyes reflected back at me, then two more, and then another two… they kept coming… I figured that my headlamp would send them away but the kept closing in on me, one behind the other. My headlamp wasn’t super bright and didn’t help reveal what animals they were, I could only see their 6 glowing eyes coming towards me. I thought they might be raccoons so I made some noise rustling my feet, and said “go on, get” but they still kept approaching me. that is when I started to walk away, a little more hurriedly though.

I put some distance between us and when I got up in my ladder stand I could still hear them following me. As the sky started to turn a faint blue the three critters showed up beneath my ladder. They proceeded to walk circles around the base of the ladder, one by one taking turns peeing on it and then wandering off. After about 10 minutes I saw the silhouette of a big buck moving quickly along the ridge. It was almost running, back and forth east to west and back again and eventually he came in under my ladder and stood directly below me. He sniffed the ladder where the foxes peed and walked into the brush. It wasn’t legal shooting light so I couldn’t take a shot, not to mention he was never in a position for a good shot. Once he left I thought, what a gift, these foxes followed me in and covered my sent along my whole path, then completely covered my scent on the ladder.

Fast forward two weeks, I’m back up in my stand along the fence with the hole in it when a squirrel comes down a tree along the fence and stops about 10 feet from the ground and begins to give off a chattering alarm call. A few moments later a fox appears from behind me walking along the fence from the east. The fox walks up to the base of the tree that the squirrel is in and like a cat scratching on a post, it elongates its body with its front paws up the side of the tree and looks up at the squirrel. I think to myself, “that’s so odd.” meanwhile the squirrel stopped alarming and slowly started to come down the tree toward the fox. As I observed thoughts filled my head; “what the hell are you doing squirrel?”, “oh, you’re teasing him, too funny.” The fox maintained its position, outstretched looking up the tree and the squirrel kept descending, slowly inching its way down, and to my surprise it worked its way down to mere inches from the fox. My mouth opened in dismay, what is going on here, that squirrel is crazy. Then it happened. The squirrel came all the way down, face to face with the fox and they touched noses for a second and then the fox came down to all fours and walked off in the direction that it was headed and the squirrel went back up the tree.

I have no idea what I just witnessed but what I do know is that the squirrel and fox have a relationship and that I would have never saw this interaction if it wasn’t for my childhood, running into Shawn, studying under Tom Brown Jr, and going out and spending time in the ultimate sit spot.

-blog post submitted by Bill Kaczor, Executive Director of AK

It seems with each passing day there is a growing reliance on new technology. Even if your car is not electric, there are many more electronics in our cars than ever before, many more video cameras on the streets recording things, many more street lamps and skyscrapers drowning out the dark skies, many more ways to measure our sleep or heart rate through watches, many more beeping devices that seem to disrupt the natural circadian sound vibrations that move through the airways. Technology, I always sensed in some way or another, takes us out of our own bodies, our own awareness, our own inner power, if you will. It outsources quite well, not only our own abilities to solve problems, think things through, and now also our artistic creations; but it also takes a devastating toll on the Earth, extracting, polluting, purging, burning, all on a constant repeat.

On the other hand, working in harmony with what nature provides, slowing down and syncing up to the natural rhythms of the day, night, and the different seasonal changes, seems to me exactly how we humans can reclaim our wholeness, peace, calm, and wellness as a species. There are so many rabbit holes to go down with this but for the purposes of this article I wanted to focus on the art and skill of crafting. Basically, anything using our hands, and interacting with nature in a shared reciprocity with respect, awareness, and balance.

Rewind with me to just a few years ago, I really didn’t give or understand the time required to sit and learn a craft, or new earth skill which all seemed to require more focus on “doing” with your body and hands than abstraction with your thoughts and mind. As someone who has always appreciated the arts immensely and living close to and harmoniously with the earth, it somewhat amazed me that I didn’t feel I possessed the patience it took to learn or really master these skills. It really took me years to even just begin to understand how incredibly healing and grounding taking the time to learn these crafts were

I started to find so much joy in creating simple tools that the earth presented to me, and realized perhaps this is one major way we have “conveniently” forgotten as a society how to cultivate a joyous life – living and creating alongside Mother Earth, being completely present and in the moment – and with just that – – feeling how fulfilling that is.

I was reading an interview with Christoper Manes, author of Green Rage, published in the book Listening to the Earth by Derrick Jensen and this quote seemed to point to what we as a society have overlooked as we live our human existence within the dichotomy of technology and craft in our “modern civilization”.

