Trappers dinner

A tasty treat that is fun to seek....!

Pete

Yeah !Fun too. Looks like some hard snow.

Good eats. Nice looking rifle setup, Did you add the peep sight?

It was pretty cold since early November and the snow piled up; soft deep flounder fest. Not much fun. Then we had that melt down and some wind and it's firmed up pretty good now.
I haven't had that rifle long but it came with the peep sight. I need to practice some more I burned a few rounds before getting the right sight picture. The other thing is the magazine tube came loose in the scabbard and all the rounds fell out. After 2 dry fires I figured that out. Reloaded and added a little black tape to hold the tube in place and took care of that.

Good looking birds!

Nice! I got lucky this week and picked up two on the road that died from hitting telephone wires. Saw three more dead ones being eaten by loose dogs

Is there breast meat lite or dark?

The feathered feet are neat. Are they feathered in the summer too?

Haha well there you go! I imagine you have some big flocks to see much of that? My cousin told me about the eiders raining onto the deck of the crabber he was working in the Bering Sea. I guess they'd fly for the lights at night and hit the rigging.

I think their feet are feathered in the summer but not as heavy but it's been a long time since I've seen summer (fall) ptarmigan up close. The breast meat is dark but if I recall it is quite a lot darker in the winter than the fall. Again it's been a while since I've had fall ptarmigan. Fall ptarmigan flavor seemed to have a nice willowy tang.

Are those White tailed?

Ptarmigan around here taste like berries in the fall.Sweet meat. In the winter get more of a willow taste. Even their eggs taste a bit like willow.

Try them dried . they are very good too. They dry them here in the spring.

I had a old school buddy I used to hunt with, he was born in a cabin out in the sticks' and trapped with dogs back in the day. He told me when they would have no luck hunting and hungry, they would scoop out the ptarmigan hole of snow with turd and all and make soup.

I recall years ago when a Back East animal rights lady was testifying against wolf control plans before the BOG. Sidney Huntington asked her: "Lady, have you ever been so hungry that you had to boil ptarmigan "dung" to make soup?" Apparently it was a "thing" along the Koyukuk too!

Pete

Theyr['e willow ptarmigan waggler.
I see where they hole up in the snow there can be a pretty good little handful of droppings in there like they either sit there for a couple days maybe, or re-use the same little snow hole or just crap more than you might think. Either way I'll file that little tidbit away for starvation plans. All the same- sounds better than letting your own blood for a meal which I read about them having to resort to in desperate times back in the day....
Sidney Huntington was great on the BOG. Don't know how many copies of his book I've given away.

They all (grouse too) dive into the snow for the night to keep warm. Lot warmer under the snow. In the day too on a real cold day. You be going along and you see nothing and then a head pokes up as you get close and they get nervous. You can shoot them that way with just the head poked up; grouse and ptarmigan. Some times you go along on skidoo at night and they explode out of the snow just ahead of you.

One of our univ profs got a grad student to go out and collect those droppings (DPM) and test them for the protein content left behind. Seems that at -20c the grouse re-eat the droppings rather than go out and get cold again. After every 4 hours the grouse expel and the white is the uric acid, so they could tell in the burrow what was recycled. The salic acid was quite high when willow was fed on in those droppings.
The bulk of chicken farms re-use the droppings as re-feed DPM is dried poultry manure up to three times because of increased protein absorption on the extra go-arounds.

Here's the feet in September.

Beautiful bird !

Do people hunt them with dogs up there? My favorite pastime is Grouse and Woodcock behind a pointing dog in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

When the boarders were open
fellows came up from Minn and traveled through northern Manitoba and would stop on drainage ditches and work their dogs down them since they are bound with willows. Above the 53 parr the season is open to 15 Feb most years and the willow ptarmagin come down south. One budding in a tree was a good sign there was going to be more. Most of these guys had been up during the grouse season as well so they were still using the same licence.