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Downhill
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PostFri Nov 01, 2019 11:22 am 
I never remember seeing ANY growing up in Chelan County in the '60s and '70s. I guessed, incorrectly that they were indigenous but decimated by DDT and other commonly-used chemicals of that period, like eagles and other species, and turkeys are another recovery success story. These days I see them everywhere throughout the region. At my place, they strip the elderberry bushes clean in the fall. Now I know that they are stealing an important food source from the black bears, deer, ground squirrels, chipmunks, and many other species of birds that I've observed munching on the berries (myself included biggrin.gif ) A solution comes to mind, just in time for Thanksgiving!

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Sculpin
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PostSat Nov 02, 2019 2:54 pm 
Downhill wrote:
Now I know that they are stealing an important food source from the black bears, deer, ground squirrels, chipmunks, and many other species of birds
Yep. But there are also lots of missing animals, like grazing camelids, that had an ecological niche only a short while ago.
Downhill wrote:
A solution comes to mind, just in time for Thanksgiving!
My mother told me a story about her housekeeper. Another client offered the housekeeper a wild turkey he had shot for Thanksgiving. Money was tight so she was happy to accept. She cooked it but they couldn't eat it, it was way too tough. So unless you can tell that it is a yearling, you might end up with only turkey soup for Thanksgiving. tongue.gif

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Slugman
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PostSat Nov 02, 2019 7:05 pm 
Pheasants are also invasive pests in North America. Some try to claim that because they are tasty that makes them not invasive. Right.....

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Slugman
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PostSat Nov 09, 2019 1:18 pm 
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Alpendave
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PostSat Nov 09, 2019 5:36 pm 
Was walking my in-laws’ property in NW Montana and came across a spot that made it obvious that a lynx or bobcat (yes, did see a lynx one time) appreciated their presence.

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DigitalJanitor
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PostSat Nov 09, 2019 6:54 pm 
Yeah, husband saw a cat down in the meadows by the Teanaway off hwy 10 one morning, and we'd been seeing turkeys in there regularly all week.

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treeswarper
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PostSun Nov 10, 2019 6:16 pm 
Went for a bike ride today. Saw a whole mess of turkeys in the orchard where they seem to hang out. They seemed bigger and fatter this time. Of course, soon as I stopped and got out the camera, they were running away. There are two blobs that are turkeys in this picture. They blend in well with all the dead leaves. There is no way I can creep up on these demon birds.

What's especially fun about sock puppets is that you can make each one unique and individual, so that they each have special characters. And they don't have to be human––animals and aliens are great possibilities
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Brushwork
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PostSun Nov 10, 2019 9:52 pm 
That’s an interesting picture Ts, very artistic!

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Downhill
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PostTue Nov 19, 2019 4:34 pm 
Sculpin wrote:
Downhill wrote:
Now I know that they are stealing an important food source from the black bears, deer, ground squirrels, chipmunks, and many other species of birds
Yep. But there are also lots of missing animals, like grazing camelids, that had an ecological niche only a short while ago.
Downhill wrote:
A solution comes to mind, just in time for Thanksgiving!
My mother told me a story about her housekeeper. Another client offered the housekeeper a wild turkey he had shot for Thanksgiving. Money was tight so she was happy to accept. She cooked it but they couldn't eat it, it was way too tough. So unless you can tell that it is a yearling, you might end up with only turkey soup for Thanksgiving. tongue.gif
I'm a tightwad Scotsman so that makes me an expert at cooking the cheapest, toughest cuts of meat - pork, beef, fowl, etc. Just takes an overnight in the brine and then cookin' slow and low. To your point, if if all goes badly - soup time! hockeygrin.gif

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Bedivere
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PostThu Nov 28, 2019 2:09 am 
Heck, there is a turkey roaming the streets of West Seattle now. Locals have named her "Talulah" and she's been adopted as the neighborhood mascot. Who knows how she got there, but it appears she's there to stay.