“I see a real distinction between technology and craft. Technology confronts the world, forces it to do things it wouldn’t do naturally. Craft belongs to a humbler, more ancient relationship with nature – going with the flow. The earth gives up clay and fire, and we make ceramic pots from the bounty. The earth and its nonhuman communities aren’t diminished or banished by the process of craft. Craft fits human needs into the existing landscape, whereas technology attempts to alter and deny the landscape at an ever accelerating pace with no recognition of nature’s limits.”

Perhaps you too feel the urge to create a different type of relationship with the earth, slow down and allow the earth to present its gifts to you, craft, and find ways to live more harmoniously with nature. Maybe Mother Nature itself is calling out to you as it did to me. Please feel free browse our many offerings and if something calls to you come join us in one of our upcoming workshops. We hope to see you there.

Submitted by Laura Rose – Field Instructor

The Three Sisters are taught in most elementary schools as an example of indigenous ingenuity. The beans provide nitrogen, the corn provides the vertical structure for the beans to climb and the squash smother the weeds on the ground. What isn’t also mentioned is that the three together provide a balanced protein source for people who eat them than any one of them would be on their own. Interestingly, the Three sisters were a relatively recent adoption across North America at the point of European contact, there had been a whole other suite of plants that had been domesticated before then! Across the world people figured out similar systems, peas and wheat in Europe, Barahnaja in the Himalayas, cowpeas and sorghum in Africa.

This past winter we tarped off a section of the field behind the Cabin and smothered the grass and other plants growing there. The soil here is not the richest and while we started some other beds, I wanted to try another symbiotic planting to try and improve the soil on this spot. I planted a three seed mix, sorghum, sunflower and cowpeas. Sunflowers have the deepest tap roots out of those three which would help it pull the nutrients which have leached deep in our soils and they can provide the vertical structure for the beans. The beans should fix nitrogen to help feed the other plants and smother any weeds underneath. The sorghum is in the mix as it is deer resistant and provides a fibrous root structure and a stable residue which will boost the organic matter and fertility in the soil for the following year. While the prime focus of this plot is building soil in this spot, it is also providing food. I’ll add the sorghum to stews, I’ll feed the sunflower seeds to the local birds, and I’ll cook the cowpeas in any number of ways.

The plants are all thriving symbiotically. We often hear about “survival of the fittest” but what many people don’t realize is sometimes the “fittest” is being the one who is able to play with others the best. The more we look around the natural world the more we find it. Whether it is in the algae and the fungus producing a lichen which survives where they both would perish or the salmon spawning in streams kept cool enough by the shade of old trees which line the banks, those salmon when they die give the nutrients from the sea back to the trees which are keeping the water clean and cool for their offspring. We can emulate it in our gardens. The summer’s tomatoes which have been growing through the heat can provide shade to keep the soil cool for starting the fall carrots, peas and lettuces. As the sweet corn gets picked, cabbage, brussel sprouts and kale can go in and scavenge any nitrogen the corn left behind and prevent it from going into our water ways.

Likewise in our human interactions, appreciate those who can do the things you can’t. Appreciate the artist who sees something in a new way, appreciate the teacher who has the patience you might lack, appreciate the doctor who can heal us and those we care about. Together we all make each other’s lives better.

What predates corn in American agriculture? Sunflowers.

Can’t see the soil from above…

The plants are working together, shade keeps the weeds at bay!

*

Sorghum uses much less water than corn and is nutrient packed! 

Blog post submitted by Kyle

It is the season of bark and berries! As we walk on the land we may find the abundance of ripening mulberries and blueberries, but this gift of abundance often comes with its own kind of work. While winter is commonly associated with the challenge of scarcity in nature, the height of spring and early summer brings different challenges: long days, high energy, and opportunities that ask for our effort and attention. The land offers much during this season, and we are best able to meet these opportunities when we have taken time to rest and restore ourselves. Rest and work, dark and light; when we move together on the land with these high and low energies in mind, time and again we find what we seek.

This season also invites us to reflect on vulnerability. The sap is rising now, and the bark of trees can be harvested as a beautiful material for weaving and making. For bark harvest as in all foraging, we meet the trees as beings, using relationship, ecological knowledge, and deep listening to harvest in a good way. Bark protects the tree, and removing it reveals the sap-wet heartwood beneath. We often move through the world with protective layers of our own. These forms of protection serve an important purpose, yet there are moments when openness allows us to connect more deeply with ourselves, with others, and with the natural world.

