IN THE WOODS - Duck Hunting, Wild Harvesting and Big Feast

What is going on guys this is Noah with Northern Scavenger and welcome to this week's video. So it is Friday after work and I'm here in Nova Scotia with my buddy Matt who you guys know doing a two-night trip not too far from Halifax on a duck hunting Thanksgiving weekend excursion. The leaves have started to change colors it's very crisp in the air and you can tell that the seasons are changing. This is a glamping trip not many portages lots of good food it's gonna be a time whenever I'm involved there's never a shortage of food. Gourmet Matt. I reckon it's gonna be pretty windy out there we're in a pretty protected spot here and the wind is ripping. I don't know what direction it's going to be in so it's hard to tell if we're going to have a a tailwind or a headwind. What are the chances of us getting a seeing a duck this evening? It's pretty good There's lots of ducks on these lakes it's just a matter of where they are. I think it'll just be we'll end up spotting one and try and put a sneak on them. I'm just taking a peek to see if there's any right here. I don't know keep our eyes open and I'm sure we'll see a couple. We got the gun ready to go just in case you see some ducks along the way. Oh no oh no soaker already oh that sucks Filled the boot. That really sucks. Do you have a pair of socks you want to change into? I only brought one pair. Seriously? Yeah. No. I didn't think I'd get a soaker in the first 10 minutes. Dude rookie mistake. Oh well. You didn't bring another pair of socks? No. What do I need another pair of socks for? Oh man. It'll be all right. I do have another pair of shoes. I'll just go Looks like you're gonna be warming those. Oh I went full on over it. Dude we just had this conversation like five minutes ago. Folks it's mid-October and Matt has a soaker with not an extra pair of socks. We're still touching shore. On the plus side the wind's calmed down so that's some good news. I think I can dry these out on the fire. Well not the boot that's gonna be wet. Well you don't have much of a choice now. I just wasn't paying attention. I was like pushing the canoe off and I just took like a really stupid step. Always bring spare socks too and on this one I was like we're just going like up the road. They're gonna be gone two nights camping in the same spot. I'm not even I literally brought no spare clothes other than extra sweaters. Like this is what I have because like I always pack spare shirts and spare underwear and then they stay in the bag the whole time and I never use them. Well screw it I'm not I'm not doing it. There you go. That's the river gods telling you to always bring a spare pair. The one time I just say screw it I'm saving space and not packing spare clothes. We'll see if you get cyperthermia folks. We made it just in time before the sun sets completely. We have a shotgun with us. We're gonna be doing a little duck hunting on this trip. Coming in here paddling down the middle of the lake Matt spots six or seven ducks coming at us and I had a perfect opportunity to get my first duck and I totally blew it. I messed up. Hopefully I have another opportunity because that was an amazing opportunity that I messed up on so thinking about that tonight. The sun's below the horizon now and we only have a few I would say 15 minutes before it gets totally dark so we're gonna get some firewood going and get Matt's sock on the fire to to start drying out. So I scavenged up some some bags. How'd you do that so quickly? I think it's like hardwood flooring. That's a find. There's like a whole pile of cut wood here. Wow thank you whoever was here last. That's uh trail magic man. We'll have to make sure to do the same for the next people. Yeah we'll chop off a whole bunch. Oh that's sweet though. I think we should uh we should reconfigure this into a like a U. Yeah we can do what we want. It's Thanksgiving weekend. Oh yeah that's not a good fire pit. Yeah no I think we want to get warm you know. The quintessential Nova Scotia campsite grill. That's probably the fanciest one we've ever found. Someone's front gate. Yeah. If you guys are familiar with Nova Scotia camping, rarely do you find a spot that's eight by eight feet that's relatively flat with no uh no deadfall over it so this is a huge find for us. This is an amazing site. This is the best campsite I've ever stayed at. Doing cold weather trips in the fall when everything is dry is so much different than doing them in the spring when everything's wet. It's like oh you want a fire? Just instant inferno. Got a decent fire going. Yeah. We got some hardwood here folks. You have the option to always go hardwood. Burns higher BTUs and for longer periods of time. Matt do you know what a