Maine crab and lobster mushrooms inside that crunchy crust

At the risk of jinxing things I have to say this is shaping up as a boffo mushroom year (in Midcoast Maine, anyway.) We haven’t had much chance to go out, but when we do we are finding things, including lobster mushrooms, which seem to be unusually abundant.

I am of the school that feels they get their name from their brilliant color. To me, the flavor is meaty, not fishy. But others claim they also taste faintly crustaceanlike. This isn’t as farfetched as it sounds; mushroom cell walls are primarily composed of chitin, the same material that makes crab and lobster shells.

Either way, they have a great affinity for Maine crabmeat, one of the world’s greatest seafoods.

Those bright red bits are the mushroom

Maine Crab and Lobster Mushroom Cakes

For 4 roughly 3-inch cakes, rich enough to be dinner for 4 if there’s something else fairly substantial on the menu:

4oz. lobster mushrooms, weighed after cleaning (see below), enough to make  @1 cup cooked and chopped*

8 oz. Maine crabmeat

2 tbl. thick homemade mayonnaise, half olive oil and half peanut oil*

½ tsp. chopped capers, or more to taste

½ tsp. minced lovage, or more to taste – omit if you don’t have any

1 cup panko

1 lemon

1 egg

2 tbl. butter

peanut oil for shallow frying

1. Put the pieces of cleaned lobster mushroom in a shallow pan just large enough to hold them in one layer. Pour in water to come up a scant ¼ inch. Bring to a simmer, cover the pan and cook until the mushrooms are fully cooked; they will look translucent.

2. There will be some liquid in the pan, how much depending on mushrooms, pan shape etc. Remove mushrooms with a slotted spoon, boil liquid until it’s reduced to thick syrup, then lower heat, replace mushrooms and cook, stirring, until there is no free liquid. Turn off the heat. Let the mushrooms cool in the pan.

lobster mushrooms ready to be cooked

cooked lobster mushrooms being chopped (I forgot to shoot them when they were still in large pieces).

3. Chop the mushrooms into roughly quarter-inch chunks, big enough to taste , small enough to blend with the crabmeat. Mix with crabmeat, mayonnaise, herbs and a pinch of salt. Taste and adjust seasonings.

4. Put the panko on a plate and grate the lemon zest over it. Toss with your fingertips to mix. Beat the egg in a shallow bowl. Set out a wire rack to hold the cakes.

5. Divide the mixture in 4 parts and form each into a patty about ½ inch thick. Pressing firmly should be enough to have it (barely) hold together. If necessary, bind with a bit more mayonnaise.

6. As each patty is formed, put it in the beaten egg and turn – gently! – to coat. Place it on the panko. When all the cakes have been formed, coat each heavily with the panko, turning and pressing to get a thick, even covering.

As each is completed, put it on the rack, then let them sit at least half an hour to firm up. (Refrigerate if you must hold them longer than about 75 minutes, then let come back to room temperature before cooking.)

7. Melt the butter over medium heat in a shallow pan  large enough to hold the cakes without crowding. Add enough oil to make a layer @ ¼ inch thick. When the oil is hot, add the cakes and fry, turning once, until both sides are richly browned, about 5 minutes a side. Drain briefly on paper towel or newspaper, then serve with

Cilantro Nectarine Sauce for Crabcakes

For about 1 3/4  cups:

1 cup thick thick homemade mayonnaise, half olive oil and half peanut oil*

2/3 cup finely minced cilantro

1 very ripe small white nectarine, peeled and chopped to pulp, @ 1/2 c. pulp

1 tsp. lemon juice, or more to taste

pinch of salt

Mix thoroughly, taste. Adjust lemon and salt.

*Substitutions:

Actual lobster can be used instead of the mushrooms, but it will of course elbow aside the more delicate crab.

Commercial mayo – Hellman’s, please – is ok, but it’s thinner, sweeter and more aggressively flavored than the homemade kind. This will make more difference in the sauce than in the crab cakes themselves. Be ready to correct with more lemon juice and maybe choose a slightly less ripe nectarine.

Preparing Lobster Mushrooms

The first thing to know is that lobster mushrooms (Hypomyces lactifluorum) are really lobsterized mushrooms. The color, flavor and texture are all created when a parasitic mushroom – the Hypomyces – colonizes another mushroom.

The host may be any of several species of Russula or Lactarius, but their individual traits are overwhelmed by the lobsterization. From the culinary point of view, all that’s left is the shape and sometimes not even that.

As the process proceeds, the host becomes yellowish, then orange, then flaming red, then flaming red with burgundy weepings. Flavor and texture are best at the orange stage. Red is alright if and only if the mushroom is firm and the inside is white when you cut into it. Anything soft or discolored ( brown or grey) is decaying and should be discarded. **

left to right: Just starting; Just right; Just gorgeous, but probably over the hill

The next thing to know is that lobster mushrooms are often extremely dirty.

Freshly picked lobster mushrooms. Notice the dirt. Know that there is a lot more dirt inside the funnels and inside the inside creases.

So step one is wash the mushrooms. We’ll save the discussion of whether one should wash mushrooms for another day. Suffice it to say there are some mushrooms that must be washed and if you don’t think lobsters are among them please don’t invite me to dinner.

The most flavor conservative way to wash is to cut the mushrooms as necessary to expose the dirt, brush off all that can be brushed off, then immerse the pieces one by one in a bowl of tepid water and gently rub off what remains.

Now you have a bunch of wet mushroom parts. Put them on paper towel and let them dry for an hour or two. You can use them damp in recipes where they will be immersed in liquid; let them dry thoroughly if they will be sautéed.

Washed lobster mushrooms set out to dry off

Loosely wrapped in waxed paper, lobster mushrooms keep well refrigerated, both before and after washing – IF you let the washed ones dry thoroughly before putting them away. Don’t be alarmed by white bloom that forms on the surface or shows up on the waxed paper; that’s just the spores, reminding you that the mushrooms are rapidly maturing and should be used up promptly.

** To be absolutely safe, you should know what the host species is, in the unlikely case it’s one that should not be eaten. Out here in reality, once hypomization is well underway, there’s no way to identify the host without lab equipment, so you have to proceed at your own risk, something I have been doing for more than 30 years.

As the authoritative Milk Mushrooms of North America (Bessette, Harris and Bessette, Syracuse University Press, 2009) puts it “Hypomyces lactifluorum is a very popular edible mushroom even though the identity of the host species is usually undetermined.”  The only poisoning Bill has ever dealt with in all his years of consulting came not from the lobster mushrooms per se, but from the fact that the mushrooms in question were rotten.

Photography note: The first time I tried to photograph the cakes it was at night, with predictably dreadful results. (So far I draw the line at learning about lighting).

