Jan 21, 2021
Hunter and trapper Jen Davis joins us from Michigan, where she shares about the value system that led her to sporting, and that also leads her to be simultaneously a part of groups like the National Trapper's Association AND the Sierra Club. Plus, Michigan muskrat dinners, a tricky turkey hunt, and the opportune (or inopportune?) fortune of spotting game on a pee break.
2:00 Buying an old house in rural Idaho... the things you'll find!
7:00 One freezer for food, one for curiosities
9:00 Saving feathers for a down vest (and jewelry/flies) - plucking, cleaning and keeping
12:30 Jen Davis is a longtime alum of Artemis events - Shotgun 101 seminar and Storytelling Great Lakes
14:30 On being a tumbleweed kind of person versus the taproot kind of person
20:00 Being a hunter for years with no harvest... then trying for a heavily regulated turkey hunt, and getting a generous call back from a DNR employee loaded with helpful tips
24:00 Setting up your pop-up blind in the presence of turkeys! Then trying to escape for a pee break, only to see a tom turkey barreling toward your decoys
32:00 Pee breaks and hunting windfalls
34:00 Being a new hunter, showing up to a trailhead and seeing other cars there, and not being sure how to handle it
37:00 Muskrat trapping & Michigan muskrat dinners (yep)... plus, learning to trap
41:00 Trapping as humane harvest
48:00 The night traps are out - it can be a sleepless night
51:00 Being a trapper AND being in the Sierra Club (and struggling to fit into any single group squarely)
56:00 "I really want to connect personally with my place in the natural order of things."
59:00 An excerpt from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, "These animals will die by his hand. But first they will live well, in part by his hand. His lifestyle - which I had condemned, without understanding - protects the forest, the lakes and the rivers -- not just for him and the furbearers, but also for the forests being. A harvest is made honorable when it sustains the giver and the taker."
1:00:00 Artemis book club, round two?
1:05:00 Welcome-to-the-neighborhood gifts: Molasses cookies versus dead ducks