BTU is? British thermal unit. So you're starting an exothermic reaction and you're releasing the energy contained in the wood. So because it's denser it has more energy? Yes. Yes. Do you know why it's denser? I don't actually know. Because it stops growing for six months of the year or something like that. So like it it has a short window where it grows. It only grows for a few months. Your tree rings end up so tightly packed it makes the wood denser whereas softwoods that grow year-round expand more rapidly and results in less dense wood. I think that's pretty good. We're having some donairs. Although I mean it's a pretty Ontario move to just like come here and start throwing green peppers in donairs. Is that how the thing is? I think that's a little offside to be honest. You just didn't know that's all. I just didn't know. You just didn't know. Onion and tomato is the traditional. I'm not ashamed to admit that I do enjoy the green pepper in there in the mix. Morning guys. It's probably about 7 30 in the morning. The sun is not up yet but it is a pretty warm morning and there's some of those crittering clouds in the distance there. And as you know from the Lost Shore video 24 hours potential rain. We're gonna be doing some exploring around the lakes and try to find some ducks for dinner tonight. Oh that's so dry. How'd your foot hold out last night? Good. I got the sock mostly dry on the fire. It was just a little bit damp in a few spots but if you have a sock that's slightly damp just you just put your sock on before bed and then crawl into your sleeping bag and then when you wake up in the morning your socks are warm and dry. Your sleeping bag and your body heat will just suck that moisture out of whatever's damp on you if you wear it into your sleeping bag with you. So I'm just gonna keep wearing my camp shoes as long as I can and not put on my wet boot. Think you can get that wet boot dry this morning? No that's fine for the rest of the trip. Gathering some wood for the fire. I came across a large pine tree with big boughs that are dead and that's a great spot to find fatwood. Dry wood that's saturated in resin. See it almost seems like it's outlined in a in a darker richer red. That is fatwood and what's great about fatwood is it burns very very well. You can tell it's on the market. The black market. Look how resin filled that is. Oh yeah it's stuff. Dude this is like it's like gummy. I kind of want to just chew on it. It's like a toothbrush no? I'm gonna start a new channel. Bushcraft or Noah fatwood specialist. I feel like if you type that into google you'll get a very different result. Matt has graciously taken care of breakfast this morning. Is that just some thick bacon? What do you think that is? Half inch? Quarter? Maybe an eighth? If you round it up that's about an inch. Yeah if anything less than an inch gets rounded to an inch then yeah. Regardless of the exact size we're working with some thick bacon this morning. Look at that. You can only fit half this in the pan. I'm just gonna touch them all. I never cook bacon in the woods like this. It's always like granola bars or oatmeal but. Yeah you're a psychopath. Where we could bring a cooler this time. I figured I'd treat myself. I don't know how you can just eat cold granola bars for breakfast. I'm a man on the go. How's your boot? Stuck my foot in a garbage bag with my dry pants and socks. So it is pretty windy out and there's a lot of gusts. So the theory is the standing theory is ducks are going to be in small ponds protected from the wind with what type of terrain like duckweed? Yeah just like generally weeds. So we're gonna try to find some sheltered bays and some small ponds to to scope. What's the situation here? The situation is it's really really windy. We gotta go that way. It's all for nothing because we came back duckless. What's the terminology for that coming back duckless? Skunked I guess. The wind is very strong it took us a while to get back to the other side of the lake and we stopped off in this bog because we're gonna harvest some cranberries because it's not a thanksgiving dinner without some cranberries. When you're searching for cranberries you want to find a bog. Do you want me to film you explaining that? That's as far as that explanation goes. Okay. As far as anything goes? Yeah I don't know what we're looking for. I feel like that's not quite far enough along. Yeah that'd be a bad cranberry to use. But like I think any of these ones a little more any of these darker ones I feel like are good. Yeah I feel like I feel like this guy's probably fine from like five minutes of work there. These cranberry bogs here in Nova Scotia they're everywhere and there's so many cranberries that you could come back here and pick like