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treeswarper
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PostThu Nov 28, 2019 8:51 am 
How to cook a wild turkey, including road kill. From this morning's Spokesman Review. MOLLY QUINN/ THE By Thomas Clouse THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW SPOKESMAN-REVIEW The turkey, be it a commercially raised yard bird or a South Hill nuisance clipped by a Honda Element, retains its high place as the centerpiece of most meals on Thanksgiving Day. While many would-be chefs continue to search for variety, much care must be taken if the menu includes a bird harvested from a local forest or backyard, instead of a neighborhood grocery store. My own mother, Barbara Clouse, took on this challenge in the late 1970s after we brought home a wild turkey shot during a family hunt in northwest Nebraska. She decided to feature the wild bird for the meal, which always included 10 people (I was one of eight kids) and generally included several stragglers who joined us for Thanksgiving. “It was a disaster,” she said. “I didn’t allow for how lean it was. It seemed like it took forever to cook. It was tough.” Think Clark Griswold when he cut into the turkey in “Christmas Vacation.” “Thank God I had other things cooked that we could eat besides turkey,” she said. Having been raised by Great Depression-era parents, my mother tried again the next year. This time, she added a commercially raised bird with the wild turkey. “Wild turkeys are not as big and they don’t have as much fat. The next time, I got a smallish See TURKEY, 4 TURKEY Continued from 1 tame turkey and I just cooked them together,” she said. She put both birds into a baking bag, then occasionally basted the wild turkey with the drippings from the much fatter tame bird. The result became a family tradition. “Back in the ’70s, we didn’t ever hear of putting anything in a brine or smoking like they do now,” she said. “We were old school.” Urban nuisance Turkeys are not native to Washington. State wildlife officials introduced them to the area in 1960 and they have flourished, first as thrilling quarry for winter-weary hunters eager to hit the woods and now as an urban nuisance. On Tuesday, my longtime hunting partner, Jed Conklin, had to stop his vehicle on Grand Boulevard as a flock of turkeys, mostly young toms, decided to use the street as a platform to work out which one was dominant. “People were freaking out,” said Conklin, a former photographer for The Spokesman-Review. “It’s unfortunate when a wild animal becomes so accustomed to human interaction to survive.” Just last week, my wife gathered several frozen turkey breasts out of the freezer. She put them in a brine and smoked them over alder wood. Let’s just say a grizzled journalist found himself in the doghouse after he secured all the leftovers for lunch sandwiches. While the urban birds crap their way out of the good graces of city folks, they continue to be the featured guest during our annual Turkey Trout Camp. The early May camp generally includes at least one bird on the menu that is cooked fresh. During that first meal, I tend to use a simple cooking method I learned from Dave Voelker, my good friend and a lifelong chef: Take a fresh turkey breast and dice it up into uniform pieces. Roll them in flour, dip them in egg and then roll them again in seasoned flour. Fry the breaded chunks in olive oil in a cast iron skillet until golden brown. Serve the turkey nuggets with a bowl of honey mustard for dipping. “The commercial bird is bred with fat and flavor in mind,” said Voelker, who recently moved from Rathdrum back to his native Michigan. “Just like commercial beef or anything else, it’s going to be easier to cook because of that fat.” Commercial turkeys generally are raised in a confined space as opposed to wild turkeys, which use their legs more than their wings. They can run as fast as some birds fly. As a result, those well-used legs can be as tough as leather. “With a wild bird, the breast is the ideal part. The rest is edible,” Voelker said, “but not the most palatable.” The key to preparing tougher meats is time. The muscles that get used the most get cooked the slowest. Crock-Pot turkey legs make a wonderful soup stock. Inject that thing! As for making a wild bird for Thanksgiving, Voelker offered several suggestions. He said the key to a goodtasting bird is the brine, a combination of salt, sugar and spices. “You can inject the brines, or flavor, or fat, into the wild bird,” he said. “Just don’t overcook them. That should be the headline.” Voelker suggested cooking a ham, or something else, for guests just in case they get surprised by the fact that the centerpiece of the meal is wild game. “Unless it’s a bunch of guys at camp, it might not be everybody’s thing,” he said. “Unless they are totally into it, there are going to be questions.” Voelker prefers to cook with high heat, searing in the juices. “I’m big on marinade, grill and maybe having bacon draped over it or wrapped around it. Everything is better with butter,” he said. “Sear it and get it off and let it rest.” Conklin, who takes the time to pluck at least one wild bird a year, has turned the turkey cooking adventure into a science. It’s sort of Kentucky backwoods meets Dorothy Dean. “We actually started planning for this in April,” he said. “If you do hit one with your car, use the following recipe.” Conklin starts with the laborious job of plucking the feathers off the bird. Keeping the skin on is key. A week prior to Thanksgiving, Conklin takes the frozen bird and puts it in a refrigerator to gradually thaw. Any meat put in a microwave to defrost causes the cells to burst and results in moisture loss, he said. Then he starts preparing either a wet or dry brine that generally uses a ratio of one cup of salt to 2⁄3 of a cup of sugar. The brine should include a goodly amount of black pepper and other spices, that could be cinnamon or cumin or any other herbs of choice. “You want that brine on there for 24 to 48 hours,” he said. “You have to brine a turkey or you will suffer the dry consequences.” This year, Conklin is employing a technique called spatchcock, where the chef physically cuts the bird from the back to remove the backbone while leaving the skin intact on the breasts. He then sprinkles the bird with a dry brine, puts it in a double oven bag, then puts it back in the fridge to soak up that flavor for up to two days. He then pulls the bird, rinses it in cold water as he prepares the Traeger Grill. He then melts butter. “You have to introduce fat into these wild turkeys because they have none,” Conklin said. “I take melted butter and I inject it.” He then takes even more butter and stuffs it under the skin, near where he removed the neck and backbone. “The trick is that you want to cook it breast down, so all that juice melts into the breast and percolates under the skin,” he said. “If you cook it breast-side up, all that liquid drains out of the back.” If the chef is in a hurry, Conklin suggested turning the Traeger Grill up to 350 degrees and cooking the turkey for two to three hours until the meat thermometer reads 160 degrees. If the party can wait, he prefers to cook the bird at 225 degrees until the interior breast meat temperature reaches that 160-degree threshold. “The other thing people often neglect or forget is that they don’t rest it enough,” he said. “A turkey requires an exceptionally long rest period versus steak or other meats. If anything should be cool for dinner, it should be the turkey.” Reporter Thomas Clouse walks out of property north of Spokane with a turkey he shot on Opening Day in 2017. JED CONKLIN/ FOR THE SPOKESMAN-REVIEW Copyright © 2019 Spokesman-Review 11/28/2019. Powered by TECNAVIA o