Many of the most memorable experiences on the land happen when we enter that open state, or flow. Walking together on the land, we find this flow state through two main pathways: high and low energy activities. “Moon energy” activities could be opening a circle, slowing down, greeting the land, expressing gratitude, listening carefully to what is around us, sit spot, and art integration. “Sun energy” activities also bring the flow state. It emerges through movement, play, and full engagement of the body. When breath deepens, attention sharpens, and we become fully present in the moment.

Whether we are foraging on the land for edible and medicinal plants and fungi, or if we are seeking inner healing, connection, and belonging; the land often reveals what we seek when we arrive with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to be present. The forager’s eye develops as we begin to notice relationships, patterns, and opportunities that might otherwise remain hidden. The rewards of presence on the land are not always measured by what we bring home, but by how we learn to see, listen, and connect along the way.

This blog post was submitted by Chelsea and Stephanie, rock stars of the forest!

There is one thing I love, REAL Maple Syrup… I can drink it right from the bottle, eat it by the spoon full, or put a little in my coffee. I use it when I do a cleanse and love it on pancakes and crepes. I love it as a candy and as granulated sugar substitute.

My first experience with tapping trees for sap was when I visited Alex Kilgore outside of Boone North Carolina. We were walking his property talking about hunting and sharing stories when I saw his buckets hanging from the sugar maples on his property. He told me about the process and went and got two glasses with ice and poured some of the fresh sap out of the bucket over the ice and handed it to me. OH MY GOD! it was the most wonderful beverage to enjoy with a friend.

Since then I have learned a little bit about it and that there are several trees you can collect sap from and process it into syrup. Several different types of Maples, each differing in degree of sweetness, as well, many different ways of tapping them, naturally compared to conventional methods.

Now that our office resides in this sweet little cabin tucked away into the woods surrounded by maple trees, and we have a few groups of eager to learn teenagers, we have decided to venture down the road of collecting an processing sap for syrup making. In the fall we collected acorns, processed, leached, ground and cooked with them and now in the early spring we will do the same with maple sap.

The best thing about this line of work is that I get to work with and teach people who have varying levels of skills, experience, and expertise. The benefit of being surrounded by these people is that we are each always learning and growing, becoming more and more knowledgeable. One of my favorite things about teaching is learning along side our students. It helps role model a level of humility and reinforces that we are all equals. As my mentor, Tom Brown Jr, once said during his Expert Tracking class, “the best thing about teaching tracking is that you have 50 different points of view, and every class i learn something new from my students and they way they see things.” That statement has stuck with me as one of the most powerful lessons I learned from him.

Submitted by Bill Kaczor – co-founder and ED of Ancestral Knowledge

For the next few months, Jupiter will be shining bright in the eastern night sky in the constellation Gemini as it makes its nearest pass to the planet Earth.  On January 10th, Jupiter will be opposite the sun and then will go retrograde.  Jupiter will appear to move slowly across Gemini, night after night, until returning back to prograde motion in mid April.

Retrograde motion is caused when the Earth passes another planet, making it appear to be moving backwards.  Imagine if you will, two well lit cars driving on a 2 lane oval racetrack on a pitch black night.  Both cars are traveling in the same direction as do all the planets. As car 1 passes car 2, car 2 appears to move backwards relative to the view out of the side window of car 1. All of the planets appear to go through retrograde motion.  Each planets cycle varies depending on how long the planet takes to go around the sun.  Jupiter goes retrograde about every 9 months and lasts for 4 months.

A fun fact about Jupiter is that there are 4 moons that are easily seen with minimal magnification.  These 4 moons are known as the Galileon moons.  This observation by Galileo was quite contentious in 1610 because God made the Earth at the center of the world.  Copernicus, 60 years prior before passing away, published his heliocentric observations in De revolutionibus orbium.  Ironically, this hardly caused a stir in the Catholic church.  Not till Galileo made the scene.  With the first telescope made in 1608 by a Dutch spectacle maker, Galileo was able to improve the design and make significant observations of Jupiter’s biggest moons.  With a simple pair of binoculars, kids telescopes, or a good camera, you can witness for yourself 4 celestial objects that are clearly not geocentric.  Go out and make observations every 30 to 60 minutes and notice how fast Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto move around Jupiter.  Have fun!

Post submitted by field instructor Keith Grenoble

As I stepped outside the morning after the first snowfall here in Maryland, a comforting silence hung in the air. It immediately felt like peace, like all of the muffled noise had vanished and I was being embraced by a blanket of calm. I suddenly felt like everything in front of me became acutely clear; like all the inner chatter came to an abrupt halt. I could hear the birds conversing loudly, I could hear my footsteps crinkle the snow underneath my feet. I could hear the squirrel gathering its nuts across the street. Those were the only sounds I heard and it all seemed so peaceful and perfect. The snow has a way of ushering in an inviting silence – a gift maybe you might not know you wanted or were even looking for. I had been feeling this longing for a few weeks now and was so excited to wake up to the snow covered landscape, as I knew what I would feel once I stepped outside.