But there were serious deficiencies in the styling, too. No matter what I did, here were these intractable dark brown disks with pale, light-reflecting sauce. Mayo on top – no good; on the side – better;  underneath – probably the best solution but then there was this naked hockey puck that looked very silly crowned with a spring of cilantro.

So before trying again in daylight I googled crab cake images, hoping to kite off some useful ideas and you know what? Nobody can photograph crab cakes, at least nobody in the first 60 offerings, after which I gave up.

Bill didn’t expect much either, but he doesn’t need much; one obscure little poisonous tidbit he hasn’t photographed yet is enough to make his day.

We were right, there wasn’t much – if you don’t count the mosquitoes and one huge honking Boletus bicolor.

Bill with a Boletus bicolor that’s on the big side for a solo specimen

“One swallow doth not a summer make,” as my mother was fond of remarking. But that  swallow reminded me to remind you  to be careful what you swallow. Although bicolors are good edibles, they’re easy to confuse with not good not edibles (B. sensibilis complex).

So. Now that the season’s about to start bigtime, here are two suggestions for happy wild mushroom hunting: check out Bill’s Long Lived Wild Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules – without letting his detailed explanation scare you to death – and start out with the gold standard: Chanterelles.

They’re delicious. In a good year they’re abundant. And they’re right up there with morels for being easy to recognize and safe for amateurs to collect.

Unlike morels, chanterelles have meaty stems too dense to clip with fingernails. Don't leave home without your pocket knife.

Note: My husband, Bill, is an expert mycologist, a consultant to New England Poison Control (there’s a reason he wrote those rules), and a frequent blog contributor whose posts amount to a short course on wild mushroom hunting. They’re gathered – along with some recipes – in the category Wild Mushrooms, under the dropdown menu for In the Wild that appears at the top of each page. Individual species can usually be found through the search and/or the alphabetical index.

Gray Treefrog, Hyla versicolor

Last night as I head back in from performing right-before-bed cutworm reconnaissance, there on the porch is what looks like a wad of leaves. Bend down to pick it up and no – it’s a little black and white toad. Bend down farther. It doesn’t move. Touch it gently. Completely still. Did I God forbid step on it when I was going out?

Nope, it’s just cold. The next time my warm hand hovers near it manages a sluggish hop.

By morning it has moved to the drainpipe and I have looked it up. Even though it’s notably bumpy and almost 2 inches long, it isn’t a toad. It’s a very large – as these things go – Gray Treefrog, Hyla versicolor, and it’s black and white because it’s sitting on the weathered cedar boards of the porch.

I rotated the other picture so you could see him/her more clearly. Here’s the actual orientation. The porch is the same color as the wall on the left.

Gray Treefrog caught last summer on a hollyhock leaf; they don’t call ‘em versicolor for nothin’.

Or you can coat them with olive oil and put them on the grill.  But Bill has found several patches so vast that even very modest gathering has put us in ramp heaven.

Must be spring - but not for much longer

And as we are also swimming in asparagus, winecaps and morels…

I have now made Pasta with Asparagus and Ramp Hollandaise; Ramp-wrapped Meatloaf; Ramp, Winecap and Ricotta Stuffed Ramp-Wrapped Sole and some quite spiffy Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes.

Cook’s Note: Ramps are really two vegetables: 1) the tender young first harvest, basically rampscallions – almost evenly thick white stems that gradually become purple as they meet big fans of wide leaves, and 2) the later, more mature version, with a fat oblong bulb, narrow purple neck and the same leaves, now much tougher. The young ones are more strongly oniony on tongue and breath but also sweeter and more complex. Larger bulbs are crunchier until they’re really fat. At the end of the season they can be mealy if cooked whole.

Pasta with Asparagus and Herbed Ramp Hollandaise

Fast and easy. No law against using the sauce on just about anything - or of course garnishing with an herb spring or two if you're not in a rush to shoot, eat, and return to the garden.

For 4 servings:

8 to 10 oz. orecchiette

8 tbl. butter

1 ½ c.  minced young ramps, both stems and leaves

3 egg yolks

2 tsp. lemon or lime juice plus more to taste

2 tbl. minced garlic chives (optional)

@ 1 tbl. each minced fresh marjoram and bronze fennel (optional)

1 to 1 ½  lb. fat asparagus, cut into ½ inch pieces

1. Start the pasta water, then add the pasta as soon as it boils. Melt 2 tbl. of the butter in a small heavy saucepan, add ramps and cook over medium heat just until wilted.

2. Beat yolks with citrus juice in a small, heatproof bowl. When ramps are wilted, add herbs if using and cook about a minute more. Put the rest of the butter in the pan and let it melt and heat.

3. Slowly beat the herb butter into the egg yolks, whisking all the while, then return sauce to the pan and put it over super-low heat. (Put it in a double boiler if your stove has no super-low.) Cook until thickened, stirring constantly, salt to taste, then set aside to keep warm.

4. When the pasta is done, stir the asparagus into the pot with it. Remove a cup of the pasta water, then drain immediately. Return mixture to the pan with ½ cup of the water, cover and let steam until asparagus is done, 2 to 5 minutes. If necessary, stir in just enough of the remaining water to moisten. Serve with the sauce.

Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes

Or maybe that’s Roasted Morels with Ramps, etc., because there are a lot of morels in this. Suffice it to say using lots of morels is one of the perks of foraging.

(comparatively) slow roasting gives the flavors lots of time to mingle

For 4 servings:

2 tbl. butter

1 tbl. olive oil

1 lb. small new potatoes, rinsed but not dried

8 to 10 oz. firm, clean morels, cut in large pieces (small, very firm cremini are not a substitute but do make a tasty alternative ; use slightly less – 6 oz. or so.

1 to 1 ½ c. mature but not huge ramp bulbs

coarse salt such as Malden salt, to taste

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Put the fats in a small jellyroll pan/ sheet pan and put it in the oven just long enough to melt the butter. Put the wet potatoes in the pan, cover tightly with foil and bake for 15 minutes.

2. Uncover the pan, roll the potatoes around with a spatula, then add the morels and ramps. Return the pan to the oven for 10 minutes. Stir with the spatula again. Repeat until potatoes are very soft and the other vegetables are cooked and starting to brown. This usually takes about ½ hour from uncovering the potatoes but a lot depends on your oven. Sprinkle with the salt and serve.

Endive Wraps with Roasted Vegetables and Chicken

A one-dish dinner, which you can serve as classic meat/starch/veg if your taco-loving husband for some reason looks askance at vegetable wraps.

Good ol' meat and veg

the wrap version (no utensils needed)

For 4 servings:

1 batch of Roasted Ramps with Morels and New Potatoes (above)

½ c. dry vermouth

1/3 c. orange juice

¾ to 1 lb. skinless boneless chicken thighs

12 to 16  broad, mild loose leaf endive leaves – spring loose leaf lettuce that’s about to bolt and has therefore acquired  a bitter edge would be a good substitute

1. While the potato mixture is cooking, choose a shallow pan wide enough to hold the thighs in one layer. Put in the vermouth and juice and add enough water to make the liquid 1 inch deep.