bagfuls of them. We've arrived back at camp fun morning exploring around checking the bays checking the small ponds for ducks. We're going to keep it low key for the next few hours. I am actually going to have a beer and not only any beer. Breton brewery spiced up pumpkin ale. I brought two different pumpkin style beers this weekend and I'm going to see which one's the better beer in terms of quality and that's it just quality. We got the Breton brewery spiced up pumpkin ale and the propeller brewing co. Pumpkin spiced ale. Cheers. Happy Thanksgiving. Pretty good. I don't know how much I would like just drinking pumpkin spiced ales on a regular basis but tis the season a couple will be good. Decent flavor. Not bad. We're going to head out for the evening hunt. We're going to head to the pond that we scutted earlier today. Hopefully get a duck or two. The wind has not slowed down. It has shifted to the west. I don't know how this is going to affect us but still there. This has been the duckiest spot that we found so we're hanging out until dusk. Hopefully they'll come in and Matt will get a shot off. Or Noah. I have more faith in you. I can get a shot off but like if we have one opportunity I don't want to be the one to shoot it. You got one? Just dreaming. What happened? Nothing happened really. As a duck guide you led us astray. That's why I don't duck guide professionally. You promised at least three ducks. I promised that. Holy potatoes. Jesus. Yeah I didn't know how many we would want. We probably don't have to cook all these. Peppers from the garden. A couple hot peppers to mix in there. What is that? That's bear lard from a bear that I harvested this fall. One of the first things I did was I took all the fat and melted it down in a pot, removed the solids, and then what you're left with is a shelf stable oil. You could use this in making pastries, you can use it just as a cooking oil, you can use it to you know if your hands are getting dry you can use it as a moisturizer or like a lip balm. Basically anything you could you would use like any other kind of oil for you can use this. I managed to sneak out earlier this week and shoot a few ducks so there's uh the breasts from two ducks, four duck hearts, and four gizzards. And then fresh cranberries that we harvested today as you guys know. Oh this is a feast. This is gonna be good. A couple pops to keep the boys lubricated. Man this is a spread. So as a follow-up from earlier today I am now going to try the second pumpkin ale by Propeller. There's a little more cinnamon aftertaste with this one but I feel like there's more of a kick with the spiced up. One more sip just to confirm. I would say there is a little too much spice with this one so if I was to go back to the store I think I'd get a spiced up bread and brewery compared to a Propeller pumpkin ale. That's a bold statement Noah. Are you worried about causing a rift in the Nova Scotia craft brew industry? I'm just a man with an opinion. It's still good though I'm definitely gonna drink it. Just to free up some frying pan space because we're gonna do the duck in the big frying pan. Let's take our bear oil. Now that it's out of the cooler it's sort of starting to turn liquidy but you can see it's just nice white. That's rendered bear fat is exactly what that is. So I'm gonna put a good couple gloms into the frying pan. Here comes our duck meat. First time trying duck heart. You like it? Yeah. It almost tastes like it tastes like red meat. Yeah. Yeah it's solid. Nice. Let's get into the rest of it. Let's do it. A couple of nice duck breasts. Fresh foraged cranberry sauce sweetened with brown sugar. Dress my duck with that. That's looking pretty good. It smells amazing. That smells amazing. Duck's probably cooked a little more than it needed to be but there's the duck and we'll scoop up some cranberry sauce. Oh my god that's good. That's good stuff? That's really good. That cranberry sauce really makes it. Thanksgiving dinner. We got our, you know, duck, not turkey, cranberry sauce, potatoes, and then mixed it up with mushrooms, peppers, and asparagus. Bushcrafty Thanksgiving dinner. Morning folks. Looks like we got some weather last night. It rained heavily for most of the night and now we have a strong headwind. Did you hear the coyotes last night? Yeah I did. That was cool. Pretty eerie. It was like an astronaut. High tech. Alright guys we had a quick morning at camp, had some breakfast, packed up camp, and we're gonna head back to the city. It's a fun couple days out here. Didn't have much of a plan. We just relaxed and enjoyed the fall colors. Tried to go for some ducks. Didn't have much luck but still had a fantastic duck Thanksgiving dinner. Thanks to Matt. Thanks for watching guys. See you next time.