Nature has a way of offering us this gift of presence, if we can only take the first steps. As I continued to walk I kept looking down at the fresh animal tracks next to me. The perfect
reminder of the wildlife that walks side by side with us on this Earth. I saw many fresh squirrel and bird prints on my walk and I couldn’t help but smile thinking of these animals scurrying along, perhaps just as excited at the first snowfall as I was. It’s these moments outside where I feel so connected to all of Nature it makes me feel so grateful, full, and happy. These moments outside, to pause from the hustle and bustle of this season, and be present with what is right in front of me feels like the best present of all.

One of the many gifts passed down to the students of our programs is the practice of “Sit Spot”. This is the practice of observing using all of your senses, of melting into the landscape so the wildlife goes about their business without any disturbance and you get to experience the forest in its most natural state. It is about being truly present to the moment – an opportunity to release the mind chatter and see again what is in front of you. One time, a few years back, I was hiking up Mt. Shasta in northern California. It was just me and between the many pine trees and clear blue sky I decided to stop and lay down to rest. I took out a thin cotton blanket and laid down on top closing my eyes. After some time here a squirrel walked right over me! I couldn’t believe it! At the time I was incredibly surprised and a bit scared truthfully. Looking back I recall it as a huge gift to have a wild animal that close to me – I was just a part of the forest floor to the squirrel while he meandered right over my body. I had completely and a bit unintentionally melded into the landscape. 🙂

The ongoing consistent practice of Sit Spot is an invitation to be one with the wild around you; to see things from the perspective of the forest floor, or a strand of tall grass, or a snail; to observe and learn about and from the subtle life all around us. I personally believe if we accepted this invitation consistently, of going outside to sit – to observe- to step outside of ourselves- to become immersed completely in nature – the peace and understanding we would find would blow us away and the trajectory of our collective future would most likely experience an enormous shift.

I feel like the snow is Natures subtle invitation to us to feel the peace it creates merely with its presence. I hope this holiday season you get the opportunity to step outside into the snow, outside of the hustle and bustle, and connect to Winters subtle invitation of peace too.

Wishing you a happy and peaceful holiday season!

Post Submitted by Laura Rose – Field Instructor

When I was in school, like many kids I loved a snow day. I rarely got sick, but it wasn’t time off from reading and learning that I looked forward to. No, after I shoveled the driveway, I would scamper off to the woods. I was fortunate that my parent’s property backed up to Patapsco State Park. There the web of life was constantly writing for those willing to read from the pages of the Earth. While an animal will leave tracks behind regardless of if there is snow or not, a fresh layer of fluffy white snow made it easy for even a lightly trained eye to easily go out and pick up on the story.

Red foxes were one of my favorite animals to follow. Unlike deer who wandered in herds along the same trails, flowing like so many suburban commuters on their way home from the office, a fox usually was travelling solo and cut a clear trail that I could easily follow through the woods. Along this trail you could see what he had been doing fairly easily. In your mind’s eye you could play a little movie of the fox’s morning. You could see when the tracks were in a nice evenly spaced line like stitches in a piece of cloth and know the fox was flowing smoothly across the landscape, its copper colored coat puffed out against the cold keeping him warm. If it came to a stop you would see the even stitches stop and the two front paws standing side by side. You could look around and try and imagine why the fox stopped. What did it hear? What did it see. Sometimes the reason was fairly obvious, you could read from the prints that the fox had spotted prey and  there would be signs of it pouncing on its meal. Sometimes you could see it had been successful and there would be a little blood stain on the snow. Sometimes there would be clues as to what the fox had caught, some feathers from a songbird, a bit of fur or the foot of a vole or a mouse.

As I followed the trails, the snow muffled my footsteps across the normally noisy fallen leaves of the forest. If I kept my eyes peeled and didn’t just fall into tunnel vision staring at the tracks, more than once I would catch up to the fox, curled up in a ball, like a last live ember in the white ashes of a campfire. The fox glowed against the white snow and gray winter tree trunks. Here the game shifted, how close could I get before he would bust me? Writing this, and knowing what I know now, I know part of it was dumb luck on my part. The winds on the backside of a winter snow storm usually would have me down wind of the sleeping foxes. These factors, the quieting of my footsteps by the snow, and the wind in my favor muted the effectiveness of the fox’s keen hearing and sense of smell, and I more than once stalked within 20 feet of the sleeping fox. The looks on their faces when they finally noticed me always tickled me; it was a mixture of shock and surprise and I like to think a hint of embarrassment that they had let a silly human catch them unawares.