Heat to boiling, add the chicken, cover the pan and lower the heat so liquid barely simmers.

2. Turn the chicken after 5 minutes, give it 5 minutes more and then start testing for doneness.

3. As soon as the meat is barely cooked, remove it and keep warm, covered. Raise the heat under the pan and reduce the cooking liquid to about ¾ cup. Return the meat to the pan and set aside, covered.

4.  When the potato mixture is cooked, scrape it onto a cutting board (or for classic, into a bowl). Pour the chicken liquid into the roasting pan and stir it around with the spatula, picking up all the browned bits. Pour the sauce back into the chicken pan and turn the meat to coat.

5. For classic, you’re done, put a little puddle of sauce on the plate and some of the chicken on it. Fan on a couple of endive leaves, then spoon on some vegetables. For wraps, cut the potatoes in halves or quarters and the chicken in roughly 1 inch chunks. Reheat meat and vegetables in the chicken sauce and serve in a bowl with the leaves on the side.

this is a meatloaf wrapped in ramp leaves and there will be more about it after I go pick up the second batch of tomato seedlings and put them in and prune the hydrangeas and one or two other little things.

Forager Bill meets Gardener Bill in this post about about lambsquarter, one of the all-time great greens. It tastes wonderful (like a cross between asparagus and spinach);  it’s easy to prepare and cook;  it’s good for you – the usual dark green “high in vitamins and minerals, low in calories”  - and as a major bonus, it not only plants itself, it starts so early and grows so fast that you can harvest multiple crops and still have time to  plant tomatoes, corn, squash, beans or whatever in the very same ground.

HALF-WILD GREENS, PART TWO  – LAMBSQUARTER

by Bill Bakaitis

Compared to cultivating ramps, growing lambsquarter in your garden is a snap. In fact, if you don’t know what it is you may already be trying to weed it out. It is considered by some to be  one of the most widespread weeds in the world.

Lambsquarter (Chenopodium album) is probably best thought of as a complex of related plants which intergrade and hybridize quite easily. I find a variety of forms growing in my garden, often changing as the season progresses. You can find one form or another of it growing throughout North America; C. berlandieri was once part of the group of crops grown by the Eastern Woodlands Native Americans.

In Mexico a subspecies (ssp. nuttalliae) and hybrids are still grown as commercial cultivars:  ‘Huauzontle’ for the flowering heads, ‘Chia’ for the seeds, and ‘Quelite’ for the leafy greens. It is sometimes called Pigweed or Goosefoot, and Giant Goosefoot, or ‘Magenta Spreen’, (C.  gigantium) is available from several specialty seed suppliers, including Johnny’s Selected Seeds.

(There is more on species, distribution and taxonomy here and here.

All varieties of Chenopodium seem to be quite prolific, producing panicles that release thousands of tiny seeds, some of which germinate quickly while others persist in the soil for years. This is undoubtedly one reason why these plants are such successful weeds.

Far from being difficult to grow, they are often difficult to eradicate, particularly in soils which are frequently turned. It’s like the many-headed Hydra of Greek Mythology, every time you hoe down the weed, more come up as you expose more seed to sprout. You can see how lambsquarter is a problem when thought of as a weed. Think of it as a delicious green, however, and the problem becomes a blessing, a gift that keeps on giving.

Next to Broccoli Raab, Lambsquarter is my favorite green, but it does have two characteristics that might give you pause the first time you try it.

The first is a grayish, mealy powder found mainly on the underside of the young leaves. This will create an intriguing silvery sheen to the leaf when it is plunged into clear water. The grayish powder, parts of the leaf structure itself, will easily rinse off and rise to the top as a scum. Not to worry, it is harmless.

Equally harmless is the purplish red bloom which will come to dot some of the leaves.

The second aspect of lambsquarter that might cause concern is a flavor characteristic. Best described as a slightly astringent, bitter or mineral quality, it occasionally will leave in the mouth and on the tooth an oxalic acid sensation similar to that produced by rhubarb.

If you or your children do not like spinach, you will not like lambsquarter.  But if your palate has progressed to a more mature level chances are that you will flip over it. Take Lois, for instance. She can’t ever get enough of it. She heads for the greens patch as soon as she gets to the Hudson Valley,  and she continually scours the garden in Maine, laying claim to every plant she can find.

CULTIVATION OF LAMBSQUARTER

Nothing could be simpler. As I build my garden compost piles in the fall, into those beds where I want lambsquarter to grow next year, I incorporate a few mature plants along with the usual horse manure, garden remains, leaves and grass.

In late winter or early spring I turn the piles at my leisure, one every week or two. Before the last frost a thick carpet of two-leafed seedlings will appear, and with the first warm rains of May the tender young plants will be ready to be sheared off with a pair of scissors.

The first cutting is always the best, and the staggered turning of the planting beds, some double dug and turned twice, assures that a “first cutting” will always be available until the heat of summer.

True to its ‘weed’ status, lambsquarter will be found throughout the garden, although beds not treated as described will not be as prolific.

The heaviest harvest often comes just as the asparagus is allowed to go to fern. Large quantities can be cut, placed in storage bags and kept for weeks in the fridge. This green is so delicious and cooperative that it has been years since we have grown spinach.

One final gift of this plant should be mentioned. During the chaos of the early to mid season growth spurt it works very well as a trap plant for aphids.

At first, only a few plants will be affected. When you find one that has growing tips covered with these tiny insects, simply pluck the entire plant and you have captured pests that otherwise would have spread over the whole garden. (Bury infested plants in the compost; the aphids won’t survive.)

HOW TO COOK LAMBSQUARTER:

Again, simplicity itself: Rinse and pick through the greens, discarding any tough stems. (Stems get tougher as plants get older and weather grows hotter.)

I usually blanch the greens for a few minutes, drain and finish by a quick sauté in olive oil.

For a more robust dish, toast a handful of walnuts and a teaspoon of cumin seeds in the olive oil. As they are toasting, but before the oil gets a chance to smoke,  add a clove or two of diced garlic, perhaps a few shallots or a quarter cup of coarsely chopped Vidalia onion, a handful of sun dried tomatoes, and a sprinkling of red pepper flakes.

Play with these as you wish.  A scant teaspoon of Smoked Spanish or Hungarian Paprika will create a perfect and automatic balance among all of the other ingredients.

Add the steamed greens, toss once, and serve immediately with coarse sea salt and fresh crusty bread. You will need nothing else except a glass of red wine.

Or beer, if you make Leslie’s Lambs Quarter Quesadillas.

Quesadillas with lambs quarter, currants, pine nuts, 2 cheeses (and a little hot pepper never hurt anybody either)

Pioneer Winecap mushroom at lower left. They'll come up thickly in this area for the next 6 weeks or so - then keep coming sporadically through summer and fall, if conditions are right.