What's especially fun about sock puppets is that you can make each one unique and individual, so that they each have special characters. And they don't have to be human––animals and aliens are great possibilities
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Ski
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PostSat Apr 11, 2020 7:57 am 
A good friend of mine, in an email of 04/10/20 wrote:
I just read on my neighborhood blog that there’s been a turkey roaming around West Seattle for over a year. He’s been down in my neighborhood recently... spotted just blocks away. Hope he doesn’t find his way into my back yard. He must have good dog sense if he’s been around that long.
wild turkey West Seattle
wild turkey West Seattle
Inland Northwest’s thriving turkey population is an invasive nuisance or a conservation success – or both / Spokane Spokesman-Review Oct. 20, 2019 HERE is the salient point of this article: “But wild turkeys didn’t exist, and had never existed, in Washington or the Inland Northwest.” Any time you introduce a non-indigenous species into an ecosystem, whether it is an animal or a plant, it brings with it a set of unforeseen consequences, which in most cases are detrimental to the indigenous species of that ecosystem. To wit: Eastern Gray Squirrels, Virginia Opossum, European Starling, English Ivy, etc. Remember that people thought it was wonderful when the Canada Goose population decided that Western Washington was a good place to call home year-round, until they fouled local parks and beaches to the point where wildlife agencies and municipal parks management had to go to great lengths (at taxpayer expense) to reduce their populations.

"I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each."
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Alpendave
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PostFri May 01, 2020 2:16 pm 
I wish coyotes were an invasive species.

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kitya
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PostFri May 01, 2020 7:15 pm 
Ski wrote:
To wit: Eastern Gray Squirrels, Virginia Opossum, European Starling, English Ivy, etc.
Often not true. Species like these are often just scapegoats, instead of real causes. Hey, even native species are often blamed for being "detrimental to the indigenous species of that ecosystem.". Fact is, currently almost absolutely every species, except species associated with humans, are in decline, so there is no shortage of examples and since people don't like to blame themselves, no shortage of scapegoats either. Wolves are native and most commonly blamed across north America for declines in other species, most recently declines of endangered cariboo in BC, Canada. But facts are, these declines were not happening before when wolves used to be abundant and now are not caused by wolves either, but by habitat loss and especially logging. Yes, eastern grey squirrels are non native to PNW, and so are eastern cottontail bunnies and even coyotes. Yes, native species are in decline. But that doesn't mean that one is the cause of the other at all. Native squirrels are in decline because we (humans) destroy their habitat and eastern grey squirrels are taking place of the missing native squirrels, because they are better in surviving near humans. But removing eastern grey squirrels will not bring native squirrels back, they are missing because habitat they need is missing, not because eastern grey squirrels are introduced.

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Chief Joseph
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PostFri May 01, 2020 8:20 pm 
Randito wrote:
I have friends that live on Spokane's south hill. There are flocks of wild turkeys roaming their neighborhood. Which seems kinda cool, until the flock chooses to camp out in your yard and defecate.
That's for sure. My Mom in Idaho feeds the birds and squirrels and it the past 3 years has been really annoyed when the Turkeys come for their share, (which I find very ironic and humorous) especially when she yells at the Turkeys to "GO AWAY"! I heard that many were transplanted to Northern Idaho from Southern Idaho about 3-4 years ago due to an over-abundance south and under population in the north. I can safely say that's not the case anymore as there are flocks of 20-30 now. Apparently they are too fast-cagey for the coyotes and cougars and not many hunt them for food. They are annoying, but at least they are not on the brink of extinction by any means. guns.gif

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