Edible, choice

September and October are my favourite months of the year. Time to reap the fall bounty. Of course, autumn is the hunting season, and I’m a hunter. But I don’t just hunt game like moose , deer, upland game birds and waterfowl (although I am leaving for a moose hunt tomorrow). In university, one of the profs called me ‘the fungi hunting Finn’, recognizing my fondness for wild mushrooms. It’s a tradition I’ve clung to.

There are plenty of species of edible mushrooms, but I only feel comfortable picking a few species. By far the best, in my opinion, is Armillariella mella, commonly called the ‘Honey Mushroom”, or the ‘stump mushroom’. As the books say, it’s “one of the best edibles” and during a good growing year, they can be surprisingly abundant.

Not every year is a good growing year, though, especially in regions like the one I live in where soils are thin and can dry out quickly. Plus, the area is prone to periods of drought. As a result, most years I don’t find any of my favourite fungi.

But this was a very wet summer (June, July and August all saw well above  average rainfalls) and the trend continued into September. So my fingers were crossed that this would be a year for ‘shrooms.

Once the grouse season opened, I spent a few mornings and afternoons with the dogs trying to pot a couple of birds and noticed that mushrooms seemed to be everywhere. So I started looking in earnest for honey mushrooms a few days ago, after a couple of nights of cool temperatures that were right around the freezing mark. That seems to be the cue honey mushrooms need. I figured our property should harbor a crop as we had had about 80 acres of poplar harvested a few years ago, which should have created the needed rotting stumps.

And I was right! It didn’t take long to find enough to fill up a paper bag. I had some with a moose steak yesterday and today they garnished a plate of ruffed and spruce grouse cooked in gravy.

They were GREAT. Edible, choice; you gotta love it.

 

Moose Maximus

I just returned from Brandon, where the 50^th Annual North American Moose Conference and the 8^th International Moose Symposium were combined and held. There were people from North America and Eurasia attending the meetings, but I only managed to intermingle for a short while; I was a one day attendant during a set of meetings, field trips and social events that lasted several days. I really enjoyed myself and it seemed to me that was the feeling that captured the general mood.

I heard several talks about moose and listening to those presentations was like music to my ears. I heard that as a species, moose seem to be faring well, although populations in some areas have declined precipitously. I live in one of those areas – northwestern Ontario – I was there to provide an overview of the factors driving moose and white-tailed deer populations in the Kenora District of Ontario.

I don’t think my presentation was quite as lucid as I had hoped and I know I made an error when I couldn’t see the labelling on one of the graphs I had inserted into the power point presentation. Unable to read the labels and the legend, I promptly got the deer and moose stats wrong. Oh well, that will be corrected during the final write-up and anyway,  I think the crowd got the gist of my presentation.

It’s still an emerging consensus, but it appears that in much of eastern North America’s moose range, moose populations are limited by the presence of a parasite called brain worm. In that eastern, wetter, more highly forested biome, the parasite is commonly found in populations of white-tailed deer, where it seems to affect deer minimally, if at all. However, when moose become infected with brain worm, the animal often dies.

In the western, drier and more open ranges of North America, there is little to no incidence of brain worm in deer or moose. The presence of brain worm seems to do a good job of helping to explain how moose populations are compromised by high populations of deer.

It seems that in the east, once deer densities exceed about 4 deer/km², moose populations decline. When deer densities are low, rates of transmission of the parasite from deer to moose rarely occurs.

There’s a lot more to the stories on moose and deer dynamics, but one of the topics of interest is how moose recover from low densities. In western Manitoba, southern Saskatchewan and south-eastern Alberta – the Canadian prairies – the thinking is that moose populations have been on the rise coincident with a decline in the number of rural farmers and ranchers living on the landscape. There’s evidence that incidence of illegal, unregulated hunting wasn’t necessarily high, as moose populations were long-depressed in the prairies, but it didn’t take a lot of moose hunting to keep populations low. As people abandoned their homesteads, more and more moose managed to find refuge and survive. Today, moose populations in grain and cattle country are robust.

The eastern forest areas where moose have recently declined are the same areas where deer populations simultaneously surged. But recent winter of deep snow and cold have knocked deer populations back; if they stay low or decline further, moose populations may be poised to recover.

A growing concern is that where moose populations are lowest, recovery could be jeopardized by legal, but unregulated hunting (Aboriginals and Metis have the constitutional Right to hunt and fish; the present interpretation is this means the hunting of moose by some can be done at any time of the year and there are no seasons or bag limits on the harvest).

The moose harvest by such individuals may not have to be much to prevent severely depressed moose populations from recovery.

Unregulated hunting is certainly not the only issue regarding moose population (or other game species) recovery dynamics. But to help solve the puzzle as to how to effectively manage moose populations in particular, it’s a factor that needs a lot more attention than society at large has lately been willing to give it.