Winecaps (Stropharia rugosoannulata) are among the tastiest wild mushrooms: firm and meaty, with a taste of the nutty/smoky quality that makes porcini so special. They’re also large, easy to clean and almost as easy to grow as potatoes. Bill wrote a complete how-to last year.

One time-honored part of the procedure is feeding the newly planted bed with a pet food soup. Really. Nutrients galore. We knew it worked, but Bill being Bill, he also set up an experiment. One new bed got the feeding treatment, one didn’t. Results are now in – or more accurately, up.

The cat food bed wins paws down. Big fat winecaps are popping up in it left and right, while the control bed is still mushroom free. You’ll have the food right on hand if you have a cat, which of course you should.

Not in the back yard, actually. They’re in the utility area behind the back yard, about 20 feet from the compost heap. The little patch is no more than 30 inches from the path, but it hid in plain sight until a couple of years ago, when Bill the forager added ramps to his must-find collection.

Each year he spends more time tracking them down and eating them up, and now he’s written a guest post guide to them. All I can say is buckle your reading glasses – major ramp treatise ahead.

HALF-WILD GREENS Part I: RAMPS (Allium tricoccum)

by Bill Bakaitis

I grew up knowing the glory of greens.

Before Clarence Birdseye and the magic of flash freezing, spring greens were the first fresh vegetables available to most of us.  Even though my grandmother ran a grocery store and had one of the few freezers in Washington, PA, it was always my grandfather, knife in hand, who would scour the yards and fields for dandelions and bring the first greens to table.

He loved to sauté them in olive oil with a little crushed pepper, mix in a few scrambled eggs, and enjoy them with crusty toast and black coffee. He could do this morning, noon and night if grandma would let him.

They were prosperous, self made Italian immigrants. Their store was on the south side of town, at the intersection of Park Avenue and Main Street. Little by little grandma’s financial skills allowed them to buy nearby houses and land as the properties came on the market.

The house I lived in as a child was purchased from the Hazel-Atlas glass factory during one of the plant expansions and moved across the street, onto an empty lot where granddad and a friend originally had their garden plot.

At times I would accompany my grandfather as he collected greens. It was from him that I learned about water cress and came to gather and market it for our store and several others in the neighborhood.

By this time my grandparents and another family member were able to purchase, for the princely sum of $3,000, a 64 acre farm on the edge of town only a few blocks from the store and our house. This is where I came to learn about the land and the virtues of loosing myself in nature.

It is said that first (or only) born children tend to be very comfortable being alone. I certainly made the most of the farm and surrounding forests coming to know nature well and coming easily and naturally to the world of foraging.

As I say, I grew up knowing well the glory of greens, and yet somehow never collected ramps. I doubt that they were missing from the limestone hills of southwest Pennsylvania, and I knew my Italian grandparents loved both greens and garlic, so it is a bit of a mystery to me as to why and how they were absent from my early foraging experience.

Of course I had heard of ramps, knowing they were a springtime staple of southern Appalachian rural folk. Medicinal too, I had heard, probably in the same way that almost any springtime green is to those who suffer the long winters without fresh vegetables. In Pennsylvania it was not only dandelion and water cress, but also mustards and lambsquarter that filled the bill for a spring tonic and cleanser.

Even as an adult I thought ramps were restricted to areas well below the Mason-Dixon Line. I now know better and have Ken Kleinpeter to thank for correcting me. (Ramps grow from Alabama nearly to the Arctic.)

Ken is a Louisianan by birth, a long time sheep tender, cheese maker, dairyman, and now farm manager for Glynwood Estates, near Fahnstock Park in the Hudson Valley of New York. A few years ago as he and I went out looking for morels, he mentioned collecting ramps near the farm he manages, and he pointed them out to me several times during the day as we roamed the back roads searching for likely looking morel habitats.

By the end of the day we had collections of both morels and ramps in our baskets. At the dinner table it was hard to tell which one was better, and I was convinced that for all of those years prior I had been missing out on a great deal.

It was only after this trip with Ken that I noticed the ramps growing in my own back yard.  I have been on the lookout for them in other places ever since.  Here is what I have discovered.

HUNTING FOR RAMPS

In the Hudson Valley ramps do not seem to be terribly common, but when I find them they are often locally abundant. This may be due to the fact that they have not been widely collected in the places where they grow so I am quite careful to take only a few from each place I find them, leaving the rest to grow and spread their seed.

Ramps are very slow growing and in places where heavy collecting has occurred it has taken many years for the population of plants to recover. Collection of ramps in the Smoky Mountain National Park, for example, was banned in 2002 for just this reason and is now being heavily regulated.

Ramps seem to be confined to deep hillside forests, often on a north facing slope, and on well shaded floodplains where there is ample organic material in the soil.

I have not found them in mucky soil, but transitional areas of sandy loam where the Skunk Cabbage meets the Trout Lily seem to be areas worth investigating.  Quite often I also find Red Trillium, Dutchman’s Breeches, and Bloodroot scattered among the ramps.

Mature ramps will have two or three  2″ x 10″ shiny green leaves arising from a common purplish stem which fades underground into a white elongated bulb; The deeper the soil, the deeper the bulb. Some in sandy flood plains will have their roots six to eight inches below the surface.

Ramps tend to grow in clusters and will have a strong garlic odor.  Once lifted from the soil an easy to peel, mucilaginous, cellophane-like sheath will be seen covering the stem base and bulb.

In the mid-Hudson area, the green shoots will emerge from the soil in April, before the trees leaf out. A single flowering stem with a whitish ball of florets appears six weeks later as the tree canopy leafs out and closes over.

By this time the leaves of the ramps will have died back, their month long greening season over. The head of black seeds seem to be released in stages. Some can still be found in the straw-colored dried seed head in the spring of the following year.

The clustering habit of ramps seems to come primarily from the seeds. One can often find young ramps in slender almost thread-like sprays scattered here and there among the clusters of mature plants. Propagation from seed is difficult, as they require a prolonged, two-stage germination process, but is one way ramps are commercially cultivated.

LOOK-ALIKES

There are three or four plants which might be confused with ramps. Of these, the first two, Lily of the Valley and Trout Lily, like ramps, are small two – leafed members (or relatives) of the Lily Family.

Lily of the Valley (Convallaria majalis) is the relative recently moved from the Liliaceae to the Ruscacae. It stands more erect than ramps,  rising from small pips in the early spring and forming dense colonies,  members of which are connected by a fibrous underground network of rhizomes.

By the end of April the mature two-leaved plants will send up a single erect raceme of 10 to 15, usually white, bell shaped flowers. These will smell just like your Grandmothers Lily of the Valley Cold Cream.