Hopefully we get a few more snow days this winter. Who knows how many more years we will have them, even from my not terribly long ago youth, they have become less frequent. If we do, I hope you get to spend a morning diving into whatever little chunk of the natural world you have in your neighborhood and read a page from the lives of the animals who live there.

Happy Tracking,

Kyle

As fall arrived I made sure my bow and arrows were in order. The DMV is filled with suburban deer who face minimal hunting and predator pressure. This imbalance creates space for invasives and hampers natural forest succession. Look at many of our parks in the winter, if they are not running a program to manage the deer, any plants growing below shoulder height are most likely heavily browsed or invasives. Part of the philosophy AK follows is that humans are not apart from nature but are a part of it. While humans have caused this situation and it would be ideal to have the whitetail’s natural predators, wolves and mountain lions come in to fulfill their ecological role, most of the public does not want top predators in their backyards. As a result it is on use to harvest the deer.

Part of respecting the deer is utilizing as much of it as possible. We save our hides for teaching students as well as for our own personal projects. We harvest the sinews for building arrows and atlatl darts, making bow strings and more. We demonstrate using the bones for tool making. And the meat gets eaten. Many people only take a few choice cuts off the deer, the backstrap is the most popular, and some cuts out of the rump. The rest if they keep it gets ground up and turned into burger.

Whitetail meat is extremely healthy. In my view it is extremely ethical to consume as the deer have not been subjected to confinement and filthy conditions in the industrial agricultural system and we are . Venison has a reputation. Some say it is “gamey”. Part of that is expecting it to taste like beef or other commercially raised animals. Some of that is poor processing (if you want to learn how to cleanly and safely process a deer sign up for our Way of the Hunter course). Some people complain venison is tough. Part of that is deer are wild animals who haven’t had soft cushy lives they have more connective tissue per pound of meat than a cow. If you approach the meat in the appropriate manner for how to cook it, it is excellent.

Last week we had a guest at the cabin. They had come from out of town to teach a class for us and were going to stay in the spare bedroom. I had received a front shoulder off a deer and made it for dinner for the two of us. The front shoulder off a deer isn’t the prize cut, but cooking it slow and low, braising it for a few hours turns it into a wonderful meal. The recipe which follows is for lemon and wine braise venison shoulder. I accompanied it with lemon and herb pan roasted potatoes, but turmeric and lemon roasted carrots would also be an excellent veg to go with it. While I prepared it for two people, there was plenty left over. This shoulder off a medium sized buck would have easily fed a family of 4. A small doe would probably feed 4 and a large buck would serve 8. If people want more recipes for other under appreciated cuts, next month I will tackle the shanks.

I deboned the shoulder. You can view this video of deboning a lamb shoulder, the process is the same. If you take your deer to a butcher, you can ask they do this for you.

Salt and roll the shoulder and tie it up with butchers twine.

Preheat your oven to 325.

Sear  the shoulder in a hot cast iron pan with olive oil, alternatively you could do this on a grill.

After you have seared it off transfer it to a covered roasting pan with one onion sliced. Deglaze the pan with the veggie stock and pour the used stock into the pan. Juice a lemon into the pan and put the squeezed-out lemon in there, add a few sprigs of thyme, 1.5 cups white wine, two cloves garlic and black pepper. This moderate heat and the liquid let the tough connective tissues break down and become nice and tender.

Cover it and place it in your oven at 300 for 3.5 hours. If you are busy, you could also place it in a slow cooker and let it run all day.

Once done, pull from the oven and allow it to cool for 30 minutes. Slice and serve with your choice of sides.

I would strongly recommend reserving the braising liquid once the meat has rested, straining it and returning it to a sauce pan. Bring it to a simmer and add a slurry of 1Tbs cornstarch and 1Tbs COLD water per cup of liquid. Whisk it together and as soon as the starch flavor has cooked off remove it from the heat. Serve this sauce over the venison.

Ingredients:

• One deboned venison shoulder rolled and twined
• 1.5 cups white white
• 1.5 cups veggie or chicken stock
• 1 onion sliced
• 5-8 sprigs of thyme
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• 1 lemon
• Salt 1tsp salt
• Black pepper 1 tsp

Optional sauce:

• 2 cups strained braising liquid
• 2Tbs cornstarch
• 2Tbs cold water.

Post Submitted by AK Staffer- Kyle Dexheimer