There are many cultivars and although in the past it was used in traditional herbal medicine as both a cure for memory loss and as an aid to induce “common sense” all parts of this plant are now known to be highly poisonous.

Trout Lilly (Erythronium americanum) is also called Adders Tongue or Dog Tooth Violet. Like ramps it will often grow in spreading troops, with plants of varying size.

Young plants will usually have but one leaf whereas mature plants will usually have two. The leaves are much smaller than ramps (1″x 4″), are deeply mottled, and will often send up a single yellow nodding flower. Peterson lists it as edible but acknowledges it is also known to be an active emetic, inducing vomit.

Mature specimens of the Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) would not be mistaken for ramps due to the large size of the ovate leaves, up to a foot in diameter. Young Skunk Cabbage, however,  has 3″x 6″ leaves that more closely resemble the 2″ x 10″ elongated leaves of ramps.

The clearly veined leaves and ’skunky’ odor of the crushed plant however will quickly serve to identify this fleshy herb which contains toxic calcium oxalate crystals.

One bite of this plant, even if well cooked, will cause the mouth and throat to burn and swell up. This is the same compound that makes the green parts of rhubarb and dumbcane (Dieffenbachia ) so poisonous.

Growing in the same location as Skunk Cabbage is False Hellibore (Veratrum viride) a quite toxic member of the Lilly family. It is much more robust than even Skunk Cabbage and quickly develops an erect stem with heavily ribbed, spirally arranged leaves.  I can’t imagine anyone mistaking this plant for Ramps, but then again ‘common sense’ often presents itself as a toxic brew!

PREPARING RAMPS FOR THE KITCHEN

Ramps are very easy to prepare. Place them in a bowl of water and rinse the dirt from the roots. This will also loosen the membrane which covers the stem and bulb. Slide the membrane off, do a final rinse and you are done.

In the fridge they will store quite easily in a plastic bag, or loosely wrapped in a wet towel.

COOKING WITH RAMPS

A  Google search will turn up dozens of ways to cook with these wild leeks. Some call for mixing them with scrambled eggs, as Grandpa Cario did with dandelion. Others recommend a simple potato-ramp soup.For the sophisticated there is Asparagus braised or grilled with Ramp Aioli.

Recipes galore await your search, more than you can possibly attempt in the short season when Ramps are available.

My favorite, and perhaps the easiest, is to coarsely chop the greens along with the bulbs and sauté in olive oil. You can play around, adding perhaps a garlic clove or shallot, thinly sliced red Bell Pepper, or a sprinkling of red pepper flakes. When done, toss with pasta or serve over grilled vegetables.

You can’t go wrong. The complex flavor is subtle yet intense, sweetish on the tongue with lots of garlic in the nose. Down south it is said that if you eat them alone, you will stay alone for no one will want to be near you.  The solution to this is simple, dine together and rinse with a soft red wine.

CULTIVATING RAMPS

Since the ramps grow wild in my back yard, I have taken to expanding this local crop by transplanting a few plants with each collection I make from the wild.

These have been planted only in the very shady parts of the yard, the tree-lined margins where conditions are similar to those in the deep forest.

Studies conducted by plant scientists indicate that the seeds normally need two seasons to fully germinate, that planting the seeds in the fall usually produces better results than spring planting, and that amending the soil with calcium increases the vigor and eventual harvest of the plants.

A quick planting guide may be found here. For a more detailed booklet and source for seeds and bulbs click here.

Much like planting asparagus, this is a gardening exercise for the future. Anticipation, patience and prudence are the names of the game.

If you need results more quickly, consider the cultivation of half-wild lambsquarter, details coming in part 2 of this series.

Can you spot the morel in this picture?

Last year, itself on the early side, Bill found the first black morels on April 25th,  but this year a prime indication – the fall of the forsythia flowers – suggested a look would be worthwhile, so off we went to a reliable spot, somewhat north of us but close to the river. No luck.

Indications there were more mixed: few wild columbines were blooming and the hepatica was still spotty. We only saw one in flower

Hepatica americana (aka H. nobilis var. obtusa and, just to make things interesting, Anemone americana or A. hepatica). Very cool little plant.

But one of the great things about walks in the second and third growth woods is the vast array of cultural artifacts left from the days when the land was open. Mushrooms may be lacking, but there’s always something to see.

Even after the cellar holes have filled in and the stone walls tumbled down, each spring uncovers bits of dishes, thick old bottles and horticultural hangers-on like clumps of refined hybrid narcissi, blooming away in the underbrush surrounded by barberries and poison ivy.

No morels, no problem. I’ll just photograph these. No tripod. Down on the knees. Multiple tries in hopes of one coming out not-too-shaky. Bill is calling, “time to go.”

“ Okay, honey, just one more,” I say, and then as I switch positions to get up. There it is.

Black Morel (Morchella elata/angusticeps/conica complex). This is the same picture, cropped to a close up of the rock just to the right of the narcissus clump

Sneaky bastards. Bill has written a black morel hunting guide that helps considerably, but missing more than you find just comes with the territory.

I didn’t step on it, but that’s not because I saw it before I put my foot down.

Hepatica in its more typical color, showing why the Doctrine of Signatures declared it good for curing liver ailments.

Hepatica flower and Leslie’s foot photos by Bill Bakaitis

What can I say? Bill is an outdoorsy kind of guy and he’s starting to get antsy. I just opened my e-mail and there with a request to pass it on was this picture and accompanying quiz

by Bill Bakaitis

Thursday is the first of April.

Here is a quiz.

When the leaf of the white oak is the size of the ear of a gray squirrel:

A. Trout shall rise to a dry fly.

B. Morels shall appear, flushed from the damp duff.

C. Fiddleheads, their green fuse forcing, shall rise to Dylan’s toast.

D. In delirious delight young men of all ages shall rise nightly from warm women filled beds, neglecting the very warmth that nourished them through the winter.

(I refuse to take any responsibility, but we do have a thorough post on collecting and cooking fiddleheads, and  there’s tons of practical advice in Bill’s morel hunting field guide. He hasn’t written about fly fishing yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time. )

Here in the Hudson Valley we don’t hear them nearly as often – or as close – but we do see them from time to time, including just a couple of weeks ago in a field near our friend Ilana the chicken queen’s  farm.

Eastern coyote (with mangy tail), apparently hunting for voles

And then we saw what looked like coyote tracks while we were out skiing. The post on skunk tracks is a perennial favorite, so I asked Bill if he’d consider doing a guest post guide to reading tracks in the snow.

He did. It’s far more than I bargained for. And so are the quite scary coyotes.

COYOTES, THOSE GAUNT DOGS OF WINTER

By Bill Bakaitis

Part  one: WHAT THE SNOW SAID

The snows of winter provide a record of the recent history of forest and field. Walking a piece of land this time of year reveals a natural history that is otherwise opaque and difficult to understand. Tracks left by the passing animals read like a book and even a halfway trained eye can see at a glance the recent history of those passing through snow and time.  In such a scape, the forest comes to life, becomes immediate and compelling, as the snow reveals a world filled with activity, the activity of animals coming and going, animals interacting with one another, and animals interacting with the clumsy passage of the chance outside human visitor.

Although a bow hunter and an avid outdoorsman, I am nevertheless reluctant to venture out into the woods during the gun season for deer.  I was therefore particularly eager to get out once the gun season ended and a week-long layer of snow covered the ground.

Luckily, Leslie and I live in an area where there are thousands of acres of undisturbed forest nearby:  State Lands, private estates, educational and research facilities, camps and preserves, as well as the remains of farms gone fallow and otherwise vacant.

It was quite easy therefore to select a piece where I thought I would be alone, and could enjoy the blessings of nature. Here I rarely see any evidence of humans except on one or two paths skirting along an edge of this large tract of reforested farmland. Not far along one path I veered off and almost immediately found a set of deer tracks.

They were quite fresh: the edges were sharp, not yet eroded by wind or weather, and the tracks at the edge of the nearby stream were still muddy, evidence of a recent disturbance.  At first I thought the deer probably spooked as I came up the trail, but by careful comparison of my tracks and those of the deer, I came to the conclusion that the deer probably passed by a half hour to hour before my arrival.

That appraisal was confirmed a few moments later when I came upon the tracks of a large canine following the deer. By following off to the side of the tracks, I quickly surmised that the tracks were probably those of coyote, not dogs, and that there were at least two, perhaps three coyote following the deer.

The deer apparently was being pushed by the coyotes.  This, I thought, is a trail worth following, and so I did for the next two or three hours.

The tracks carried me far into the forest, always the coyote tracks coming over and therefore after, those of the deer. The largest set was persistent, dogged, never wandering far off the trail. Another set, or perhaps two of nearly identical size, seemed to join the trail for a period of time and then divert, returning again at a later juncture.   And always my tracks were the last, obliterating everything underfoot.

At one point a yellow urine stain squarely midway between the 5″ to 6″ straddle of the larger sets of tracks indicated that one of the coyotes was a large female; I judged that she was being assisted by one or two smaller animals, possibly her young of the year. The urine stain was clean, with no trace of the blood tinge which might mark her estrus in the coming weeks.  The snow was telling me a lot about this family.

And then, during one of those peculiar loops of the trail, miles from where we began, I found a set of my tracks with those of a coyote overlaying my bootprint.  An immediate surge of adrenaline raced through my body as I realized what the snow said, that, at least momentarily, I had become the tracked, not the tracker.

Compared to the deer I was both soft and slow and during all of this time I had not seen another set of human tracks. Here I was all alone in the woods with a family of large presumable hungry canines.   What an eerie feeling!  I had become so immersed in the snow’s story that it was like slipping into a dream- space of natural drama. And in that space, the deer, the coyote and I had become equals.

It was not quite a panic, but I immediately broke off the trail and headed overland towards a place where I knew a path to be, thinking the next time I come I’ll bring a handgun, just to be safe, thinking about how bold the coyotes have become in this area, thinking about the kills I knew these 50 pound animals had made, the calves killed in Steven’s barnyard, the remains of the piebald deer I found near here last year, the dogs and cats killed in town, the stories of the German Shepherd which last fall had not survived an encounter with a family of coyotes…

This is a safe kind of fear, mostly a product of my imagination, both thrilling and non-rational, but it was with a sense of relief when I reached the trail to find both human tracks and those of someone’s faithful companion, a well fed, jaunty Golden Retriever perhaps, judged by the joyful, sloppy character of its tracks. These signs were as comforting to me as a fire on a cold day and I followed them to the highway which was still a mile off.

Back home I resolved to follow up on those coyote stories.

Part two: WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAID

It is a well reported observation: After a few years of eclipse, the Coyotes are back. Grown accustomed to the suburban exurban environment of the north east they are more and more likely to be seen in broad daylight in our fields, forests and yards. Their nightly songs are quite common throughout the area. For many the coexistence has been harmonious, but for others, one fraught with anxiety and trouble.

The manager confirmed for me that in the children’s camp a family of three coyotes became so bold that by the end of summer they began to hound the young campers and then, once the camp closed,  to dog the seasoned staff.  A stalwart of the town also confirmed that this summer, in town, a small dog was trapped and killed on the porch of the family home. So too with several house cats. I was unable to verify the persistent rumors of the German Shepherd which did not survive an encounter with a group of Coyotes.

This is not completely new:   Twenty years ago, at my previous home, a mini-farm surrounded by larger farms and thousand acre tracts of preserves, coyotes came into my barn in the spring to kill our nesting turkeys. They were notorious for monitoring cows about to deliver and then taking the calves during or shortly after labor. On a nearby dairy farm, several coyotes have been killed in the barnyard as they closed in on the expectant mothers. In one case they were actually eating the calf during the delivery process itself.  An Angus calf in a back pasture of the neighbor’s farm I was helping to manage was lost when we misjudged the due date of the mother and coyotes took the newborn calf.

Coyotes are natural predators, and are usually wary of humans but increasingly the locals’ stories seem to indicate that they are dancing alongside us in tighter and tighter movements.

Part three: WHAT THE INTERNET SAID

COYDOGS

It has been suggested that one of the factors involved in their ability to exploit a human dominated environment is the ability of coyotes to interbreed with domestic dogs.  The most common term used is ‘coydog’ which technically refers to the male coyote (Canis latrans) – female dog (Canis lupus familiaris) offspring. The male dog, female coyote offspring is referred to as a ‘dogote’.  Both hybrids are known to be fertile in controlled breeding experiments and assumed to be so in the wild as well.  The introduction of familiaris genes into the latrans population is thought to influence both the growing size and boldness of the evolving eastern coyote population.

This coydog hybrid hypothesis is not without controversy. Although both species have compatible chromosomal arrangements (78 chromosomes arranged in 39 pairs), their natural breeding cycles and temperaments differ sufficiently so as to make the occurrence of hybrids rare. Coyotes usually go into heat in the winter, delivering springtime, while most domestic dogs come into heat so as to deliver in the winter.  For more and photos of coydog hybrids, click here.

On the internet, several technical papers can be found in which discriminate morphological skull analyses indicate the occurrence of hybridizations, but most seem to conclude that these are not common. See here for a brief synopsis.

Whatever the factors, there are sizeable variations in the local coyote population from  ‘Border Collie’ to ‘German Shephard’ in size and stature,  between 35 to over 50 pounds in weight, and with marked color variation.. The adults that attacked the cows in Steven’s barnyard were about 50 pounds in weight and rangy in stature.  I recall seeing their bodies completely filling the bed of his pick-up truck. These were about the size of the larger coyotes that I sometimes see in the fields and forests near my home, and whose tracks I often find in the winter woods. These eastern coyotes are considerably larger than the ones commonly seen out west.

Intermingled with these larger animals are ones which are noticeably smaller. The one Leslie and I saw in the field, for example, was on the small side. The difference in size is readably apparent when you see them in nature and also easy to see in the size of the tracks.

COYWOLVES

Searching through the internet, following a trail one link at a time is somewhat analogous to tracking natural signs. In following the ‘Eastern Coyote’ links a series of articles appeared that knocked my socks off and gave me the same eerie feeling I had when the coyote tracks appeared in my bootprints.

The first, from Scientific American, is a summary of very recent work done by Dr. Roland Kays, curator of mammals at the New York State Museum in Albany, and his associates. According to his team, genetic analyses of the Eastern Coyote indicates considerable hybridization between coyotes and wolves.  The team concluded that mating between female coyotes and male wolves was abundant, that these coywolves have larger, stronger jaws and bigger skulls overall than the so-called straight western coyotes, and that perhaps most importantly this interspecies hybrid is not only fertile but has adaptive advantages over either the wolf or coyote in the  human-modified environment of the Northeast. Furthermore, they found that it is common for members of the genus, Canis, including coyotes, wolves, and dogs, to “hybridize quite readily.”

More details can be found here, including this photo of a coywolf skull showing its wider width and more powerful jaws.

photo by Roland Kays

Dr. Kays describes the male as being larger than the female, with the hybrid population possessing a wider range in color variations. This hybridization, or exchange of genetic material between species, he points out, is a mechanism which allows for a more rapid adaptation to environmental changes than do mutations.

If those findings knocked my socks off, the following singed my toenails! A few months ago, in Nova Scota, a young woman walking alone along a trail was killed by a pair of coyotes. The attack was witnessed by other hikers who together drove off the coyotes.

A senior wildlife official in the same area described another occasion where he was repeatedly charged by a lone coyote. The wildlife official thwarted the attack by ‘not acting like a prey’ and gave the following advice:   “Coyotes can be found in rural and urban area across Canada. They often shy away from humans, but if one does approach, here’s what to do:

• Be aggressive yourself: Wave your arms, stomp and yell loudly in a deep voice to deter it from coming closer.
• Stand your ground: Stay where you are and look it in the eye. Never run away; it is more likely to consider you prey, give chase and seriously harm you.
• Be prepared: The best defense is a good offence; carry a whistle, flashlight and/or personal alarm. This is especially important for small children who play outside or walk to school in areas where coyotes have been spotted.
• Stay together: If you are walking in an area that has high coyote activity, never do so without a companion.
• Don’t lure them with food: Coyotes are scavengers. If you have pets, feed them inside the house rather than leaving food outside, don’t leave meat scraps or products in compost buckets outside your house, keep regular compost in an enclosed area and ensure garbage bins have tight resealable lids to keep out animals.

“In situations like a national park [where] usually there’s no hunting and no trapping allowed, [coyotes] can get used to a human presence and not have much fear of any retribution.”  He also advised hikers to carry a means of personal defense, such as a knife.

Jonathan Way has studied the coyote/human interactions in the Northeast for some time and, although clearly not an alarmist, and very ‘coyote friendly’ has nevertheless issued a similar set of advice, especially for those of us who have pets.”A one sentence summary of [his recommendations] is quite simple: To avoid most negative interactions from occurring with eastern coyotes, leash your dogs, don’t let your cat outside (after all it is a wild animal when outside hunting small animals), and don’t feed them.” For much more, see  here.

The New York State Department of Conservation has listed a similar set of recommendations and points out the predator- prey message inherent in 1) humans having garbage accessible to coyotes (thereby associating the scent of humans with free food) and 2) humans acting like prey and retreating at the sight of coyotes.  The result trains coyotes to actively treat and pursue humans as prey. See this and much more here.

This Cornell University study adds an edge to the issue that is both chilling and compelling.”Paul Curtis, an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources, recently received funding for a five-year study on coyote ecology and behavior in urban and suburban areas of New York. Coyotes have become increasingly aggressive in recent years in southeastern New York State. Usually coyotes avoid humans, but they have been venturing into suburban neighborhoods and attacking pets. Curtis states, ‘This kind of aggressive behavior is usually the last stage before coyotes actually start attacking humans—such as small children that are perceived by the coyotes as a potential food source.’”

With a degree of timing that is uncanny, a neighbor just today sent me this  link to a local news story  of a woman in a suburb to our south, out for a walk in a local park, who suffered an attack by a coyote on 1/26/10.

Part four; Return to the woods: WHAT THE RAINS REVEALED

A warm and torrential rain in late January quickly melted all of the snow which had accumulated over the previous month and I took this opportunity to return to the area where I had tracked the coyotes which, in turn, were tracking the deer.  In a situation such as this, rapid snow melt has the effect of collapsing time. The record of a month or more of activity can lay exposed as a single layer on the forest floor, largely undisturbed by the accretion of time. This record will come to be churned into chaos by the activity of creatures and growth of vegetation in the warmth of spring making interpretation much more difficult.

Again, I had not gone far into the woods, following the same trails and lay of the land where the coyotes took me a month earlier, when I spotted the first evidence of a deer kill.

These few tufts of deer hair, found far from any road, indicate a deer probably killed by predators rather than an automobile. The tufts were isolated, indicating that this was not the site of the kill, but instead represented a place where a portion of the kill had been carried for consumption. The site of the main kill would be nearby.

Circling the area, I soon found the probable site of the kill.

Large amounts of white hair covered the ground in one spot, indicating where the underbelly was opened. The ground there was also torn up with several small shrubs and the base of Cedar debarked. I could imagine the coyotes each tearing at the deer pulling it asunder, disturbing the surroundings. A sparse trail of hair led towards a stand of spruce and adjoining swamp.

Along the trail a small portion of the skeletal remains were found

and nearby more deer hair from the carcass.

Finally, near the Spruce stand were a few bits of long thin hair from the tail of the deer, part of the prized meaty, haunch section.

Finding more of the dead deer was not completely surprising. When a hunter harvests a deer in the forest it is usually eviscerated then dragged out of the woods. The soft stuff, the pile of guts, stomach, and offal disappears in a few days, often overnight. It is quite amazing how the scavengers, from coyotes, fox and ‘possums to birds such as vultures, crows and smaller songbirds will completely clean up the remains of a kill. Nature, it is said, is a mutual eating society, and in a harmonized ecosystem nothing goes to waste.

But most of the times, in a deer kill such as this, one is able to find the skull and vertebrae of the animal nearby. All the flesh and cartilage, and most of the ribs will have been eaten but the larger bones will remain, often to be consumed by rodents during the next year or so. The fact that no bones were found here suggests that the carnivore was large enough to carry off the larger, heavier pieces.

All of this, it seems to me, is consistent with the hypothesis that the prints I first found and followed were coyote, or coywolf as the newer evidence indicates, and that they were able to kill a young deer and either consume it entirely or drag it off to a cache far from the site of the kill. By inference, this is probably done several times a month in order for these large, fifty pound dogs to survive.

Part five: ECOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS

As we all know, the landscape and ecology of the northeast has undergone considerable change over the past fifty to sixty years, the post WWII era. The reasons seem clear.

A large network of highways and superhighways along with the corresponding increase in private automobiles has led to an urbanizing sprawl of development. Urban planners have for decades spoken of the Bos-Wash Corridor as a single megalopolis extending along the Eastern seaboard from Southern Maine to Virginia. Spreading outward from this complex are layers upon layers of suburban and exurban developments. During the last decade this type of expansion has been accelerated by the fearful reactions of a post 9/11 world, the speculative housing bubble caused by a deregulated financial system, and a skewed economic distribution system which has hugely favored the wealthy at the expense of our nation’s working classes.

At the same time a move towards a corporate dominated, integrated and monopolized agribusiness system has led to the collapse of the small family farms which once dominated the rural landscape.

Within a few miles of my home are dozens of hastily constructed, chipboard McMansion developments, their selling prices beginning at $500,000, filled with commuters driving SUV’s to workplaces which lie an hour or more away. On the hilltops overlooking these former corn fields is the former pasture land now owned and posted by an urban elite who visit periodically, usually on weekends.

In the late 1960’s, when I began teaching at Dutchess County  Community College in Poughkeepsie, NY, each of my classes held enough students from farms that a discussion of  concepts such as “10-10-10″,”nitrogen budgets”, “crop rotation”, “wildlife/ erosion buffer zones”, “non point-source pollution”, “food chains”, “predator-prey relationships”, or “carrying capacity”  would flow easily and naturally from their farming backgrounds.  In turn, this discussion would meld seamlessly and easily from the farm based ecology/economy upwards into a treatment of larger socially referenced systems, and downwards into a discussion of the workings of one’s own biological based psychological system.

By the time I retired in 2006 I was lucky if I had a single student in my class who had even visited a farm. For them, food was something their mom or dad picked up, prepackaged and ready to eat from the deli section of the A and P. Their cognitive templates were not based upon biological natural phenomena, but upon man-made digital constructions and the disposable gadgets accompanying this development: computers, games, MP3 files, animation videos, and transient cultural content.  “Reality” it seemed, was something served up in TV shows and by a political base which proclaimed that “reality is whatever we say it is”.

The combined effect of the demographic changes sketched in above has been a major factor in exponential increase of the population of the White-tailed Deer across the northeast. And with this increase in the size of the deer herd, has come the rapid evolution of a new sub-species of coyote, the coywolf.   “Change in one part of a system”, I used to tell my classes, “leads to changes throughout the entire system, most of which are unplanned, often unanticipated, many of which are undesired.”

According to records kept by the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, in 1954 there were 39,000 deer harvested by hunters in the state.  By 2008 that number stood at 223,000, approximately a quarter of the size of the estimated 1,000,000 deer in the entire herd.

Nationally, the White-tailed deer population more than doubled during the two decades from 1980 to 2000, standing today at 30,000,000.  Increasingly a larger number of deer are involved in automobile collisions, currently around 1.5 million a year according to the National Highway Safety Administration.

Many of these collisions occur during the rutting season when the males are in hot and constant pursuit of the females. During this sexually charged chase the normal caution of the deer simply dissolves as they run across forest field and highway. They are not being chased by hunters as some ‘animal lovers’ would like us to think. They are being driven by the increase in their natural hormone levels. (This incidentally seems to be common with most, if not all, species. Think of carp or salmon spawning, cardinals or robins competing for nest-mates and territory, the prowl of un-neutered house pets, the well publicized sexual proclivity of politicians, actors, or athletes, or, heaven forbid – and denied in full – by normal folks like you and me.) There are general discussions here and here . For technical details, see here.

Part six: GAME MANAGEMENT

Coyote and Deer, Predators and Prey, Hunters, The Hunted, the Food Chain and the Health of our Ecosystem: all are interrelated.  It was Aldo Leopold recounting the overpopulation of Mule Deer on the Kaibab Plateau who asked us to “think like a mountain”. Just as the deer live in mortal fear of the wolf, he noted, the mountain lives in mortal fear of the deer.   The health and ecology of much of the northeast today is being compromised by the size of our deer population and the pressure they place upon understory plants. Under continuous browse by deer the number and types of herbaceous and woody plants undergo systematic change. The ecosystem becomes degraded, less diverse and more fragile as plant species disappear and with them the birds and other animals which not only depend upon that vegetation for their own survival, but improve the robustness of the ecosystem as a whole. For more, see here.

On a more immediate, personal front, think of the problems you have in trying to garden. I know of no one in my neighborhood who can maintain even a small plot without deer fencing. Our entire property, in fact, is completely fenced off, even the driveways, in an effort to protect the plants around our house.

Leopold followed up with a now-famous corollary:  When the hunter kills the wolf the hunter takes over the wolf’s job.  This simple truth leads to concepts now familiar in game management circles.

With overpopulation, a major tool is to encourage the decline in numbers of breeding females. In deer management, this is usually accomplished by increasing the harvest of antlerless deer. The results can be striking, both with regard to speed and quality of recovery.

In the 1990’s, for example, the state of Pennsylvania was at the top of the list for both the large size and poor health of its deer herd. Beginning in 2002 a new policy of antler restriction was initiated. Immediate changes included a reduction of the size and composition of the herd and a concomitant increase in the size and health of the individual deer harvested. For more, see here.

Within this context the return of the wolf to the northeast  – albeit this time a wolf in coyote clothing -  is a perfectly natural phenomenon, the result of the failure of the hunter to do the job the mountain asks of him or her.  Attempts to extirpate the coywolf conceivably could be initiated, but would be completely counterproductive without a corresponding effort to reduce the size of the deer herd. This is not a place where the tender-hearted plaints of those concerned with protecting  ‘animal rights’ is likely to get much purchase. We are already killing the deer with kindness, and also, it seems, creating conditions perfect for the evolution of a new subspecies able not only to pare away at the excess deer population but also, it seems, poised to move on to new urban exploits.

The deer will be controlled by hunters, automobiles, coywolves or starvation and disease. Take your pick.

In the meantime when I plan to walk alone and quietly in the woods where the coywolf lives, I’ll probably follow the advice given above, and since I prefer to speak softly in the woods, blending into nature as best I can, I shall need to carry a big stick.  How are you fixed for pepper spray?

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Y’know, when I started this thing I thought it was just going to be a simple blog post illustrating animal tracks in the snow. I hope to return to that simple task next time.

Coming up soon (I hope): Foxes and Cats, ‘possums and ‘coons.